Page 61 of The Bratva's Innocent Sold Bride
“I disappeared, so he panicked. I reappeared, and he jumped at the chance to try to catch me. He’s been trying for a long time, you see. I keep breaking his things.”
Well, no, Mat wouldn’t like that. Oh crap, Terrence—Anatoli, whoever he was, must see me as one of Mat’s things. Maybe his very favorite. And I’d walked right into the trap by not listening, not trusting he knew there was danger. Mat was right, I really was too naive and innocent. He’d never say stupid, but I was kicking myself.
My dog was lost, possibly about to run into traffic. What was going to become of me was too much to think about. I blinked back the tears that blurred my vision and tried to pretend I knew more than I did. It had worked before to get information out of Mila and Masha.
“So, I guess Mat never sent me a message saying he was five minutes away. And it was you who made my guards think there was an emergency. Nice work.”
He snickered. “High praise from you. I’d compliment your app getting into my phone, but it was because of that I could trace back to your computers and find out everything I needed to know.”
Well, that was a kick in the gut. Wait, was I actually upset that my work wasn’t as good as I thought it was when I might be on my way to my death? I had to keep from losing it somehow.
“He’s going to kill you,” I said, trying to act nonchalant.
It wasn’t a front. I believed in my gut that Mat would kill this man for taking me, throwing our dog out like he was a bag of trash. He’d kill him slowly if he hurt me, maybe just put a bullet in his head if he kept his hands to himself. Either way, I kind of wanted to watch. I stared at him defiantly until his hand left the steering wheel with the speed of a striking snake. A burning slap made my head twist to the side, my forehead bouncing off the window.
“I’m not interested in hurting you,” he said. “But I will.”
I rubbed my cheek and nodded. Message received, shut the hell up. We headed east, and I pretended he was just taking me home. As we got further and further from civilization, the fear began to push forward and take over. My hands shook, and I squeezed them between my knees. My mind raced, but I tried to calm it with plans.
As soon as he stopped…
I was going to run.
Until we pulled up to a place so desolate that my wafer-thin escape plan crumbled to dust. There was nowhere to run. He would be on top of me in seconds. Nothing to hide behind, no one to hear a distress call. Maybe he didn’t want to kill me until he was assured of whatever he wanted from Mat, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t shoot me in the leg.
The trailer looked like it had just been parked there recently; there were no trails, no welcoming fire pit, or folding chairs set up outside. No one lived here. The place had one purpose. To hold me.
It wasn’t even defiance that kept me from getting out of the car when Anatoli ordered it. My legs refused to move. OnceI went into that tin can, I might never leave it. I’d never given a single thought to my death before, why should I at my age? Now it was all I could think about, and I didn’t want it to be here.
He yanked me by the arm, impatient with my inability to move. I stumbled over another apology as I tripped on the metal steps leading into the trailer. He ignored me, and I gulped back bile as he shoved me in and slammed the door behind me.
Something slammed into place on the outside of the door. A bar, and a strong one. The rickety door wouldn’t budge. I wouldn’t have been able to fit my shoulders through the tiny windows, and even if they had bars welded across them on the outside.
When I heard the car start up again and pull away, I crumbled to the vinyl floor and screamed my throat raw.
No one heard. No one came to help me. I was alone, and all I could do was wait.
Chapter 38 - Mat
Back at home, Artem clung to my side much the way he did to CJ when we first rescued him. He’d at least given us a starting point, the place where they must have ditched him before leaving with CJ. I didn’t have the energy to comfort him, and after a long scratch behind the ears, I turned him over to one of the housekeepers who helped spoil him rotten.
“I need to concentrate on finding her,” I said.
That meant everything I had, no distractions. It had been three hours since I first went to the office and discovered her missing, but it might have been much longer than that. Lev had driven down from San Francisco, and we were organizing search teams, along with getting any available surveillance cameras from the office park.
The uptight property manager was balking at handing it over, so I sent someone to impersonate a police officer to get it with as little fuss as possible. He was on his way now, and for the moment, all I could do was wait.
A call finally came in with new information. Someone had located the driver’s car, so much blood on the inside of the windshield that it would be unlikely Bardil would turn up alive, if at all. Another dead end, more time ticking by with CJ in the hands of a man who wanted to wipe me off the map as much as I wanted him gone from it.
To think I had planned to broker a peace treaty we could both live with. I had foolishly believed he had shown himself for that purpose, that he might even come to me. Perhaps he was growing tired of the swift retaliation we brought down on him every time he attacked something of mine.
Seemed he was feeding on the chaos, growing stronger and bolder. I wouldn’t make the mistake of cutting him some slack again. When I found him, there’d be no talking. No peace.
Masha ran into the room I was pacing in, her face red. “Josef’s on the phone. Someone found him in bad shape a little while ago. He must have been pretty out of it, said he woke up in the hospital.”
I followed her to where Garik stood in the other room, phone pressed to his ear and a harsh look on his face. He handed the phone over when he saw me.
“Tell me everything,” I said.
