Page 85 of Savage Claim

“You don’t want to do this,” I said, voice coming out wobbly.Goddamn Santino, I thought as I tried to lean back, slow the neanderthal down. He had made me empty my pockets at the train station, and the tracker had been thrown into a trash can.

I tried to look around, to figure out where we were. It resembled a hospital. Dingy and worn down and lacking people, yes, but everything about it reminded me of the ER that I rotated through while I was still in school. My heart jumped into my throat. This was bad. Whatever was happening, wherever I had been taken, it was worse than anything I had faced so far.

The man pushed open a door, and my chest constricted, squeezing down on my lungs. The baby thrashed in my belly, kicking as if telling me to get the hell out of this place. The roomwas some kind of old-fashioned operating gallery. Everything was sterile and draped, just like it would be in a modern hospital, but the machinery around us was at least thirty years out of date.

And nothing was turned on. There were no oxygen tanks. No cauterizing machines. No monitors, even.

Artem Volkov was standing by the operating table, grinning like a madman. If it was possible, he looked even worse than Santino. His nose was nearly non-existent; there was just a hole in the middle of his face. One eye was nearly shut from the burned skin that seemed to have melted and covered it.

“Isabella,” he said, and I shivered at the way my name seemed to slither out of his mouth. “It’s good to see you again.” When I had met Artem Volkov before, he had been a handsome man. Terrifying, but it was easy to see that he could be charming when he wanted to be. A lot like Lorenzo, honestly.

But this man and the one from before were not the same. It wasn’t just that he was scarred now. There was something about the look in his eye that was haunting, like maybe he wasn’t entirely in touch with reality anymore.

“I can’t say the same.”

Artem chuckled. It was a rusty, almost painful sound. “I wouldn’t expect you to be thrilled,” he said. “I should have put a bullet in your skull the moment I saw you, but I wanted to see the light drain out of Lorenzo’s eyes. I didn’t get to do that the first time around, you know.”

Bile climbed up my throat, and I had to resist the urge to touch my belly. I didn’t want to draw any more attention to it than humanly possible. “I left Lorenzo,” I said, straightening myspine. “He was going to kill my sister, so I helped her escape. He won’t care?—”

Artem raised a hand,tsk-ing at me. “We tried this song and dance before, remember?” he asked. “We both know that, at least while you’re carrying Lorenzo’s brat, he’ll be coming for you.” He clapped his hands together. “Luckily for you, I have a solution to that.”

A door behind him opened, summoned by the clap no doubt, and I had to bite back a scream. Dr. Coleman came to stand by Artem’s side. “Dr. Coleman?”

The man wasn’t happy to be there, I could tell, but that didn’t really change the fact that he was. “He took my wife,” the doctor muttered. “My girls.”

If I was capable of feeling sorry for him, I would, but all of that was overshadowed by my own fear. I swallowed hard. “What are you going to do?”

“You’re having a boy,” Artem said. “Dr. Coleman was kind enough to show me your ultrasound to confirm it.”

My eyes drifted on the baby weigh-in station that was just behind them. Like the operating table, it had been prepped and ready for a baby. My hand touched my belly: they were going to take my baby. “I’m just getting into my third trimester now. Whatever you’re planning here, it’s too soon.”

Artem smiled, and it was a garish thing of twitching muscles and teeth that were barely clinging to the gums that he had left. Something burning must have hit him square in the face. “Did you know that Dr. Coleman here was a specialist when it came to premature infants.” He clapped the man on the back, and I couldtell that the doctor was barely holding it together. “How many weeks along is the fetus considered viable?”

“Twenty-three or twenty-four,” Dr. Coleman replied. He was looking a little green in the face. “It depends on how the fetus has been developing, and if there are any underlying conditions that haven’t been discovered prenatally.”

“And Isabella there is hovering between twenty-eight and twenty-nine weeks, right?”

He nodded. “That is correct.”

The world around me was starting to spin. There was no way that I was going to allow this to happen. I would run; I would start screaming until my throat bled. But no matter what I told my body to do, I was paralyzed. Fear had sapped me of my reason and my ability to move my muscles. “It’s too soon,” I repeated myself, gasping out the words.

“Keeping you alive for the next six to eight weeks is too much of a risk,” Artem said. “Don’t worry, Dr. Coleman will take good care of little Efram until he is big and strong.”

Efram? That named seemed familiar, but I couldn’t be sure. Then revulsion hit as I realized…

Efram Volkov was Artem’s younger brother. He had been killed when Lorenzo rescued Gemma. He was going to replace his lost brother with my baby.

I gagged; my knees buckled, and the man who had been restraining me let go so that I could land on the ground with an echoingcrack.

“Ivan,” Artem grunted. “Pick up Isabella now. That was rude.”

I scrambled away from his grasp on my hands and knees. I heard Artem scolding me, sounding more and more like a madman every time he opened his mouth, but I reached the instrument tray and overturned it, grabbing for a 10-blade in the process.

When Ivan stood me up, I slashed at him, sinking the blade deep into his cheek. Blood gushed, bright red and arterial, from the wound. The man howled, clapping his hand over his face.

Artem made that disappointed chuffing sound again. “You’re going to regret that.”

CHAPTER 57

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