Page 33 of Vicious Hearts

“They’ve got Ariadne.”

Attila unsuccessfully tries to hide his surprise that she’s the first person I would worry about when I regained consciousness.

“I’ve got people working on that,” he tells me.

“So what are you doing here?” I ask him. “I want every man out looking for her.”

“Relax, Caleph. I’m handling it.”

“How?Howare you handling it?!”

My voice is louder than I intended, but I don’t stop long enough to regret it. They took Ariadne and we have no idea where the fuck they’ve taken her or what they’re doing to her while we waste precious minutes here instead of being out there looking for her.

Attila looks at me as though seeing me for the first time, his mouth pressed into a hard line as he analyses me. Like he has so much to say but doesn't quite know how to say it. My body is numb with pain. My mind is racked with fear, and my soul is engulfed with rage. I am so angry I could kill someone. I could tear them apart with my bare hands, chew them up with my bare teeth then spit them back out again.

Attila smirks and finally relents when I insist on getting up. “Who knew all it would take is a woman to bring out the beast in you again.”

* * *

“The good thingis they want her alive,” Attila says, as we climb into the car.

We drive a short distance until we enter the city. Attila drives into a building basement and emerges on the other side before he drives two blocks and enters another basement. Security measure: if anyone was tailing and waiting for us to emerge from the first building, they’d be waiting a very long time.

Someone obviously knew that Ariadne was in Guatemala, and moreover, they knew she was with me. I wondered who knew and at which point they realized it. Definitely someone who was intimate with my day-to-day operations and somehow knew where to find us.

“They’ll either try to move her out of the country or someone will be coming here to collect her.”

“Ports? Airports?” I wince as a shard of pain lances through me. It hurts to even breathe.

“We have them all covered.”

Attila shoots me a reassuring look, his eyes lingering on me longer than usual, before he tells me that we’ll find her. We’ve lost about six hours while I was up to my eyeballs on painkillers, trying to bite back the stabbing pain that ebbed and flowed through my broken body.

“Camera footage?”

“Waiting for us in the safehouse.”

It isn’t safe for us to go back to the house. I immediately feel the void of Ariadne’s absence from the forest. Instead, I’ll be staying in this sterile apartment that is fitted out like an industrial warehouse and harbors an impressive cache of weapons.

There are a dozen or more of our men scattered around the apartment, standing to attention as we step out of the elevator. Most have worked for us for years and I know them on a first name basis. Their loyalty is undisputed.

Attila hurries to the kitchen bench and takes control of a laptop, turning it around so the screen sits between us. Our tech man on the ground in Guatemala comes to stand beside us. He taps out a series of numbers on the keyboard until the screen comes to life and the scene of our accident starts to play out.

I watch on in silence as the film moves in slow motion, paying careful attention when the van cuts through traffic and skids across the road to smash into the side of the four-wheel drive. And then, as onlookers stop and watch in horror, a man of immense proportions gets out of the van and limps across the pavement until he stops at the car. Without pause, his arms reach into the car and pull out a very badly injured Ariadne, dragging her across the road to his van. And the last thing I see is the horrified look on Ariadne’s face as she looks back at the four-wheel drive as it hisses with its impending fire, and she is hurled into the back of the vehicle and driven away.

29

ARIADNE

My body hits a thin mat covering the cabin of the van. I slide in with a painful thud, adding to my physical woes. Damn, it hurts.

“Please,” I murmur. “Please – let me go.”

The man tells me to shut up. I can’t see him properly through my swollen eye. I must have hit my face on the dashboard, because I feel as though it could so easily explode.

The physical pain is so excruciating, but it’s nothing compared to the pain of leaving Caleph behind. Of losing him, losing what we could’ve been.

I watched in horror as the car caught fire, flames engulfing it rapidly as I was shoved into the van. I didn’t see Caleph come out of that car like I did. I watched that car go up in flames, the same way my life did. With Caleph went my hopes and dreams for any sort of a future with him. And there was no way I would survive this, because his death means no one is coming for me. My location, my safety… dies with him. It will only be a matter of hours at most before I join Caleph in the world of the dead. If only I could be laid to rest beside him.

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