Allison’s eyes snapped open. Why was she lying naked in a strange bedroom with a sore body and a woolly head? The last thing she remembered was drinking Prosecco in Portia’s clinically elegant living room. Had she drunk too much and passed out? She squeezed her eyes shut again, blocking out the light, trying to find answers in the dark. There weren’t any.

Struggling to get her thoughts in order, she distinctly remembered enjoying the first Prosecco and Portia taking her empty glass away and returning with it full. Hadn’t Allison been puzzled that she hadn’t brought the bottle through? Yes! And she remembered feeling more relaxed as she sipped the second drink… sipped – she hadn’t knocked it back. Two glasses. On an empty stomach, she might have been tipsy; she wouldn’t have been drunk.

Difficult as it was to accept, never mind understand, it seemed clear her drink had been spiked.

Portia had drugged her.

Facing the truth was, in Allison’s experience, the best way to deal with it, the fastest way to find solutions to a problem. She looked around the room. Apart from the bed she lay on, it was empty of furniture. A skylight overhead let in light. Daylight… how long had she been here? There were two doors. One the exit, the other perhaps to a bathroom.

She hoped so; her need was suddenly urgent.

Pushing back the sheet, she got to her feet, swallowing the lump in her throat to see the bruising to her ribs, her hip, the multiple finger-sized bruises on her arms that indicated, even in her drugged state, she’d tried to resist whatever had occurred. Good. She hoped she’d made it bloody difficult for them to get her wherever the hell she was.

Them. Portia and Stuart? Someone else? Whoever had done this to her, she’d make them pay. Somehow. She clung to that thought as she crossed unsteadily to the door. The first was, as she’d expected, locked; the other, to her relief, opened into a small en suite with a standard toilet, shower and wash handbasin. There was a tiny towel and a roll of toilet paper. Nothing else. Nothing Allison could use as a weapon against them. Keeping them safe from her anger. Keeping her.

She used the toilet, wincing as even the mundane act of sitting hurt, gasping when she got to her feet again at the sudden sharp pain in her side. Moving a hand gently over the area, she guessed she’d broken a rib or two. It wasn’t going to make her panic. She’d broken one when she’d fallen against a doorknob years before and had spent hours waiting to be seen in the A&E department of her local hospital only to be told in the end that they didn’t do anything for broken ribs.