Chapter 14
Anya
Every time that Nikolai looks back at me over his shoulder, I make a point to look out the window.
I’m freezing, trying not to shake myself apart. I’m starving, and exhausted. They could have at least been decent enough to scoop up my soft, comfy blankets with me while they were abducting me. This is just sadistic treatment. Clearly.
Every time Ilook out of the window, I want to hurl. I am not great with heights. I can deal with it most of the time as long as I don”t look down, but it”s ruining the experience for me. I enjoy traveling; it”s just getting from one place to another that sometimes causes me problems. Boats I am good with.Nikolai must have a yacht somewhere. Maybe if he had kidnapped me and taken me to a yacht, I wouldn”t be having so many issues now. I try to watch the clouds we’re flying through. The white fluff decorates the sky as we move through it, and the helicopter jostles. It’s too loud to properly space out though, but I try.
He and the large, scarred man sitting next to him are speaking in those strange strings of words and codes that only make sense to other pilots. I don’t try to follow along or attempt to understand what they might actually mean. I’m making a very dramatic show of pouting. Excessively.
The helicopter hits a bumpy patch of air, the turbulence rocking the thing before we start to slow, then descend. Only then do I look out the window, just for a moment. The sight of the ground rushing up to greet us makes my stomach flop uncomfortably and I clamp my hands over my mouth to keep from vomiting. We’re above what looks like an airplane hangar.
A sleek-looking gray plane is waiting, the door open and a small carpet is already laid out, leading up toward the stairs. Men in black suits move around the tarmac, and something I can’t see very well is being loaded into the cargo bay of the private plane. There’s some sort of emblem or crest on the wings and tail of the plane, but I don’t look at it long enough to really see what it is. No doubt it’s a bear or something hyper-masculine that Nikolai puts on everything to feel more like a man.
I don’t move when the helicopter lands. I plan to kick Nikolai the moment he comes within range. He pulls off his headset and then hops out of the plane. Something is unloaded from the back of the helicopter and onto a cart to be loaded on the plane. I can’t let him think that I’m too interested.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him speaking to the pilot. Suddenly, he rips my door open. He dodges my legs, he isn’t even looking at me, all the while speaking over his shoulder to the other people. He undoes the belt and throws me up and over his shoulder like I’m nothing more than luggage to him.
I thrash, scream, spew each and every profanity that I’ve ever learned in my entire life at him, but it’s like he doesn’t even hear me. Nikolai carries me over the tarmac and onto the private plane where people are moving about quickly. I only stop screaming because I’m being noisy.
He plops me into one of the bucket chairs and fastens the seatbelt over my lap and leaves my hands bound. I try to stand, but the belt digs into my hips. The chances of me breaking out of this is very slim. I don’t want to be too obvious with the fact that I know what they are saying, so I keep pretending to break out of my chair.
We’re leaving the country.
They are speaking so quickly and I am rustier in my Russian than I would like. The slang of the men in the black suits is faster and not something that I’m overly familiar with. I hear Moscow and then they start talking about the clubs that they want to go to when we touch back down. Then, they start talking about the things that they want to do when they are in said clubs with any woman that they can get to touch their dicks. I don’t like them.
I refrain from curling my lip up in obvious disgust but it’s not easy.
The door closes and the only stewardess starts to do some sort of pre-flight check. Nikolai has a glass of clear liquid in his hands that I presume to be vodka, garnished with a pickle as he finally moves into the seat next to me. He winks by way of greeting and makes a show of looking me over, my hair a mess, still in my sleepwear with his love bites on my neck.
“How did you sleep?” he asks finally. I roll my eyes and slouch further in my seat. My stomach growls. “You looked so peaceful I almost considered leaving you there, but after last night, I could hardly be away from you.”
I don’t want to look at him or answer him. I certainly don’t want to be thinking about the fact there is likely a bedroom just to the back of this plane—partitions blocking off each section we could easily hide behind should he choose it.
“You should be thanking me for allowing you to sleep at all.” Nikolai rests his elbows on his knees while he leans forward toward me. Our knees almost touch, there is hardly more than an inch of space between us. He smirks at my obstinate silence and pulls the pickle from his vodka. My stomach gurgles. I wish he didn’t hear it. “Hungry?” he grins slowly, knowing that I can’t deny it. I don’t answer, but that’s about all I can do.
I can see him lifting the pickle garnish toward me suggestively, just as one of his men calls to him from the front. Nikolai sighs and eats the pickle himself.
“Don’t move,” he teases.
If I could flip him off and get away with it, I would. He disappears into the forward section, but not before snapping at one of his men to get me something to eat. Hopefully, it will be something like the breakfast spread that Ivan got for me yesterday. Actually, I haven’t seen Ivan at all today. I wonder where he is. I had thought that he was Nikolai’s right-hand man, or at the very least my personal protector. Now I’m not so sure.
The man in the black suit comes over to me with a tray full of food, some sort of sandwich selection, and a small side salad covered in cellophane wrapping. There is a selection of juices in clear glasses covered with an opaque wrap to keep them fresh, what looks like pesto pasta, and a few other odds and ends. I want to eat all of it. I lift my bound hands to the man in front of me and he looks at me like I’m stupid for thinking that he will let me free. He scoffs and shakes his head.
“How am I supposed to eat?”
