Page 155 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

I drop to the floor, overwhelmed and in pain. I don’t realize I’m crying until tears roll down my cheeks.

Is there anyone I can trust?

The question slices through me like a knife. After everything I’ve been through, trapping me in a room against my will is… horrible.

I feel like a little girl again. Trapped beneath the fallen roof while my house explodes and burns around me.

I tip my head back and look around the room. It’s stuffed to the brim with weapons, ammo, drugs, and cash. Enough for me to arm myself with and blast Dima into a million pieces as soon as he opens the door again.

I let myself cry for another minute, rubbing my sore shoulder. Then I stand up, dust myself up, and take stock of my situation and supplies.

The handle is sturdy and well-made. The keyhole stares out at me, almost like it’s laughing, mocking how helpless I am against it.

“No,” I say out loud. “Hell fucking no. I will not sit in here and wait to be rescued. I’m finding my way out of this shit.”

I spin around and study the shelves.

Most of the weapons in the room are guns, but there are small metal boxes lining some of the lower shelves that look more like tool kits. I open one up and find a box filled with gloves, rope, tape, and ski masks.

They’re hit kits. Quick bags of supplies you can grab and go to steal things and hurt people.

I move onto the next box and the next, rifling through them quickly until I find what I want: a lock pick set.

Nine years of veterinary training—of learning how to operate in every unconventional way imaginable—has prepared me for this.

Now, I’m going to use the steady hands I use for emergency animal surgeries to open this door and get myself the fuck out of here.

My plan beyond that is vague. I need to find Lukas—somehow. And then I need to run as far and as fast as I can.

But first—the door.

I kneel down on the cement floor and get to work. The job is slow and arduous. I have my ear pressed against the door, listening to the sound of each tumbler as they shift and fall.

The longer I’m here, the more I’m confident I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ll probably still be kneeling here, ear pressed to the door, when Dima finally comes back and unlocks the door on the other side.

Then, suddenly, the last tumbler clicks.

The handle pops free. It was so easy. Almost… too easy?

I stare at it in shock for a moment before I wrench it open and take a deep breath of air. It’s the same stale air I was breathing in the armory room. I’m still in a basement, after all.

But fuck, it feels so good to be free.

Before I leave the room, I grab a gun hanging from the peg board wall at the back of the room and load it.

Then, I find my car keys and get the hell out of Dima’s safehouse. Leaving everything else behind.

* * *

“Lukas. Lukas. Lukas.”

I repeat his name under my breath again and again like a prayer.

My plan begins to solidify once I’m on the highway, heading into the city, but I’m still not one-hundred percent certain where I’m going until I pull into a familiar neighborhood. One I’ve been in hundreds of times before.

While I saved every penny I could, renting a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a safe neighborhood, Brigitte went in the opposite direction, as she so often did.

She rented a townhome in a part of the city where she needed bars on the windows. I didn’t often go to her house after dark, which is why I’m glad to have the gun on me right now.

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