Page 36 of Call Sign: King
“Roger that. I think that’s smart,” Axel agreed.
“No. Smart would have been never letting her leave my side. Let’s pray she doesn’t pay for my mistake with her life.”
Chapter Ten
KHLOE
“You need to go to the hospital,” Khloe said, doing her best to sound calm. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
As with her previous attempts, her captor remained silent as he let one of his accomplices tend to his wounds, leaving her nothing to do but repeat the horror movie of a bleeding Trevor and Ricky on auto loop. She wasn’t sure which was worse. Remembering how the people she loved were currently fighting for their lives or thinking about how she was probably going to be next.
The only emotion stronger than fear was guilt. Her dear friends… Ryder’s BSO team. They’d all put their lives on the line… for her. For years, Ryder had talked about the dangers, but until she’d seen the terror in Trevor’s eyes as he’d rushed into the bathroom, she hadn’t really thought the danger was real. Not really.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
The mantra on repeat in her brain was helping some, but she needed something more.
Think, Khloe. What would Ryder do? She’d lived with and loved the man for over four years. Surely there was something she could be doing right now to assist in her own rescue.
Case the joint.
As casually as she could, Khloe glanced around the back of the van looking for something she could use as a weapon. Her kidnapper had haphazardly tied rope around her torso at the hotel. Since jumping into the van, the guy who’d been waiting in the back had turned his attention to helping her assailant sitting directly across from her on the bare metal floor.
The built-in shelving units he had his back propped against were almost empty. In fact, short of the blood they’d dripped onto the floor, the entire van was immaculate, brand new even.
Was it stolen? With any luck the police would be looking for it.
The only weapons her inspection found were the ones currently in the shoulder holsters of the two men in the back of the van with her. Even with one of them injured, she wasn’t strong enough to wrestle a weapon away from them, even if by some miracle she could get out of the ropes.
She turned her thoughts to the driver. He’d shouted back to them from the cab of the van a few times now, but he hadn’t been speaking English.
As the daughter of Polish immigrants, Khloe spoke fluent Polish. The men were definitely not speaking that, but there were enough similarities she was ninety-nine percent sure they were speaking Russian — a fact that only terrified her more.
Ryder may have never shared exact details about his missions during his thirteen years in the CIA, but she knew enough to know he’d lived in Moscow for many of those years and that he’d been undercover, working with some of the most dangerous criminal elements. And while her husband hadn’t given her the full story about how dangerous his work had been, she’d heard the full story of his last heroic night in Moscow directly from Maggie Marshall, the woman he’d saved that night.
Just knowing the trio had come all the way from Russia to kidnap her told her there would be no help coming from the men assisting her kidnapper.
Despair threatened to engulf her as she thought of everything these men were taking from her. She’d lived a charmed life by literally anyone’s measure. She had it all. Money. Fame. Love. With a rare certainty, she knew she’d give up all the material things in a heartbeat just to be able to be with Ryder and the friends she loved. Tears threatened as she thought about never seeing them again, but thankfully righteous anger stepped in, refusing to let her give up.
Ryder would come for her. She was sure of it. He would go over every inch of the globe looking for her and wouldn’t stop until he found her. That meant she had to first stay alive, and more importantly, help him in any way she could.
Thank God she’d listened to him and let Hawkeye inject the GPS into her left hip a few days before. That meant the BSO team knew where she was. They were probably following her right now.
And when they rescued her, she needed to make sure she’d done all she could to leave evidence to help convict these assholes of kidnapping. That meant leaving DNA behind everywhere she went. The kidnapper’s blood splatter on the floor proved he had been here, but now it was her turn.
It was hard to maneuver much with the ropes, but thankfully she’d worn her hair down during filming that day. She was able to reach up her back just high enough to pull on the back of her blonde locks. Her scalp was still sore from the asshole pulling her hair back at the hotel, but she yanked more anyway, only stopping when she could feel strands of hair loose between her fingers.
Letting them drop to the floor as evidence of her being there, she next made a tight fist, digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands, scratching and scraping as much skin as she could under her fingernails before wiping the tiny cluster of her cells onto the metal wall of the van at her back.
Khloe felt the heated glare of the man across from her. If he knew what she was doing, he didn’t let on. Still, his stare was unnerving.
“What?” she finally asked, trying to draw him into telling her something that might help her know who he was and what his plans were.
“You surprise me,” he finally answered in English.
Was that admiration she heard in his voice?
“I surprise a lot of people,” she said, trying to sound stronger and more confident than she felt.