The man tilts his head to the side, eyeing me like I’m lunch instead of what’s on my plate. Until this very moment, I hadn’t felt apprehensive about the way that I’m dressed at all. I press my knees together and sit up a little taller. His gaze is predatory, he leers at me with his blue eyes.
He’s balding, his neck so thick it’s a wonder that he can turn his head at all. I know what that look means. I glance in the direction Nikolai went, as if he will come and stop this somehow. I have no doubts that his men aren’t allowed to touch me. They can’t. Right?
“No hands.” The man grunts at me. “Eat with your face, like dog,” he sneers at me, his eyes drop to my legs, and I try to turn away from him. “That is what bitches do.”
I whip my head around. “What did you just say to me?!” I spit on him, right below his eye. He wipes the saliva from his face slowly, and then grabs my chin firmly, and wrenches it toward him. “Bitches are only good for two things: fucking, and looking pretty.” He pulls closer, I can smell his sour breath. “You are not that pretty, so you are only good for fucking then.”
My heart starts to hammer in my chest, adrenaline pulses, and I kick at the arrogant prick. I think I connect with his shin or some other solid part of his leg. He grunts as if only slightly discomforted before I see his giant hand rear back.
“Bitches need to be properly broken,” he grinds out between clenched teeth.
This is it. This is the moment that he knocks my head clear from my shoulders. I’ve never really, truly been hit before, other than the spanking Nikolai gave me the other day. I recoil as soon as his hand goes up, flinching back down into my seat and scrunching my eyes shut, bracing myself for whatever is about to come. Only it doesn’t.
I hear a slap of skin and I peel one eye open to see Nikolai’s hand wrapped firmly around the man’s wrist. He is a good three inches taller than Nikolai’s hulking frame, probably weights at least fifty pounds more than him but under the sheer look of cold rage that Nikolai trains on him, the giant balding man shrinks.
This is not the man who fucked me immobile last night.
This is the mafia boss who kidnapped me.
This man is terrifying.
I’ve never been more aroused by anything in my life. Ever.
Nikolai squeezes the man’s wrist until his fist closes involuntarily and he starts to crumple in the direction of that arm. I swear it looks like Nikolai could rip his hand clean off of his body because he dared to raise a hand to me. Nikolai twists the man”s large arm behind his back so quickly that I think he dislocates it, because I hear something crack loudly and the balding man grunts in pain. He”s clearly trying to be macho about it, but something in his eyes tells me he”s almost as scared as I am right now. He makes no attempt to fight back. He is led to the door, and for a brief moment, I believe Nikolai is about to depressurize the cabin and kill us all so that he can send this man plummeting to his death.
Nikolai shoves his head against the tiny circular window, pulls it back, and slams it into the window again.
“Prosti!” The man says, loudly, three times in a row. He’s apologizing, surrendering.
Nikolai places his hand against the back of the man’s skull with a snarl. “Had you not been so loyal to me thus far Piotyr, I would bash your head in against this very door for daring to raise a hand to what is mine.”
The bald man closes his eyes and starts to mutter a Russian prayer under his breath. He is prepared to die for losing his temper. I guess he really misread the situation.
Nikolai grabs the hand that is twisted behind the man’s back, and breaks his index finger with a snap that settles deep in my bones. “To make sure that you do not make such a stupid mistake again.”
Nikolai”s other men are also watching the scene unfold as he breaks a second finger,and a third—I”m going to be sick.
He’s sending a very clear message. Nikolai releases Piotyr and he slumps to the ground, cradling his useless hand, not even attempting to stand. Lines of sweat are running down his forehead and I can hardly imagine the amount of pain he must be in, sitting there with his hand mangled. Nikolai just mutilated his own man in front of me, and doesn’t seem phased by it.
Is that the way that he had planned to hurt me? He certainly threatened to, often enough. Is that what he meant all those times? That was one of his own men, loyal to him. I am nobody. I’m the daughter of a man that is his enemy, one that he wants to hurt. He would likely do a hell of a lot worse to me in a lot more intimate ways if I cross him.
Slowly, silently, I pull my legs up onto the chair with me, trying to make myself smaller so that he doesn’t look at me. I don’t want his attention to shift back to me right now, or ever. I just want to go back to bed. I can be his prisoner in the room. I’ll behave back there. Having seen him like this, I don’t want to go to Moscow. It’s never been a place that I wanted to go.
“If any of you assholes get the wrong idea about touching what belongs to me, I will not be lenient a second time.”
The men all answer with nods and ‘Yes, sir’s’ before resuming their posts like nothing happened. Like there isn’t a mangled man right now, suffering.
Then he turns back to me.
I’m frozen to the spot. Each step he takes toward me I try to fold myself smaller and smaller, to become one with the chair or invisible somehow. Of course, that is too much to ask. I flinch as he lifts his hand to touch my face. With a sharp inhale, my entire body jerks away. He doesn”t push it for some reason. He reaches for my bound hands, slower this time, and frees one of them without ever touching my skin. To keep me restrained, he straps one hand to the chair soI can eat with the other. He takes a small wrapped silverware set from his breast pocket and places it on the tray in front of me. He doesn”t try to touch me again. He simply nods and returns to the seat across from me andpours himself another glass of vodka while watching me.
“Anya, you have my word that no one but me shall touch you.”
I want to tell him that’s exactly what I’m afraid of.