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Finally, we stopped, the tires screeching, and I was roughly dragged out of the back of the van. I was thrown over someone's shoulder and carried up a flight of stairs. In all the confusion, I tried to take note of the smells and sounds of my location in case I survived and was questioned by police. I hoped I would survive. Even that thought sent my pulse racing, so I shut it down. I shut off my worry and just went with what was happening, not trying to second guess or predict what they would do to me.
When I was finally thrown down onto a sofa and my blindfold taken off, I found myself in a large warehouse, the walls brick, the ceiling lined with ductwork, and the floors hardwood. The place looked like it was used for storage, and there was plastic sheeting hanging, like the place was being renovated.
A man came to where I lay, and I glanced up at him in fear.
Sergei Romanov.
I recognized him from news reports of his crime family and he'd been to Spencer's memorial service. His beefy face was bearded and he wore his longish dark hair slicked back. A large gold chain hung around his neck. He wore a cream sweater and dark jeans, and looked to be in his forties with a touch of grey in his hair.
"What am I going to do with you?"
His voice, rough-sound
ing, had a thick Russian accent.
"What do you want?"
"I want Hunter. That's what I want."
"He's in jail."
"Not anymore."
That made my heart rate increase. "He was let out?"
I heard the man snicker.
"So, what will I do with you? You're a pretty thing, and Hunter needs to be taught a lesson."
Adrenaline surged through me, and I wondered what that meant. Would they kill me to punish Hunter?
There was nothing I could say.
"Please don't hurt me."
"Leave," he said to someone else behind me.
I tensed when I heard footsteps and a door close. Then silence.
Sergei walked over to where I lay. The look in his eyes said everything I needed to know. When he grabbed his belt and began to unfasten it, I closed my eyes and tried to shut off.
Shut everything off.
Chapter 8
Hunter
My stay in the local jail in Alexandria was turning out to be much more difficult than I anticipated. I'd been in so many bad places in my life that one might think I’d be inured to the local lockup, but I wasn’t.
I'd been in dozens of hellholes around the world: bullet-ridden mud-brick houses in Basra, half-destroyed palace rooms in Baghdad, two-bit fleabag hotels in Amman, flop houses in Syria, opium dens and dens of iniquity in Indonesia, straw huts in far-flung war torn tin-pot dictatorships in Africa.
Timbuktu, for fuck's sake.
I'd been used to being busy from the start of the day to the end, and being in cells meant an endless monotony from which I could not escape. It reminded me of when I was in Afghanistan – the long calm before a battle, when I'd lie under our armored vehicle and wait for the fighting to begin. We hated that wait because we knew a battle would come eventually, and would rather get it over and go back to base than sit in the darkness and wait. It was better to be doing rather than waiting. Battle was scary as hell, but it was also an adrenaline rush.
So the cells were tame compared to what I'd seen while deployed.
From the time I was a child, I was either fighting in the ring or active in sports. After I joined up, I spent a tour of duty in the hellhole that was the Persian Gulf during the rise of the ISIS insurgency, patrolling the streets of Fallujah, calling in air strikes, clearing streets house by house, protecting civilization from the scourge of terrorism by capturing and killing bad guys.
