* * *
The sun had dipped below the trees, casting an eerie yellow glow.
When I turned onto the dirt road leading to Dmitri’s house, I found the gate open. He was expecting me. He knew I would come. He knew exactly how to manipulate people. Caro was the button he could press and press and press.
I drove through the gate.
The ride was exceedingly bumpy, even in my big truck, so I had to go slow. Even so, I covered ground more quickly driving than walking, and before I was ready, the mansion was within sight. I parked the truck and got out. Walked straight up to the door without looking into the bed of my truck at all. I didn’t want to see him looking back at me, if he had woken up early and if the blindfold jostled aside on the ride over. The chances were slim that would have happened, but I couldn’t see the disillusionment in his eyes. By now he knew what I really was.
The door opened before I pressed the doorbell. Dmitri stood there with his greasy smile, the one he thought was smooth and terrifying.
“You made it,” he said as if I’d arrived for a party.
“Where’s Caro?”
“Watch your tone, darling. And she’s inside.”
“Well, bring her out. I want to see her. And she better be okay, you dirty fucker.” She better be alive.
Dmitri smiled pleasantly. “She’s very well, actually. You’d be surprised. But I don’t think you’re in a position to make demands about the order of things. First I’d like to see the package.”
“We had a deal,” I insisted. I studied the windows all the way to the top, but they were too reflective to see inside and Caro wasn’t anywhere. “Let me see her.”
“We did have a deal, and I intend to uphold my end of the bargain. You give me what I want, and I won’t stop your sister from leaving if she wants to.”
I narrowed my eyes. “She’s coming with me.”
He raised one shoulder in a sort of European shrug. “That won’t be up to me. Assuming you brought me the man.”
Every cell in my body screamed to get the hell away from there. Just get in the front seat and drive away with Clint. I wouldn’t even take him to my house, where Dmitri would know to look for him now. I wouldn’t take him to the police station, where Dmitri had the police chief on payroll. I’d just keep driving forever, through desert and plains. I wouldn’t even stop when we hit the ocean. I’d drive on water if it meant he stayed alive.
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you think you’re going to die, but it wasn’t my life I saw. Not the tiny apartment I shared with my sisters or the dingy club I’d stripped at for years. I saw my future instead. The great expanse of possibility, if things had worked out differently. If Clint and I could have been together. If he had been a regular passenger and I had been a regular girl.
In the end, I didn’t have to walk over and see if Clint had stirred, if his blindfold had slipped. Dmitri made that choice instead, striding over to my truck and pulling the plastic tarp out. He stared inside the bed of the truck for a second, and another, and another, and then finally looked at me.
“Is this a joke?” he asked.
“I’m not fucking laughing.”
“Neither am I, Della. I want the fucking package. I want that army pig and his fucking package. Where is he?”
I stepped closer to the truck and stared into the empty truck bed. “Oh shit.”
“Oh shit,” he mimicked. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice, you dumb slut? Did you think I would just give you Caro and the two of you would ride off the sunset?”
“No, I—” Oh God, where did he go? What am I going to do?
You’re going to die. And it’s all you deserve.
Still, I was trying to figure out where the hell Clint could have gone. I had this horrible vision of him somehow falling out of the truck while we were on the highway and getting crushed. God. God. But I would have noticed that, wouldn’t I? It seems like I would have noticed his weight lifting from the truck and bouncing out. I would have noticed cars swerving and crashing behind me, even if I’d been in a haze of guilt and self-hatred since leaving my house.
But then I remembered the open gate at the edge of the property and the bumpy road on my way in. I might not have noticed if someone had slipped over the side on a big bump.
No, that’s too much to hope for.
That would mean Clint actually woke up and managed to get out of the truck while cuffed on his wrists and ankles. It was so freaking unlikely, but my heart already raced with exhilaration. He’d done it. He’d gotten away.
Even the duffel bag was missing, which told me he must have taken it with him. He had his cell phone, his weapon. He’d escaped.
Dmitri grabbed my arms and shook me. “Where is he?”
My eyes scanned the tree line, and without meaning to, I gave it away. Dmitri released me fast enough that I stumbled back. He shielded his eyes from the sunset glare. No movement.
“He’s gone,” I said, my voice hoarse with relief. “He’s far gone by now.”
I just prayed that was true.
Dmitri took a phone from his pocket and made a call, snapping in Russian to the guy on the other end of the line. Then he strode over to me, grabbed my arms, and shook me again. My head wobbled on my spine so hard I was dizzy even when he stopped.
“You little stupid whore. I give you one thing to do, and you cannot even finish the job.” He ended his little speech by slapping me across the face.
My jaw felt like it unhinged. I shook my head to clear it, ignoring the ache in my cheek. “So maybe you should do your own work instead of blackmailing women to do it for you.”
That earned me another brain-jarring slap. This time I lost my balance and fell on the ground. I wanted him to keep going, to keep pummeling me, to give me the pain I deserved for dragging Clint into this mess.
He gripped my chin hard enough that I whimpered. He turned my face so that I had no choice but to look into his pale, haunting eyes.
“You understand you’re going to die now,” he said calmly.
I know. I couldn’t speak, my jaw too sore—was it broken?—and his hand clamped it shut anyway. But I told him with my eyes. He’d been crouching over me, leaving himself vulnerable. He didn’t expect me to fight back, not when it would lead to more pain for me or for Caro. I was beyond that now. We would both die here, but I wouldn’t make it easy for him. I raised my knee and kicked him between the legs.
