Page 16 of Stolen Vows

His fingers tightened around my wrist. Suddenly, the way he was looking at me shifted from annoyance to something more. His gaze darkened, and I felt a jolt run down my spine.

I yanked my wrist away from him, and stepped aside, thinking better of going after his phone. At least, for now.

I knew that Dad wouldn’t leave me to face this alone. Not a chance in hell. He might have wanted to marry me off that awful Mario, but that doesn’t mean that he’s willing to let me slip through his fingers like this.

Max hasn’t hurt me, but the very act of stealing me away from my wedding day was always something he was going to have to pay for. Hell, he probably only patched me up after that fall I had in the hopes of keeping me from looking too beat-up by the time they had to start sending out ransom requests or whatever it was they were going to use me for. Not out of the goodness of his heart.

And that’s what I keep reminding myself as I pry open the window a few inches, a sudden gust of cold air rushing in and filling the room. I shudder. I'm still dressed, of course, but the shower running beside me has filled the room with steam, and the sudden shock of chilliness makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

Or maybe that’s something to do with the man standing on the other side of the door. I’m sure he has no idea that the glue around the edges of the window has started to come up. I noticed it a few days ago, and have been careful to smear the sealant that holds the window in place with soap and water every time I am allowed in, in the hopes of making it a little easier to peel off. And, today, nearly a week after my father’s second message, I’m ready to put it to the test.

The sealant comes off in a single piece, which I stuff behind the toilet. I need to make this whole scene look as confusing as possible, when he finally opens the door. There isn’t a lock on it. He doesn’t trust me. And it’s not as though this is going to give him any reason to.

That thought nags at the back of my mind, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. It shouldn’t matter to me what this man thinks of me, right? I don’t know anything about him. And the things that I do know are hardly flattering. He stole me away from my wedding, forced me out of a window at gunpoint, and tossed me under a blanket to drive me across the country and lock me up.

In some ways, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it—what he has done, how someone who can be so cruel has offered me these small moments of kindness, too.

Perhaps because they are some of the only moments of kindness I have experienced other than with Misha. I grimace as the glass in the window cracks dangerously, as though warning me it may explode. It sounds ridiculous, even to me, to think of him in those terms—as the sole arbiter of people being nice to me—when I know it’s not true.

"You’ve had everything you could ever have wanted," my father had told me, gesturing around my beautiful bedroom, when he had first told me that I was to marry Mario and I had dug my heels in. "Travel, clothes, a home, luxury. Think of all the women who would kill to have had everything you did, and you won’t give me this one thing in return?”

I would have traded it all in to escape that fate.

I shove the thought aside as I finally manage to lift the glass from the frame. It doesn’t give me much room, but the sudden rush of fresh air and the scent of the forest beyond draws a smile to my lips. I don’t do well with being locked up. Especially in a place as tiny and rundown as this one.

I glance at the door one last time. I know I don’t have much time. He seems to be attuned to everything that is going on around him, ears pricked for any sign of something wrong. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that he’s some sort of ground soldier for whatever rival mafia faction has sent him here with me. But there’s something human behind that piercing gaze that makes it hard for me to think straight—as though he is seeing further into me than anyone should.

Or anyone would want to.

I have to get out now. I'm going to flee this cabin and head into the woods, until I run into one of the men that my father will have sent out to find me. I have no doubt that he has flooded the whole damn state with people searching for me, and if he’s gotten hold of Max’s number, then he must be narrowing down on my location. I doubt I’ll be out of this place for more than a few hours before someone comes across me, and, when they do...

I stretch my arm out of the window, feeling the cold bite of the air on my skin. The tee he gave me is enormous, but it doesn’t come down past my elbows. A shiver runs down my spine. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I really won’t last long out there, once I make a break for it. I have no idea where we are, no idea where the nearest road leads to, no idea if my father is anywhere close by. My mind has been so focused on finding a way out of here, I’ve hardly thought about what might be waiting for me on the other side when I do.

Mario. I know he’ll still be expecting me to go through with the marriage as long as I’m untouched; he didn’t see anything, after all, of my doubts before I made my way down to meet him. As far as he’s concerned, I was a blushing bride ready to meet him at the altar, and this man has stolen me away from my rightful duty. The thought of it sends a thick lump rising up in my throat, and I swallow it down swiftly. Maybe all of this will have given my father reason to re-evaluate whether this is a good idea or not, and I might be able to reason with him and find some way out of this.

As long as I am hidden away here, I will never know. Pushing my shoulders awkwardly through the bathroom window, I scramble to find my footing on the toilet, the polished ceramic nearly sending me crashing to the ground once more. A shock of pain rushes through my leg where my injury is still healing, but I ignore it. The seconds are running out, and I can’t let that happen.

If there is one thing my father has drilled into me above all else, it’s to find a way back to my family—that he is the one who can protect me, he is the one who knows me, he is the one I can trust. As much as Max might have kept me physically safe here, God knows what he will start doing once he realizes that he has managed to lull me into a sense of security...

Finally, with an almighty shove, I fumble out of the window and on to the ground below – the wind is knocked out of me as I hit the earth hard, my chest slamming into the damp ground. I spring to my feet and glance around. Inside, I can hear Max calling out, probably checking that I am okay.

And, to my surprise, there is a note of concern in his voice. Not that it means anything, not that it ever could. He’s worried about his prime asset getting out of containment, not about anythinghappening to me, the same reason he patched me up before. I can still remember the cold look of fury in his eyes when he stole me away from that wedding, and I am not going to forget it any time soon.

I don’t have shoes, so the rocks and twigs are already digging into my feet as I straighten up and look around. As far as the eye can see, there are trees stretching out in every direction. It doesn’t look like another living soul has stepped foot in this place in longer than I’d care to imagine. Every direction looks the same, which probably means it doesn’t matter which one I head off into. And yet, as I hear his voice rising behind me, there is a part of me that wants to stay rooted to the ground, right where I stand.

I could climb back in through the window. Try to shove the glass back in place, replace the sealant, whatever I can do in the time before he bursts in to check on me. I can still hear the shower running, and the thought of the hot water running over my body is almost too tempting to resist. That cabin, as much as I might never have chosen to come here myself, has been something like a sanctuary, and running away from that and into the woods where I have no idea what is waiting for me suddenly seems like the stupidest idea I’ve ever had in my life.

But then, I see the door start to move, and I turn my back and run, ignoring the pain in the soles of my feet, ignoring the cold of the wind in my hair. The further I can get from here, the more chance I have of being found, the more chance I have of one of the men my father has sent to bring me back managing to come across me...

I can already feel the breath tearing through my lungs as I try to force my legs to keep moving. It’s not as though I get out to the gym much, not with my father being who he is. He’s alwaysinsisted that I’m better off cultivating my mind than my body, and that no men in this business care for a woman who’s all muscly, anyway. Right now, I would do anything to have muscles that could carry me a little further, but I have to rely on what I have to work with.

"Cara!”

A voice roars through the forest, and I glance back, almost on instinct. I have no intention of stopping. But there is something in his tone that throws me back to the day he took me. A real hatred, as though he can barely believe that he has been stuck with me at all. My eyes are already burning with the cold air, my hair flying back from my face in tangled waves.

I don’t know why Max took me in the first place, but it doesn’t matter. My father will deal with all of that when the time is right. All that matters to me right now is getting out of here, finding some way back to my old life; the comforts of everything that I’ve ever been used to, my home, my father, my family. It’s where I belong.

And, even as I hear footsteps following me into the darkened woods, I know that I will do anything within my power to get back to it.

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