But wait, it got even better. Between the lashings of my upper and lower arms I was acutely aware of the shunts that had been inserted into the veins just inside of my elbows. Great! I had an IV running into each arm. I had always hated that particular placement of IVs, they pinched whenever you moved. Fortunately since my arms were reasonably well secured any possible pain from arm movement was, for the most part, mitigated. Though, as I managed to wiggle my right arm just a little bit the shunt did its job and sent a painful reminder of its existence up my arm. I seriously doubted that the shunts had been inserted as a torture mechanism. More than likely they were in place so I could be pumped full of whatever my captors wanted flowing through me.
Despite how securely my upper body was fastened to the chair, I still attempted to stand up and found out just how careful these people were. Working my way up from my feet, both ankles were threatening to go numb from a loss of circulation due to another pair of handcuffs firmly attached to the chair. Like my arms, my legs were bound to the chair as well. And to top it all off I was tied down to the actual seat. Someone obviously took his work Very seriously. I was not going anywhere anytime soon.
In summary; I was relatively uninjured, secured, and at the complete mercy of Dempsey’s men. Not to mention that I was more than likely being drugged with something. Knowing that I could do nothing about my bonds, I shifted my search to my surroundings, which started out being just about as useful as my body search, as my eyes were still seeing in shadows. I decided to hunker down and listen. Before I could calm myself well enough my very upset mind ambushed me with a single question. How in the world could I have been so completely stupid not to have seen this coming?
I should have paid more attention to just how freaked out Bella was by all of the inconsistencies. Isolating the mysterious new player who had ungodly luck, flooding his starting table with fresh dealers, these were quite well engineered first steps. All of this fit with Dempsey’s reputation, he would have wanted to get as many different opinions as possible before making a decision. But there had to have been something more concrete than a player with a monster run of luck. Not even Dempsey would do something this severe on a simple hunch. Or would he?
And of course the puzzle fell into place, or at least one version of it did, the break. Bella had told me that her uncle had never before taken a break during one of his tournaments. He must have had cameras installed in the final table. And with those cameras he would have been able to see my cards heading into the last hand and what they were on their way out. That change would have been all the proof he required. Well it looked like Matt had been right to worry, I was never going to live this down. If I lived.
I could feel a rising sense of panic flood through me like a raging river No, no, no thoughts like that weren’t helping. I needed to figure out a way to escape this mess and letting panic get the better of me wasn’t going to help. I forced myself to count to ten while taking deep, slow breaths.
One. Calm down, clear your head. Two. Think about how you are going to get out of this mess. Three. What do you have to work with? Four. You’re still missing something. Five. What is it? Six. It’s something painfully obvious. Seven. But what is it? Eight. Does it matter? Nine. Could I deal without it? Ten.
I held my breath for a five count before I went back to chiding myself for losing control. I knew panic wasn’t going to help the situation. But then, neither was second guessing my own decisions. I would be a millionaire a million times over if I were able discover a way to alter my choices based on hindsight. But since that was never going to happen, I was just going to have to learn from this mistake and move on. First step in moving on? Finding a way to protect myself from any kind of projectile weapon. Doing that would ensure that something like this would never happen again. I would figure something out no matter the cost, presuming I found a way out of this mess to begin with.
For now, all I knew was that my situation was bad. I was tied up with no idea where I was or who was with me. I took another deep breath as I forced myself to listen to my surroundings. I needed anything that could help me to survive, so I catalogued everything. Unfortunately there just wasn’t a lot of noise in the immediate vicinity. While my eyes slowly came back to life all I had to rely upon were my ears and nose. So I stretched my ears to their limits and waited. I was rewarded with the hints of a conversation, though it only came in bits and pieces. But once I found it, I focused on the scraps and listened like never before. Even then it was difficult, something was making it more difficult than it should have been. The IVs must have been pumping something into my system that clouded my mind, and that meant this difficulty was unlikely to change any time soon.
What am I forgetting? I knew it was something and I knew it was simplistic. But what was it? It was something as common to me as breathing. So why can’t I put my finger on it? I… wait a second… my gift, that was what I was having difficulty remembering. But why? Could whatever was in the IVs be some form of drug? Wait, I had already figured that out, could that explain the trouble I was having concentrating. But that didn’t matter, I had remembered my gift, so I rushed to try and transform away my bonds. Nothing happened.
Why is nothing happening? I once again mentally examined my body did but this time it was as an internal gauge and for the first time I realized that I was cold. Once I started to notice the constant coldness enveloping me I couldn’t help but shake from it. Where am I being kept? Wherever I was it was obviously someplace cold. And with my slightly increasing eyesight I could tell that wherever I was had an industrial look to it. Coupling that with the cold factor I figured I had to be inside of an industrial freezer of some kind.