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12
CATERINA
The ride to our destination is a long one.
We’re crammed into a van, all of us pushed to one side of it while Alexei’s soldiers, all of them armed, sit and crouch on the other side, watching us with predatory gazes. “It’s a shame he’s got plans for all of them,” one man mutters. “I’d like a taste. Especially the blonde.”
“I like the redhead, myself,” another says, motioning towards Sasha, who squirms backward with frightened eyes.
“TheUssuri’swife has claws,” the man on the far left says with a smirk. “I’d like to get my cock up her. I like them feisty. Plus, what a fuck you to the boss, eh? Fucking his wife. We should all pass her around if Alexei wouldn’t lop our balls off for it.”
“What about the Italian slut?”
“I don’t like pregnant bitches. Creeps me the fuck out.”
I ignore them. They can’t touch us, Alexei would do worse than kill them, and they know it. This is one moment where Alexei’s cruelty will work in our favor. Instead of gratifying them with a reaction, I focus on calming the others. Sofia is pale but remarkably calm—or maybe just in shock—so I turn towards where Sasha is huddled next to Anika and Yelena; Ana still passed out next to her.
“I’m scared,” Yelena whimpers, her face swollen from crying and her nose red. “They killed Olga, Cat, they killed her—”
“I know, baby. I know.” My chest tightens with grief as I reach for Yelena, gathering her into my arms along with Anika. Anika is starting to come back to her senses, but she doesn’t fight me. Instead, she curls into my embrace along with Yelena. Under other circumstances, my heart would have swelled with happiness to have Anika be so sweet and trusting with me.
But all I can feel is barely controlled terror. Alexei is worse than I thought, tipped over the edge from merely being a traitor to having become a power-hungry madman. What he has planned for us—for each of us—is terrible, but what he has planned for Anika and Yelena is worse than that. And I won’t let it happen.
I don’t know how I’m going to stop it, though. I can pacify him for a little while, keep him occupied so that he doesn’t have time to hurt anyone else. But unless Viktor and the others find us quickly, it might not be enough time to make a difference. Alexei isn’t going to bide his time for long. He can’t possibly believe that Viktor will slink off into the distance with his tail between his legs when Alexei has just kidnapped his wife and children, along with two women under his protection and his ally’s wife and unborn child.
I meant it when I told Viktor that I believed he would come for us. I just don’t know how long we have.
“I’m scared,” Yelena cries again, dissolving into sobs, and I clutch her to my chest, muffling them as best as I can so as not to piss off our guards. Even beyond the fear, I’m seething with anger and hatred like nothing I’ve ever felt before for Alexei and everyone who’s helped him. It’s one thing to kidnap and brutalize adult women. Still, I know that Anika and Yelena will bear the emotional and mental scars from this for the rest of their lives. The trauma they’ve endured just in the past hour is unthinkable.
If they make it that long.The thought creeps in, but I shake it away just as quickly. I won’t let myself think that for even a moment. I won’t allow myself to consider a possibility where, at the very least, Viktor’s daughters aren’t rescued.
I’ll do anything it takes to save them. No matter what it costs me.
I glance towards Sasha, still holding Yelena and alternating between stroking her hair comfortingly and Anika’s. “Are you alright?” I ask quietly, and she swallows hard, her chin trembling as she fights not to cry. Her mouth is swollen, her face bruised, and her arms are wrapped over her chest, trying to hold her shirt in place so that the guards can’t see her breasts.
“No,” she whispers. “But what the hell am I supposed to do about it?”
Her honesty is startling. My heart aches for her because she’s been through so much already. “We’re going to be okay,” I whisper back, and Sasha smiles sadly at me.
“I don’t know about that, Mrs. Andreyva. But we’ll hang in there as long as we can. They’re the most important thing.” She nods at Anika and Yelena. “As long as they’re safe, it doesn’t matter what else happens.”
“I don’t know what they’re going to do to me,” Sofia murmurs through her pressed-together, pale lips. “My baby—”
“I’m going to keep you all safe,” I whisper fiercely. “I promise. I’ll distract Alexei as long as I can—”
“It won’t be enough.” Sasha is pale, too, her hands trembling where she’s clutching her shirt. “You don’t know men like him, Mrs. Andreyva. Your husband is one of them, but even he’s not so evil.”
I’m taken aback briefly at that.Your husband is one of them.I know that, of course. It’s why the rift between Viktor and I is so deep, still not healed even after those last few minutes between us. I didn’t want to leave him with so much hurt, didn’t want our last conversation to be the stilted, angry ones we’ve had over the past weeks. But it’s not magically better. And even if he rescues us, nothing will change if he doesn’t.
There will still be an impassable, impossible gulf between us. But in this moment, I’d give anything just to be back home, even if it means living alongside my sometimes cruel, distant husband without the love or pleasure that I’d so briefly hoped for.
The last night we spent together seems so far away now that I could almost think I dreamed it. It feels like nothing but a fantasy now, like I can’t even be quite sure that it happened. Here in the cramped, cold van, jostling between Sofia and Sasha with my stepdaughters in my arms, armed men watching us like hawks, that warm, firelit night feels like something out of a movie. Something I made up.
He’ll come for us.I tell myself over and over as I glance towards Sofia. Viktor won’t let Alexei win, for his pride if nothing else, but I know that it’s more than that. I don’t know what there is between us, exactly. He’d wanted to say something to me before Alexei dragged me away, but I hadn’t let him, for more reasons than one.
If he’d been going to say what I think he was, that wasn’t how I wanted to hear it. Not there, not like that, not in front of Alexei as my friends were being hauled off to be sold as sex slaves, with me headed directly after them. Not with only seconds left before we might never see each other again.
More than that—I want him to be sure.Iwant to be sure. And if either of us are ever going to say those words to each other, I want it to be when I don’t have to tell him,I love you, but—
