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I’m on land. I’m in Russia.
Through my fuzzy brain, I try to think back to the last thing I can remember, but all I feel is pain—literally. My left shoulder feels as though red-hot pokers have pierced it, and my whole body aches.
With the slowest of movements, I gradually open my eyes, blinking rapidly to clear my blurred vision. It takes a few seconds, but when I eventually focus, I can’t deny my surroundings are quite a sight.
I’m clearly in a bedroom, but this room looks like it once belonged to royalty.
A gold wallpaper ingrained with blue and gold flowers covers the walls. The high ceiling is domed, I think, and covered with the same wallpaper. The wooden furniture has red velvet cushioning. Thick silk drapes the king-size bed I’m lying in, and the color scheme matches the wallpaper.
Regardless of all the gleam in this lavish and comfortable place, it’s still a prison—just with shinier bars.
I try to sit up, but my head spins, and I groan, falling back down onto the pillow and rubbing my brow. When the door opens, and a young woman enters with a jug of water, I can’t help but shrink back. “W-who are you?” It takes me two attempts to speak, but she understands me perfectly fine.
“Oh, you’re awake?” She has a definite French accent.
“Where am I?” My voice sounds like I gargled glass, and that pitcher she holds suddenly has me wetting my very dry lips.
She closes the door gently and walks over to the bed. “You’re in Russia. At Aleksei’s home,” she explains, reaching for a glass on the bedside table and pouring me some water.
Even though she confirmed what I already knew to be true, my stomach still turns at the thought.
“My name is Sara.” She passes me the water, and I am far too thirsty to care if it’s drugged or not. I reach for it and tip back my head to drink it all down. It gurgles in my empty belly.
“How many days have I been here?”
“Two.”
My exhausted brain attempts to do the math. Remembering Saint said we were roughly three days away from Russia, that means I’ve been unconscious for five days.
What the hell happened?
“Where is the man I arrived with? Saint,” I ask, hoping she knows who I’m talking about. But more importantly, hoping I did, in fact, arrive with him in tow.
When she averts her gaze, I sit up, ignoring the pain shooting straight through me. The blankets pool around my waist, allowing me to see I’m in a white nightgown. I can also see a bandage poking out of the collar where my shoulder is strapped.
Memories crash into me, followed by a deafening BOOM! Instinctively, I reach for my shoulder…the one Saint shot me in. My mouth pops open because the image of me being manhandled by Zoey before she was seconds away from blowing out my brains comes to life.
I would be dead by now if not for Saint’s bullet, which is ironic in every sense of the word. He shot to wound, not to kill. But I don’t understand why I’ve been out for five days. Unless Saint is playing down his gunshot wound to the shoulder, then something else caused me to be comatose for the past five days.
“I don’t know where he is,” Sara explains, placing the pitcher on the table.
“Has he come to see me?” I ask, but it’s in vain. I know the answer.
“No.”
“Why have I been unconscious? I don’t remember coming here.”
Sara frowns. “Aleksei, he made me do it.”
“Do what?” I ask slowly, sitting against the headboard.
“He told me that I was to keep you…comfortable.” Her pause has me guessing that means he did to me what I did to him.
He drugged me.
“I need to leave.” I’m about to throw the blankets off, ready to flee this prison once and for all, but Sara’s eyes widen, and she latches onto my forearm.
“Please, don’t! He will kill me,” she pleads, and I see the truth in her eyes.
