Chapter 28
Zoya~
I walked into my house, letting out a deep breath as I shut the door behind me. This was my last night of living here, and with all my stuff packed and ready to go, it was going to be nothing to move the few boxes that I had to Kasimir’s.
I felt exhausted.
So damn exhausted.
The only good thing about tonight was that I hadn’t had to work with Marcelle.
Once upon a time, I would have called to check on her when she’d called in sick, but that time was over.
After yesterday, it was clear that we were no longer any kind of cordial, and while it sucked, after everything that Kasimir had told me, maybe it was for the best.
Ready to take a shower, I made my way towards my bedroom, but two steps into the living room, I noticed that the kitchen light was on, and if my mother was still up this late, then that couldn’t be good.
Though she’d been avoiding me since our last fight, I’d told her that I would be out by tomorrow, so I could see her waiting up to try to talk me out of it.
After all, there was no way that she hadn’t done the math yet.
“Mom, are you still up?” I called as I walked towards the kitchen, but when I made it around the partition, white stars danced behind my eyes as something cracked the left side of my skull, knocking me to the ground.
My purse went flying across the kitchen floor, spilling the contents everywhere, but the pain radiating down the back of my head had me thinking of nothing but throwing up everywhere.
Desperately, I sat up, then scrambled my way towards the refrigerator, my back pressed up against the cool surface.
When I finally looked up to see what in the hell was going on, I saw my mother tied to a chair, duct tape across her mouth, and her eyes looked wild, the puffiness and redness flooded with tears.
Once I got past my mother strapped to the chair, I saw one man standing behind her, and he was dressed completely in black, a matching ski mask over his head. On the other side of the table, there was a second man, dressed exactly the same, a ski mask covering his face as well.
Pain still radiated across my skull, but I knew that I needed to pull it together.
If this was a burglary, they couldn’t have picked a more wrong house.
My mother and I had nothing, and anyone with a pair of working eyes could see that.
Not to mention that this neighborhood was barely middle-class, there were no secret fortunes hidden in any of the houses on this street.
“What...what do you want?” I asked when I could finally speak without the threat of vomiting.
The guy who hit me walked over to me, then dropped on his haunches. “What do you think?” he asked. “There’s only one reason to break into someone’s house.”
“We don’t have...have any money,” I rushed out. “I mean, just look around...you can see that we don’t have anything worth taking.”
“Ah, but that’s not true, is it?” he sing-songed.
“What...what are you talking about? We...we don’t have any money,” I repeated.
The backhand to my face was hard enough to knock me over, and it was a good thing that I hadn’t been standing up. Pain shot across my left eye, and I could hear my mother’s muffled screams somewhere in the background, but I needed to stay focused on what I could control right now.
I let out a yelp as he grabbed my hair, then yanked me back up into a sitting position, but he made sure to slam my head against the refrigerator door before letting go. If he was trying to prove that he was serious, he didn’t have to; I believed him.
“I’m not here for jewels or paintings, darling,” he said. “I’m here for the three-hundred-thousand dollars that you have hidden somewhere, because I know that it wasn’t deposited into your bank account like a good law-abiding citizen.”
Oh, God.
While everyone at the auction knew how much Kasimir had paid for me, they’d all known me as Montana Hughes, not Zoya Kuzmin.
Besides Kasimir, Marcelle had been the only person to know who I really was that night, and as much as it turned my stomach to accept, these two guys could only know who I was and where I lived from her.
I hadn’t told anyone else about the auction, and I certainly hadn’t told my mother anything.
It also didn’t take a genius to figure it out after our argument yesterday.
Marcelle had been upset, and my mistake had been in not taking her greed seriously enough.
I had dismissed her, and now I was paying the price for it.
“I...I don’t have the money,” I said again, trying to get through the pain.
“You’re lying!” he yelled in my face before backhanding me again.
“I’m not!” I yelled back. “I...I haven’t got paid yet!”
Grabbing me by my hair again, he yanked me to my feet, but the blow to my stomach sent me back down to the floor, and I found myself gasping for air as the pain seized my entire torso.
Having never been in a fight before, every assault on my body was something new to me, and the pain was more than I would have ever expected.
A kick to my ribs was next as he said, “I know for a fact that everyone got paid that night.”
“I haven’t,” I wheezed, praying that he’d believe me.
Then, because he was twice my size, he lifted me to my feet, then tossed me across the room, my back hitting the wall before I crashed onto the floor, my shoulder screaming in pain as it took the brunt of my weight.
My mother was still screaming behind the tape, but she couldn’t help me any more than I could help her right now.
“Where’s the fucking money?” he hissed down at me. “I will not keep asking.”
“Maybe she needs to see us carve up her mother,” the second guy suggested, and it was enough to make my stomach begin to roll with genuine fear.
“Is that what we need to do?” the first guy asked. “Do we need to make an example out of your mother?”
“N...no,” I choked out.
“Then tell me where the fucking money is,” he ordered.
“I sw...swear...I haven’t gotten any money yet,” I insisted. “I haven’t been paid.”
My mother’s screams had my head rearing upward, and I watched in horror as blood dripped from the side of my mother’s face, shards of glass raining down over her, scattering around her feet. The second guy had grabbed an empty glass, then had slammed it against my mother’s head.
“Oh, God...” I cried. “Please...we don’t have any money.”
“Well, as you can see, we don’t believe you,” the first guy taunted.
“You can...you can check the entire house and see,” I begged. “You’ll see.”
“We have,” he replied, surprising me. “You think we’ve just been sitting here, having tea with your mother?”
“Then you know that we don’t have any money here,” I said, imploring with him to believe me.
“Which only tells me that you’re hiding it somewhere else,” he surmised, but he was so wrong.
“I haven’t gotten any money yet,” I repeated. “Please, you need to believe me.”
“Actually, I don’t need to believe anything that you say,” he replied coldly. “Especially, since I know everything about the auction.”
A crippling fear rose up to strangle my throat, and while I wasn’t an expert in situations like this, it wasn’t a good thing for him to be telling me so much.
If they were planning on leaving us alive, then they wouldn’t want to tell us anything that we could tell the police.
If they were planning on leaving us alive, then they’d do their best to make sure that we couldn’t identify them in any way.
So, the fact that he was telling me that he knew about the auction, knew about how much money I’d made, and just the fact that he knew who I really was...
these two men had no plans on letting us live once they got their hands on the money that I didn’t have.
No matter what, these two men were not going to let my mother and me live once it was all said and done.
Not caring that my mother was going to hear the truth about what I’d done, I said, “Then you know that it was Kasimir Korolev who bid on me.”
“And?”
“And since the auction was sponsored by the Korolevs, he didn’t have to pay,” I semi-lied. “He doesn’t have to pay if he doesn’t want to.”
“You’re lying!” he yelled again, and before I could assure him that I wasn’t, he had me by the hair again, but this time, he threw me into the living room, separating me from my mother.
“I’m...I’m not,” I cried out between gasps of pain.
The guy shook his head as he said, “I was hoping that we wouldn’t have to do this, but it looks like you’re giving me no choice.”
“What...what are you going...going to do?”
“I’m going to see just how much you love your mother,” he answered sinisterly, and that’s when I finally threw up all over the floor.