Page 46 of The Bratva's Forced Kidnapped Bride
I glanced back at the store, but no one was paying me any attention, so I quickly removed the plates from my new sedan and another car in the next row over and switched them, giving us even more time after the car was reported as stolen. Hopefully, the person who got the stolen car’s plates wouldn’t notice for days that anything was different about their vehicle.
All that mattered was that I got Masha to my place down in Mexico while I regrouped and put an end to the Collective once and for all. I was just starting my new car when a squeal of tires had my head whipping up. A black car was winging out of the parking lot and jetting toward the highway at top speed.
Not the silver car, I told myself as my heart jumped into my throat. Just someone in a hurry, or maybe they’d just pulled off a beer heist. It wasn’t the silver car that was following us, but was it still familiar? Masha had been keeping a better eye on the cars around us as we drove, while I consulted the map to find back routes that wouldn’t add too much time to our journey.
Swearing, I left the car running and raced into the store, looking around wildly for Masha or Svet. My big guard should have stood out like a sore thumb amongst all the milling tourists, but he was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Masha, though she would have easily blended in better, so I calmed down and walked swiftly through the entire store, asking a few people if they’d seen anyone of her description.
They smiled, not noticing my rising panic, just thinking I was some hapless husband who’d lost track of his wife. Not that she might have been taken by an enemy bent on killing her. No one must have seen anything out of the ordinary, either, or surely they’d be making a fuss about an abduction. It must have been done fast and with surgical precision, but I wouldn’t have expected anything less from the Collective.
It seemed like an hour with my rapidly beating heart in my throat, but I got through the store and restaurant in less than two minutes. Taking off toward my own car, no longer caring about stealth, I headed in the direction I’d seen the dark car go, but it was no use. There were too many turnoffs at this junction, and two different highways to get onto. They could be anywhereby now, and they’d probably change cars soon if they hadn’t already.
I lost her.
Sitting in the safety lane, I pounded the steering wheel once, then stared out the windshield, barely seeing anything through my rage. Until ice-cold fear hit me, making me grip the wheel until my knuckles were white.
I lost her. And with what I knew about the Collective and Julio Santino, maybe for good.
No. That wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter who had her. She was mine, and I’d get her back, safe and whole. It didn’t matter that I was on my own, most of my men dead or missing. There wasn’t a future in my mind without Masha, so the only thing to do was get to work. Pulling back into the rest area that was like a damn circus, I got a seat in the back of the restaurant so I could use their wifi. A boisterous waitress came around to offer me coffee and rattle off all the specials in a singsong voice, and it was all I could do to keep from biting her head off.
Instead, I accepted the coffee and snapped open my laptop, turning it away from any prying eyes to begin hacking into the cameras situated in all the corners and over every door. They must have had thousands of people go through this place on a daily basis and had the security down pat.
The only problem was that there weren’t many cameras past the parking lot. We were still a ways from civilization, hours from LA, and still hours from the border. California was a huge place, and I happened to be in one of the empty expanses of it.
Even if I managed to get a better look at the car that squealed out of here with my wife, it would take hours to find any cameras and access their feeds in order to track it. But it didn’t matter how long it took, did it? Or that I didn’t haveanyone who could split up the workload. My fury gave me the strength of an army. I didn’t need anyone else.
Just Masha and I were going to get her back.
Chapter 35 - Masha
My vision returned as the man’s hand fell away from my mouth. My knees hit the pavement, but I was quickly jerked back up, dazed at first, and sucking in a breath. The other man near the car was in front of me now, the one who had grabbed me had me pinned to his chest again. My kicks weren’t even annoying him.
The heavy cloth bag went over my head, and I was shoved forward, slamming into the side of the car. It didn’t matter much to him if I was dead or alive, so why would it matter how roughed up I got? They jerked my arms behind my back, and I felt the bite of zip ties. I still refused to quit fighting and managed to crack someone with another backward-aimed headbutt.
A hand dug into the back of my neck, squeezing hard enough to turn me into a ragdoll, certain he’d snapped my spine. Once again, I couldn’t breathe, and panic was welling all over again. They both picked me up and tossed me into the back of the car. At first, I hit the seat, my head bouncing off the opposite door, then I rolled onto the floor between the seats.
“If you make a single sound, there’s tape that will go over your mouth,” one of them snarled before slamming the door.
No, I didn’t want tape over my mouth; it was hard enough to breathe through the bag over my head. The fabric was so heavy that I was in utter darkness, even though it was a bright sunny day. The front doors opened and slammed shut, the engine revved, and the tires squealed as they took off.
After a few rough turns that had me tossed in one direction and then another, the driving evened out. When I calmed myself down enough so I wouldn’t hyperventilate, I heard thumping sounds coming from the trunk. So that’s whereSvet was. I hoped he was still alive, but I couldn’t tell if he was actively trying to break out of the trunk or just rolling around lifelessly back there.
It wasn’t long before we came to a stop, but neither of the two said anything to me or tried to get me out of the car. I felt a rush of cool air flow in from their open doors when they jumped out and savored the brief moment. Sweat was rolling off my forehead and into my eyes, and the bag was beginning to make me feel like I had my head buried in hot sand. All I could do was try to remain calm so things wouldn’t seem worse.
I heard them pop the trunk and haul Svet out, and my hopes soared when I heard him barking curses in Russian at our abductors. He was alive. Until a single gunshot rang out and the curses stopped midstream. One of the last and only people who could have gotten word back to Anatoli and now he was dead.
Now I wished they had shut the front doors because the cool breeze didn’t drown out the sound of them dragging Svet’s body away. There was a heavy thud, then a metallic clank, and I felt sick. They must have chucked him in a dumpster. We were on our way again.
My only hope was to try to brazen it out with them and offer them something better than whatever the Collective was paying them. If they were only hired guns, I had a chance. I was almost confident by the time we stopped. For one, we hadn’t gone too far from where Anatoli was. For another, I’d worked myself into believing these guys would jump at the chance to ransom me back to the biggest crime family in the state.
I waited, still trying to breathe normally in the stifling bag, until they dragged me out of the car by my feet. Neither of them made any effort to help me get up, just kept pulling me along a dusty path. Small rocks dug into my skin, and my shirtwas riding up to my armpits. One shoe fell off, and it was all I could do to keep from eating a bunch of dirt on the bumpy slide to wherever they were taking me next.
They were both laughing under their breath when they stopped, finally hauling me to my feet. I swayed and coughed from all the dust that had somehow gotten under the tightly tied bag. One of them poked me roughly in the back, grunting for me to walk. I immediately tripped on a step that was right in front of me, and the other one either took pity or ran out of patience and yanked me the rest of the way up before shoving me through a doorway.
It was hotter than outside and smelled like old, rotten wood. The rope that held the sack around my neck jerked tight, and I had a moment of panic, about to call out my carefully planned offer in a rush. But they were only taking the bag off, and I gasped and sputtered, blowing the hair out of my eyes.
I was in a single room shack, dimly lit from a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and sparsely furnished with things that the dump would have rejected. The lone window was boarded up tight and covered with torn black paper, as if someone had been peeking through a crack in the boards. One of them dropped a metal bar across the narrow doorway, and it landed with a finality that made my heart sink.
Now I could get a good look at my assailants, and they were ugly sons of bitches, tall and burly and scarred. One had long, greasy black hair, while the other was bald as an egg, tattoos running up his thick neck to his ears. Greasy shoved me into a chair, and they both loomed over me.
