Page 78 of The Woman in the Warehouse

Even if I could only thin the herd here before someone disarmed me, I wasn’t helpless.

I’d been raised in a boxing ring. I knew how to fight, to anticipate an opponent’s moves, to use my smaller size to my advantage against their brute strength.

I wasn’t a helpless little girl.

I had power.

I just needed to keep myself calm enough to utilize it.

I didn’t want to let myself lean too much into the idea of being saved, since I was capable, damnit, of saving myself, but I also had to remember that I wasn’t alone. That, eventually, Anthony would be looking for me.

And, with him, I had the might of the entire fucking New York City mafia.

If I couldn’t take them all out, then my job was to survive long enough to see someone else do it.

I tried to pay attention, to track the turns we took, mapping out the movements in my mind.

But by the time we were driving out of Washington Heights, I was completely lost, though. And then, well, we kept driving.

On and on.

It was hard when you were in a tight, dark space with no access to a phone to tell the passing of time. But I was pretty sure as I tried to start counting it down that we were driving for almost an hour.

An hour.

Pretty much nowhere in the city took an hour to get to.

But Washington Heights to… Staten Island? Yeah, that could take almost an hour and a half.

Were they taking me back to Matej’s?

Did they not know that he was free?

That they were walking into a fucking trap?

Elio would still be there.

Anthony too.

And an extremely pissed off Matej.

My stomach twisted at the idea of a gunfight, of Anthony getting hurt. Because, let’s face it, with his luck, he’d be the one getting shot.

But I had to admit there was some relief in the idea of not being completely alone.

Deciding that if this was all going to go down in the house of horrors, I needed to wait to reach for my gun, I checked the safety, then wedged the damn thing into my bra that was still stabbing me in my tit, though that was the least of my worries right about then.

Reaching down, I removed the holster from my ankle. If they frisked me and found it, they’d know I was hiding a gun somewhere else. And I wanted to keep that a secret as long as possible.

Feeling around, I found the edge where the carpet lifted up, and tucked the holster as best I could underneath.

Without much left to do, I spent the rest of the ride berating myself for being so dumb as to forget my damn phone. They hadn’t even looked for it. I could have been in the trunk on the phone with the cops, getting the call traced, and telling them my suspicions about our destination, so the police could set up a road block or something.

I decided that, if I lived through this, I was taking my ass right to the electronic store in the morning, and grabbing myself one of those fitness bands that allowed you to make calls and enabled GPS. Then committing to only ever taking it off to charge while I showered.

This was never going to happen again, damnit.

As the moments dragged on, nothing but the bass beat of the music coming from the cab of the car—likely to muffle my screams—I found myself wondering if this shit was worth it for any longer.

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