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Still, I was used to being tied up, and I was beyond accustomed to wriggling around when restrained, but I didn’t dare until I knew where we were.
Behind my closed eyes, something changed—it went from a darker light to a more intense kind. The traffic noises shifted too.
Staying as still as possible, I allowed my eyes to open into slits. Peering through the one that wasn’t covered by the tarp, mostly, I saw streetlights, and I had to slither my eyelids into slits because the bright glare tore my retinas into shreds, burning them as if it were an acid.
My ears picked up some of the slack, and the amount of traffic made me think…
Were we crossing a bridge?
My woozy mind tried to imagine a map from Jersey to Manhattan, but it’d make no sense to drive us straight through Five Points’ territory.
Maybe Mid Island?
My anxiety wouldn’t let me rest. It became imperative that I figure out where the hell I was.
Expansion joints—the truck rattled every time we crossed one. We were definitely on a bridge.
Struggling to find a sign, I squinted and strained, finally seeing one for ‘Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge - Staten Island.’
So, hehadtaken us through Mid Island. Wewerein Brooklyn.
Russian territory.
But the Russians were our allies.
Amid the chaos of information plaguing my brain, I recognized that it was the current Pakhan who was an ally, and that he was having trouble holding onto his throne. That was… My mind struggled to remember the name of the Five Pointer who was involved with the Russians.
Conceding defeat, I asked myself if a pretender to the Bratva leadership would trigger a war with the Irish?
Wasn’t that an insane move to make?
The Irish had cleaned up after the Italians and Russians went to war. The Five Points had never been this powerful. A declaration of war against the Irish was like requesting,nicely, to get a bullet between the eyes.
I heard a beep which set my nerves on edge.
Then I realized it was the toll.
We were getting off the bridge.
I spent the next twenty minutes trying not to puke from the pain in my head, but the ache was only compounded once I started to panic as I felt the vehicle slow down. I tilted my head more as we turned, using that as an excuse for movement.
The migraine from Hades made my vision dance, but when I caught a sight of the bulge a few feet from me, I felt like weeping.
Aidan.
It had to be.
He wasn’t moving.
Oh, God.
Tears pricked my eyes again, but I couldn’t let them fall.
For years, I’d studied the moves the mafia pulled. There had to be some advantage to that.
They weren’t like serial killers, where stopping them from moving you to an alternate location was imperative. With them, it was about information. That meant torture. That meant they’d want us awake, so pretending to be unconscious was the way forward.
The vehicle—from the size of the cargo bed where we were lying, I figured we were in a covered pickup truck—slowed and the texture of the road changed.