He doubled over and fell on top of me, pressing us both into the ground. I couldn’t breathe. I fought him, struggling to get his weight off me. I never wanted his weight on me again. That would be worse than death at this point. I had already resigned myself to dying, but I wouldn’t let Dmitri touch me again. Wouldn’t let any of those fuckers touch me again. The last man to be inside me was Clint, and I was going to die that way.
Big ideas. I had big ideas, but then Dmitri slammed my skull into the ground. The ground was hard from a recent drought; it rattled my brain and left me dazed. Dazed enough that he could flip me on the ground and put his knee on my back.
He laughed at my predicament. “You’ve changed since you left.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I mumbled.
“You should. I like a little fight. You and your sister. You always thought I wanted a girl who did what I told them to, but that wasn’t it at all. I wanted a girl who fought back. Caro figured that out first.”
The weight from his knee increased as he levered himself up. He stood, pressing his heel into my spine until I couldn’t hold it in; I sobbed into the dirt, hating that he’d brought me this low again.
He twisted his foot, pressing the hard edge of the heel farther into my spine. “I’ll have fun with both of you here.”
A crack rang out in the open space, pinging the granite wall behind us. I froze, and Dmitri did too. I angled my head so I could look at the smoking hole where the bullet had gone. Who the hell had fired that? The only ones who’d be here and armed would be Dmitri’s men, but why were they shooting at him? Did they mean to shoot me and somehow got it horribly wrong?
I waited for Dmitri to dive for cover. Even he would do so when we were taking fire from an unknown source. He didn’t have a death wish.
And for a second it seemed like he had gone for cover as his body landed beside mine and dust rose to cover my eyes and ears and nose. Then everything went silent.
I watched in horror as the dust cleared. Dmitri was lying on his side, his body lax. And his head…God, his head. It had been shot through, that was the only way I could process it. Half of it was missing. I looked at the ground around us and realized it was sprinkled with blood. And hair. And brain matter.
I scrambled away, wiping at myself furiously, crying.
Who had shot Dmitri?
Then I saw the figure of a man in the distance, emerging from the tree line. He was tall, with broad shoulders. He walked slowly at first, like someone who had been injured. Or someone who was cuffed at his ankles. As I watched, he aimed his gun down between his feet and another crack split the air. Then he crossed the remaining distance quickly.
“Clint,” I whispered.
Chapter Fourteen
Clint
There are times in your life when you think you’ve hit the bottom. Eating MREs and hanging out with international criminals while they brutalize women…that was one of them. That had to be the worst. But then we’d put most of them behind bars. We’d dismantled their organization, and I thought it made things okay.
Then I made it stateside and figured out that my girlfriend was breaking up with me. Worse than that, she’d been cheating on me. Oh, and she kicked me out of my own apartment.
That, I figured, had to be the lowest fucking point.
But I was wrong. Getting
kidnapped
and
almost fucking murdered
by the girl I was seeing. This was the worst.
I figured it out, of course, as I came to in the bumping bed of the truck. I was the payment Dmitri had demanded in exchange for her sister’s life. So maybe it should have made me feel better to think she’d tried to offer him money instead, that she’d tried to find some other way.
But I didn’t feel good. She’d picked
this
in the end. It hurt bad enough to break me up inside, but I stared at her stonily as I walked closer. I had a lot of experience with this, approaching the enemy.
And as much as I hated to think of her that way, she was the enemy.
Her face was puffy and red from when the bastard had hit her. Those would turn into dark bruises soon. How badly was she injured? Her clothes covered any injuries on her body. She held herself stiffly as I approached.
Ridiculous how easy it was to feel sorry for a woman I should hate.
“You okay?” I asked roughly.
I hadn’t meant to ask that, but she looked too fucking pitiful, like a dog from the gutter, that I had to throw her a bone. She shrugged, then winced at the movement.
There wasn’t much I could do for her here anyway. I went over to Dmitri and found two firearms on his person—tossed them into the cab of the truck.
“Get in,” I said.
Della just sat there, her eyes wide, looking past me.
She’s going into shock, asshole.
Yeah, well, maybe she wouldn’t be so fucked up right now if she hadn’t tried to kill me.
“Get in the truck.”
“Can’t,” she mumbled.
Shit.
“Something broken? Where does it hurt?”
A humorless smile tilted her lips. “Hurts everywhere, but that’s not why. Caro. My sister.”
I glanced at the house. “We go in there, we might not come out. There are men patrolling the area. Only a matter of time until they find us.”
“You go,” she said.
I shook my head. “This is how it’s going to happen. You get in the truck, driver’s seat. I’ll go in and look for her. If I get us out, we all three drive away. If I don’t come back, if the guys find you first, then you can assume I didn’t find her. Anyone comes here, you drive like a bat out of hell. Got it?”
Her eyes widened. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“No, Della. You don’t get to call the shots. After what you did, the least you can do is listen to me.”
She tried to stand…and stumbled. She finally made it to her feet, swaying in the sunset. “I’ve spent my whole life doing what men told me to do. Including tying you up and bringing you here, which was the biggest mistake of my life. I’m done with that.”
“Yeah, you picked a real inconvenient time to start being independent.”
She flinched, and her shame resounded deep in my belly. I knew she deserved my bitterness, my cruelty. And she’d take it all too. I read the guilt in every harsh line of her body. She’d probably let me beat her just like Dmitri had. She’d let me pound her into the ground as if I could take my revenge out on her flesh.