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“Let’s go, Miss,” Jack, a man I remember from home, helps me out of the car. Inside the house, I am pointed to an old desk chair. While the outside looks like shit, the inside is nice. Like a nice hotel.
I sit down and am immediately tied to the chair with cable ties. I wish I had a weapon.
“You remember Sasha?” my dad asks, gesturing to the old man.
“How could I forget,” I say wryly and immediately regret it when the back of his hand connects with my left cheek. I put my hand up to try to ease the sting. Tears spring to my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall.
“You would have been all set, Nikole, but now you're used goods.”
“Excuse me?”
“Did you think that I wouldn’t find out what you’ve been up to?” he asks, grabbing my left hand. “Shacking up with that ???????? What were you thinking? I did everything I could to keep you useful. You just had to ruin it. You should have stayed pure for the man I gave you to,” Dad says, calling Anatoli a bastard. He is angrier than I’ve ever seen him. Even when he was talking to Rico, he was calm, cool, and collected.
“Who said I was pure before I met him?” I ask, jerking my hand away from him. All that does is earn me another slap.
“?????. Filthy little whore,” he shouts; the slaps keep coming until my face feels like he took a match to it.
“Calm down, Igor. I won’t marry her, but she can work at one of my clubs. Since she likes to be free with her body, The Gentleman’s Secret seems like a good place to start,” Sasha says, making me cringe. The Gentleman’s Secret is a gross strip club by the interstate in New Jersey.
“Fuck you, you piece of shit,” I shout at him. “X?????. Cocksucker,” I scream. “??????.” I continue to scream, calling him an asshole and anything else my mind can conjure.
“You can call me names till you’re blue in the face, little bitch. I’ll break you before it’s over. You’ll wish you were never born,” Sasha says, getting right in my face.
“Is that what you want for your daughter, Dad?” I ask.
“It’s not what I would have chosen for you, but you made your bed. Now you’ll lie in it,” he says coldly.
Oh, God! For the first time, I’m actually scared. I thought I’d be able to get away eventually, but now I know I won’t. My first thought is of Anatoli. Will I ever see him again? He doesn’t even know where I am. What about Kat? I have never felt so alone before. With nothing to be done, I let the tears fall now.
“Take care of that,” Sasha says, and a needle is jammed in my arm. I struggle against the cable ties, my wrists starting to bleed. Whatever I was given is working quickly.
The last thing I hear before everything goes dark is dueling bouts of cruel laughter.
Chapter Eleven
Anatoli
It has been hours of calling her with no answer. She never made it to the store with the girls. It has been radio silence, and I am losing my mind. I am conjuring the worst-case scenarios imaginable, and it is not helping to calm me. I keep going back to the revelation the guys laid on me. How did I miss it? How did I not see what she was keeping from me? Bratva. Kerkin. I mean, what the fuck! Her ‘old guy’ comment now makes sense, and I need to hit someone. No fuck that. I want to kill someone.
“Anatoli. Yo. Anatoli.” The muffled voices of the Jorgensen’s pierce the fog of my mind.
“What?”
“I was asking you if she is tagged?” The question, relevant but pisses me off because of the answer.
“No. I was going to send her ring away this weekend. She kept so much from me that I didn’t feel the urgency. I failed her,” I say, giving myself a moment to feel pity.
“Hey. We don’t have time for that, Babichev. We need a plan for finding her.” I know he is correct, but all the ways this could have been prevented are weighing on me.
“We don’t have anything to work with. Do we even know where they could be hiding right now?” I look around the room, hoping someone has something for me?
“I was thinking about that.” Tori starts. “Given how much time it has been since you last spoke with her and how small the town is, they couldn't have gotten far. I think we should start here and work our way out. There are only a handful of places they could be stashing her, and out of that handful, we own eighty percent of them. So, that leaves one abandoned warehouse in Minnesota and an abandoned hotel. I say we try the warehouse first.” The consensus in the room is in agreement.
