Page 7 of One Hellion of a Christmas

Thirty minutes later, the city traffic had thinned out. Neither man had spoken since I’d gotten the little love tap to the face. My cheek was throbbing, my head pulsing, the taste of blood lingering on my tongue. The driver pulled into an empty parking lot and drove around to the back of a run-down building. When he pressed a tiny remote, a garage door opened, and he pulled inside.

I kept my shit together until the guy who had the gun stepped out. “Let’s go,” he commanded, the bite in his voice rubbing me the wrong way.

Fear wasn’t something I handled well. My reaction to the emotion had always been to face it and fight, to take away the power of whatever scared me.

Another slap to the face was my reward for throwing verbal abuse at them both as they dragged me to a room with no window.Fucking assholes.There was just a chair, a single harsh light hanging over it, that they threw me into and a tiny table with the camcorder that looked like it belonged in one of theHome Alonemovies.

One guy cut off the plastic restraints, but only so the other could jerk my hands behind me and secure them with another cable tie. Then they left me there.

That was more than an hour ago.

And I was back to making stupid decisions, yelling at the recording device. I was tired, scared, and pissed off. My hands were numb and so was my ass from sitting for so long in one position. Nausea and heartburn had been the only distractions I’d had as the temperature in the room had slowly risen until each inhale seemed to be full of fire.

That stupid camcorder was at least thirty years old, so I had my doubts that the CCTV could be hacked easily. But if anyone could accomplish that, it would be Vaughn.

Looking straight at the lens, I spoke to the device in Russian. Abi and I weren’t nearly as fluent in the language as we were in Spanish, but we could hold full conversations with Vaughn, Sammy, and other Vitucci family members. Amala had a better understanding of the vocabulary than I did, but I was learning more every day. But just because I could speak Russian didn’t mean I stopped busting Vaughn’s balls over his switching to Russian when he didn’t want some people to know what he was saying.

“Yo, Vaughn. Have your skills dulled? Why the fuck haven’t any of you blown a hole in one of these fucking walls yet? I can’t feel my fingers. Snap-snap, shithead. I’m ready to go now.”

The squeak of a rusty door hinge pulled my attention from the camcorder to the door, and I stopped my flow of Russian to the man tapping away somewhere on his many phones while he attempted to locate me. There was a long, silent pause in the hall, but I could hear the person breathing heavily outside my new prison.

Someone wanted to make an overdramatic entrance.

Rolling my eyes, I tilted my head, curious which of the two dumbasses who had brought me there would join me in the hot room.

An older man in a suit stepped inside. I had to squint against the harsh overhead light a few times before his face came into complete focus. When it finally did, my mouth snapped closed, all the insults on the tip of my tongue turning to dust.

Someone wanted a magical family reunion for Christmas.

Ah, fuck.

CHAPTER FOUR

samara

Kids screamingin the yard was like white noise in my head as I paced the long driveway between the three houses. Their glee-filled laughter barely penetrated the buzz in my mind that had only tripled since the arrival of my parents and several other members of our family. Subconsciously, I kept them all in sight, but I left them to their own devices.

Not even when the two terror twins, Aidan and Ciaran, started making plans to test the theory of gravity did I feel the need to engage. Sometimes kids needed to learn certain things the hard way. Swinging as high as they could get and then jumping out seemed like a lot of fun, but maybe I should have cared a little more when they began discussing how to get onto the roof of the bigger house so they could jump off.

Their older brothers suggested something about pillowcases or bedsheets for parachutes, cackling like the maniacs they all were, which had me pausing for all of two seconds before I was back to my pacing.

Holding my phone in my hands, I kept monitoring the app that told me where Abi and Amala were. I’d only spoken to her a few minutes ago, but I felt restless. Knowing my mother was so close only made the buzzing in my head louder. It didn’t matterhow old my precious niece was—I didn’t trust Anya Vitucci around her. Amala was not going to be put through the same education I’d had to withstand. Maybe my mother’s heart was in the right place when it came to shit like that, but she’d had to turn off a piece of her humanity every time she’d taught me something new.

Sometimes she’d forgotten to turn it back on when the lesson was over. I’d quickly learned how to shut off my mind at a young age. Block the pain. The exhaustion. Crying wasn’t an option. Tears wouldn’t save me. Fear was something that didn’t register for me on the same levels as other people. I wasn’t blaming all of my crazy on her, but she hadn’t exactly helped.

Amala and the new baby wouldn’t ever have to learn those mind-altering things. I was easing Amala into the skills she would eventually need. I was mentally ill, not stupid. Our family had too many enemies for me to ever believe Vaughn’s children wouldn’t be a target at some point in their lives. They would be prepared, just not in the extreme way I’d been forced to learn. Amala thought we were playing games, and I was able to sleep a little easier snuggled up with Elias knowing she was able to defend herself.

“Ah, crap! No, little dudes. We don’t jump off three-story buildings. Who the fu…fluff told you that was a good idea?” Jamie’s voice echoed around me.

Lifting my gaze from the two little dots on my phone screen, I watched him grab Ciaran before he could leap off the roof, wrestling the two boys away from their science experiment. At least someone with a moral compass was paying attention. I wasn’t all that sure how straight Jamie Carver’s pointed, though.

Many times, I’d seen the switch flip inside him, turning on his crazy and amping it up high. A few times, that crazy had even rivaled my own. But he and the two other rockers took good care of Hayat, so that had to count for something. If they protectedher, kept her happy, then I didn’t give a single fuck if he was a little mentally unstable.

Not just anyone could fill the role of my second best friend. My fourth favorite person in the entire world. Hayat was special. But then again, she would have to be to earn Abi as a bestie.

Sparks and Ky appeared on the roof to help Jamie. All three of them were struggling to breathe by the time they got the boys safely back on the ground.

“The next time you two get a wild idea to learn about gravity, Google it instead of performing your own experiments,” Sparks told the kids. “And you two.”

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