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“Don’t have time to fucking tease the information out of you,” Huck reminded me.
“How many guns we got on us?” I asked, glancing over toward Seeley, who’d been in charge of that.
“Plenty,” he said.
“For what?” Huck asked.
“Che, take the next left. Then a right. Then keep going until you see a big gray mansion.”
“And who lives there?” Huck asked.
“The Bratva.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Maeve
I was going to have to tell Triss that getting kidnapped wasn’t as romantic as it seemed in her soaps. All the fear and uncertainty, and then the big, strong hero magically shows up to save her.
I mean, I wasn’t bashing Donovan. I absolutely believed that if he had any idea who my kidnapper was, that he would totally be the heroic knight in shining armor, rushing in to save me.
But the guys from the club had been looking for this person since Donovan had been hit, and they clearly didn’t have any leads if they were doing meetings with people to, I imagined, fish for more information.
It wasn’t their fault.
They were running around, chasing leads with faulty information.
About the kidnapper being, as the statistics would tell them, a man.
I mean, save for women who kidnapped children, when have you ever heard of one taking other adults?
I certainly never had.
Maybe it was simply because there were certain physical limitations. I mean, I was as pro-woman as you could be. We really could do everything men could. But most of us were just smaller. You know, genetically. Shorter. Thinner. Not as muscular. Sure, there were exceptions, and maybe those women would be the real trailblazers in the female kidnapper racket. But as a whole, it was harder for women to wrestle around other women. And definitely more difficult to wrangle a grown man into a trunk.
I could hope that Alaric had seen, that he could relay that information.
But, clearly, my kidnapper wasn’t the one who’d been shot. Which meant it was most likely Alaric.
Sweet, vain, yet insecure, Alaric.
No.
Nope.
I wasn’t going to let my mind go there.
I wasn’t going to mourn a man who might very well still be alive.
But, yeah, Triss was insane for wanting this.
Because it wasn’t all dramatic music and inserted footage of the hero jumping in his car to come save you.
All there was were the sounds of traffic, and the nauseating speed the car was traveling at, the stomach-dropping sensation when it took a corner at said speeds, and, of course, the drumming of my own heart, the way the heat of the trunk was making sweat pour down my face, chest, and back.
I wasn’t bound, but I was using my arms and legs to brace against the sides of the trunk, so I wasn’t rolling and slamming into things.
Turning my head, I tried to wipe my sweaty forehead on the shoulder of my tee. But it was quickly replaced with new perspiration as I tried to fight back my panic and focus.
I knew what I was supposed to be doing.
Reaching for the release latch. Every car had one. Except, of course, this one.
Because, apparently, that kind of thing could be modified. And maybe this unknown woman made a habit of kidnapping people.
Anything was possible.
The next best thing was to try to kick out a taillight, then stick my hand out of it.
Except there was something blocking the access.
This woman, whoever she was, had thought of everything.
I guess it was easier, as a woman, to do this sort of work. Since we were taught from the earliest age how to escape a trunk during a kidnapping. Things I was relatively sure my male counterparts of the same age were not taught. Not that boys didn’t get kidnapped, but it just happened to girls more frequently.
And if she thought of the pull and the lights, I knew she thought of making it so the back seat didn’t push in into the cab.
But I tried anyway.
I even tried to scurry into a corner and pull up the carpet, looking for a tire iron.
No luck.
Hope, an infinitesimally small balloon, deflated in my chest.
I had nothing left to do but wait.
Then, I don’t know, I guess I could try to overpower her.
I wasn’t exactly a confrontational person, but fear tended to make me a little, well, testy. Which made me ballsier.
I’d once been certain I was being followed when I was walking down the street toward my car one night. And I’d let the fear wrap around me for a while before, suddenly, I was turning, facing the man, and demanding loudly to know ‘why the fuck are you following me?’
It actually turned out he wasn’t. And I’d been mortified. But at least it did tell me that, when the chips were down, I could muster some divine feminine rage, and blast it in the direction of who made me scared.
That was something.
