Then I saw the van, with the door already open.
A bag came down over my head.
I felt myself being lifted inside, then shoved down against the van’s floor. Hands wrenched my wrists behind my back.
I screamed “Luka!” and I thought I heard him shout my name in response.
Something hard surrounded my wrists and pulled tight. A second later, another one tightened around my ankles. Then a hard circle of metal pressed against my cheek through the bag. The barrel of a gun.
I stopped screaming.
The van’s suspension sunk as Luka’s muscled body landed next to mine. I heard him kicking and thrashing as they tried to secure him.
“Stop struggling,” said a voice in Russian. “Or we kill your little bitch.”
Luka went still.
And the van sped off.
I don’t know how long we drove for. My heart was hammering so fast that I thought I was having a heart attack. The bag over my face meant I couldn’t breathe properly and someone was still pushing a gun into my cheek.
Then I felt something against my hand. A big, strong finger rubbing against my thumb. Luka had stretched out his bound hands to meet mine. I grabbed his finger and clung to it with all my strength.
Minutes or hours later, I was hauled out and thrown to the floor. I cried out as my shoulder hit concrete. Luka landed with a grunt next to me.
I was pulled up to an awkward sitting position and the bag was pulled off my head.
Darkness. The person who’d pulled off the bag stepped back into the shadows and disappeared, leaving Luka and I alone. A lone light overhead cast a pool of light around us.
“Are you okay?” asked Luka.
I nodded breathlessly.
“No,” said a voice from the darkness. He spoke English, but with a strong Russian accent. “She’s not. Because she’s with you.”
From the echo, the room was vast. A warehouse, maybe. I searched the darkness for any sign of the man who’d spoken, but there was just blackness.
Then a single point of light exploded, glaringly bright. A match. A second later, a cigarette tip glowed orange.
He walked towards us out of the shadows. A short man in a cheap gray suit. I’d never seen him before, but his piggish eyes reminded me of his son’s.
“Hello, Arianna,” said Olaf Ralavich.
I twisted away from him, trying to get closer to Luka. He laughed and squatted down near our bound feet. I knew he was the equivalent of Vasiliy and must be about the same age. But time hadn’t been so kind to the head of the Ralavich family. Where Vasiliy had maintained his muscles, Olaf was flabby. And where Vasiliy radiated a kind of cold, calculated charm, Olaf was all swagger and brutish violence. A thug, not a criminal.
And he was staring right at me with those dark little deep-set eyes.
“So you’re the one who saved my son,” he said to me. His English surprised me—it was at least the equal of Vasiliy’s or Luka’s. But he spoke with a sneer I couldn’t imagine either of them using. Vasiliy might have hated me—maybe still did—but he’d never sounded like this. Olaf spoke as if I was a lower species, as if all women were.
He turned to Luka. “I heard you were letting some blyadischa order you around,” he said, glancing at me as he casually called me a whore. “But I didn’t believe it until now. What is it she’s got between her legs, Luka, that gives her such power? Shall we see?”#p#分页标题#e#
Luka kicked out viciously, but Olaf dodged it easily, laughing. My blood ran cold. We were all alone here, tied up and powerless. Easy targets for whatever Olaf and his men wanted to do to us.
Olaf walked around to our heads and squatted down again. “My son is still in the hospital. They may not be able to fix his face. Only the whores will want to fuck him, now.”
“He was chaining up women,” said Luka in a low growl. Even bound on the floor, he managed to exude menace. If he was scared, he didn’t show it. “Letting men pay to rape them. I should have killed him.”
“If you had,” said Olaf mildly, “I would have killed you already. But since you just made him suffer, I’ll just make you suffer. I’m going to teach you a lesson, Luka. About how you and your father can’t just steal our business.”
Shit! This wasn’t just about Luka beating Olaf’s son. This was about the gun deal. But how did they even know about that? I stared at Luka, terrified. Now they’d beat him, right in front of me.
Two men stepped out of the shadows and grabbed Luka’s shoulders, then hauled him up to his knees. He struggled, but they knelt behind him, their knees grinding painfully into the backs of his legs, pinning him there. Then they wound their fingers into his hair so that his head was held still.