Chapter 2 TWO

2,

I fucking froze as three men waltzed inside.

They were huge. Like, I-feel-like-a-teaspoon-next-to-a-soup-tureen huge, athletic looking men, not in suits like I’d expected but in khakis and plaid shirts, like they were heading to Walmart instead of a kidnap on university ground.

“There you are,” one breathed, his gaze sweeping over the duffel and luggage scattered across the room. “Good thing we came when we did. Would’ve been a shame to miss your little escape.”

The others bounced inside, moving lazily.

One, with platinum blonde hair, whistled loudly. “She’s neat one, huh? Folds clothes before running for life.”

Another snorted, “Preparation, no?”

“Maybe we help her pack, da?”

“Maybe we help her unpack.”

They guffawed like hyenas circling a prey and I stood frozen.

Okay, brain, think. Khakis, plaid, and a casual threat of assault. My heart thudded so hard it hurt. I couldn’t take them. Not one, not three. They looked casual, but I wasn’t stupid enough to believe they didn’t have guns tucked under those shirts.

Every bit of my Vescovi training screamed at me to run. Every instinct for survival told me the window was too far, the drop too high.

These men weren’t amateurs. They joked around, sure, but didn’t mean they wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet in my head if I struggled.

Which brought down rule three: if flight means death, submit to survive.

I raised my hands, palms up, shaking. “Take me,” I said, voice trembling. “I know why you’re here. Just tell me who I’m going to.”

The leader’s eyes narrowed. The smirk fell from his face, replaced by something like reluctant respect. For a second, I had control. A second.

“Smart girl,” he muttered, stepping closer.

His two cronies immediately moved to surround me, one grabbing my arm, the other ripping my bag off my back.

“Seigei Morozov will be very pleased to see you.”

Aleksei Morozov I knew of, not Sergie, but I wasn’t in the position to ask questions or seek clarity on who was who, and why this Sergie wanted me, or if he had been the one to murder my father.

They led me out like bodyguards, and I had no choice but to follow. When a curious neighbor—Mrs. Henderson with her small, fluffy dog—peered out, I even managed a frantic little nod and a tightlipped smile to appear normal.

By the time their SUV door slammed behind me and a bag went over my head, the only thing left in my chest was the sound of my own heartbeat.

Flanked by the two men, I was wedged tight against the car seat, and the drive began.

My mind rattled through a desperate loop:

I wanted my mother.

I wanted a phone.

I needed help.

But all I could get was listening to them fantasize about torturing me like I wasn’t sitting right there.

"Sergei, da. He will be pleased."

The Russian accent was so thick that it rolled in waves off their tongues with every word.

A higher voice from the right chuckled,  "Oh, yes. Very pleased. The Boss likes to be the one to... finish things."

"The knife, maybe?"

“Slow torture?”

“Possibly.”

"Or would he go with the old Soviet method? He saves that for special occasions, yes?"

"Nyet, nyet," the higher voice corrected, a low tsk. "This one is too important. This is the surprise of her life."

What surprise? My internal scream was silent. What fucking surprise could a man who murdered my father possibly have for me?

They went silent after a while, and after what seemed like a stretch of hours, the car slowed.

I held my breath, covered in perspiration, my fingers trembling, having a feeling this night could be my very end as soon as the doors began opening.

They didn’t tell me to get out.

They pulled me out.

Literally.

Like dead weight.

My head hit the roof rack with a dull thunk loud enough to yank a grunt from my chest as I staggered to my feet.

I still couldn’t see shit, and they wouldn’t remove the bag over my head, but I felt the crunch of gravel stone beneath my sneakers as we covered a rough, wide expanse of land.

A large hand rested atop my left shoulder guiding my path with only necessary shoves.

They were gentler than I thought they'd be. Which, somehow, was worse.

As a kid, I’d caught glimpses of my father handling kidnapped victims a couple of times and it was anything but gentle. It had always been brutal, gory, bloody.

One time had stuck, years later.

Eight-year-old me had wandered too close to my father’s work room after hearing screams down the hallway. I peeked through the door and saw Judea with a table knife, ripping into the cheek of a teenage boy. Blood spilled down the silver, shredding agonizingly slow as the boy squirmed and screamed, tied with ropes to a chair.

I remembered his eyes, bloodshot gray, and I remembered, most especially, how they had connected to mine before I flinched and raced back down the hallways to avoid getting punished by my father.

The sound of a door creaking yanked the memory out of me.

I was back, present, my heart thrumming, goosebumps over my skin now.

We were now inside a house.

The deeper they led me, the more the silence was replaced by low, male conversation and the distant throb of music, like it was coming from underground. Then a door squeaked open, and the world shattered.

The sounds were immediate and gut-wrenching. A man was screaming. "NO! PLEASE! NO, LE—" His words dissolved into blubbering gibberish and an even more intense shriek. "AH!"

My breath seized. I stopped walking for the briefest of seconds before I was violently shoved forward. I was suffocating now, both from the bag over my head and the fear swelling in my chest, a certainty that I was inside a torment room.

"Knees. Now." A deep Russian voice commanded.

I resisted, trembling.

“I SAID ON YOUR KNEES!”

I felt a swift pressure against the back of my legs, forcing me down.

I tried to fight it, a useless, pathetic little jerk of resistance, but I was driven hard onto the floor, my hands instinctively pushing into the cold stone to brace myself.

Then, with a savage wrench that snapped my neck back, the bag was ripped off my head.

Light exploded, almost blinding.

A wave of déjà vu crashed through me as I blinked to adjust to the lighting of the room. The first thing I saw was a man seated on a chair, tied down.

It took a few seconds to register his face from the swelling, the blood, the cut down his cheek, but it soon clicked that it was  Judea—my fucking brother—beaten into a pulp, eyes bloodshot.

And leaning over him, a bloodied knife in his hand, was the man who must be Sergei Morozov.