"You can't do this to me!" I cry, pulling as hard as I can against the heavy leather restraints. I put my whole body into the effort, yanking hard enough to make my shoulder ache with the strain, but there's absolutely no give anywhere.
The woman in red looks down at me with an expression of mild amusement. "Why not?" she asks. She reaches down and cups my vulva possessively. I try to shake her hand off, but the strap at my waist makes it impossible to do much more than wriggle. The way she looks down at me makes me suspect that she likes watching me wriggle, so I stop. I'm not giving this bitch any satisfaction.
"Because..." I rack my brains, trying to think of something that will convince her to let me go. I don't think there's any other way I'm getting out of this; I've been trying to get out of these straps ever since I woke up, and it's not happening. She hasn't gagged me, and I've yelled as loud as I could--and anyone who's ever heard me sing knows that's pretty fucking loud. Wherever we are, it's someplace where no-one's going to hear me scream. I'm trying not to get freaked out about that.
"Because?" She smirks, and I want to punch her even harder because she's imitating the smirk I do in my videos. She caresses my cheek with her other hand, and I try to flinch away but I can't move my head even a little. There's something on it, like a helmet or something, and it holds my head completely and totally still. I can't even wiggle it like I can the rest of my body. I just thank fucking God I can still feel my hair under there. Bad enough that I'd get shit about imitating that bitch Britney if I showed back up with my head shaved, but how could I tour without my trademark? 'Bald' doesn't cut it as a stage name.
"Because someone's going to notice I'm gone," I say. I try to put as much confidence as I can into the words, but I don't remember last night well enough to be sure about that. I think I might have ditched my posse at some point; I remember meeting this cool chick at one of the clubs we visited, and she had these awesome little pink pills that she told me were totally safe because they were herbal, and she said I had to try one because come on, they were pink like me, right? And then things kind of get fuzzy, but I remember her telling me that my posse was just a bunch of suck-ups and losers who wanted to hang out with me for the free drinks and shit, and we should totally duck out and stick them with the bill because it would be so fucking funny to watch them squirm and--
"So what?" the woman in red says, breaking into my train of thought. I realize all of a sudden that she's the chick from last night. "It's been in all the tabloids for about two weeks that you started drinking again, and everyone saw you getting wasted and popping pills last night. They're just going to think you wound up in a hotel room somewhere drunk and stoned."
"But they're still going to look for me," I reply. I'm not sure whether I'm scared now or pissed off or a little of both. Or maybe a lot of both. "My manager's going to know when I don't show up for the recording session, and he's going to call the police."
"So what?" she says again. I feel her hand adjusting the weird helmet thing on my head, tightening it so it's pressed almost painfully tight against my scalp. "They can't file a missing persons complaint for twenty-four hours, and by then, you'll have shown back up."
"I will?" I squeak out. I feel a knot of fear that was almost too big to acknowledge unclenching itself in my gut. I hadn't realized until she said that just how sure I was that she was some sort of a crazy stalker fan. That she was going to kill me. I start shaking as all the tension unwinds itself in my body.
