3. Hayat
CHAPTER THREE
hayat
I tried to wiggle my wrists free of the restraints. They were so tight, the cable ties were cutting into my skin. My fingers were numb, the blood having stopped circulating.
“Fucking asshole,” I seethed to the empty room. I could see a camera that looked like it was from the last century. Someone was watching. I could practically feel their gaze, making my skin itch.
Just like every other time I’d left the apartment without one of my rockers with me.
Despite the cold winter temperatures outside, the room I was being held captive in was hotter than the tropics. My hoodie clung to me, sweat soaking through my clothes, my hair glued to my face and neck.
“Dickless coward!” I yelled right at the recording device. “I fucking know you’re in there, you spineless weasel. Hiding behind your little monitor must make you feel like a big man, huh? What the fuck are you waiting on, those little blue pills to start working? Sorry to ruin it for you, but if they haven’t kicked in yet, not even pharmaceuticals can help your erectile dysfunction at this point, my dude. Let’s move this shit along already before the nerves in my hands are irreversibly damaged from lack of circulation.”
Probably not my smartest move, but I was on a roll lately with making stupid choices.
Not telling Ky, Sparks, or Jamie I was fairly sure I had a stalker?
Check.
Forgetting to get my birth control shot before and after the summer tour?
Double check.
Hiding my pregnancy symptoms from everyone?
Check all the fucking boxes on that one.
But back to the stalker bullshit…
I’d been standing in line, debating which one of the colorfully iced chocolate chip cookies Amala would like most, when some creep with his baseball cap pulled down low over his face had stepped into my personal space. Between the smells of all the different foods making the nausea worse and the daze I’d been living in since that damn pregnancy test had come back positive, I hadn’t been paying attention to the people around me. Stupid mistake. Before I could snap at him to back up a step, I’d felt the sharp bite of something metal shoved hard against my ribs.
“You scream, you’re dead,” a low, slightly accented voice threatened. “You cause a scene, I’ll kill you right here. Then I’ll find your little redheaded friend and kill her and the kid.”
Fear had squeezed my lungs tightly. Maybe I would have called his bluff if he hadn’t mentioned Abi and Amala. But as soon as he did, my vision got blurry. Nausea roiled in my belly, shooting a blazing trail of stomach acid into the back of my throat.
Stupid goddamn morning sickness.
“Turn off your phone,” he’d instructed, putting an arm around me so he could better hide the gun he had pressed painfully into my ribs. I could smell his cologne. Something smoky and masculine. Not the worst scent combination, but it immediately triggered another rush of acid.
Apparently being pregnant meant heartburn city. Not a fan. Why had no one told me about that part?
“Fuck off,” I hissed at him, my gaze shifting toward the bathrooms where Abi had disappeared five minutes before. Please don’t come back yet. Please don’t come back yet.
“Turn your phone off, chica .”
I didn’t move, my eyes locked on where Abi had disappeared with her mini-me earlier.
“Turn the fucking phone off, or no one in this place is going to make it home for Christmas. Do you want to be responsible for that? So many families losing loved ones mere days before the most joyous holiday of the year?” He tsked, the click of his tongue hitting the roof of his mouth triggering the urge to stab him with something. Anything. But all I had was my phone with my wallet clipped to the case and the two bags with presents.
After a quick internal debate on the pros and cons of testing the creep’s threat, I switched it to silent instead of powering it off, taking my time to make the motherfucker think I was complying with his demands.
“Good girl,” he praised, and I had to swallow the urge to vomit all over his shoes.
Yeah, that wasn’t sexy. When my men said it to me, I melted. Those same words from my apparently psychotic stalker? Disgusting.
“Now, without making a fuss, we’re going to walk together over to that trash can. Throw everything away.”
After another sharp jab of the gun into my ribs to nudge me into action, I walked with him practically glued to my side toward the nearest trash can. “Do you know what’s in this bag? It’s worth thousands. If you need cash, you can just take everything and sell it. Or I can find an ATM. There’s a daily withdrawal limit on my cards, but I can give you a few grand. Just don’t hurt anyone.”
He kept his chin lowered so I couldn’t make out much of his face. “Trash, now. Or I find the little girl.”
Scared and angry, I shoved the bags and my phone into the trash bin, shaking from the threat to my little mini. I had no idea who this idiot was, but I couldn’t wait for Sammy or Vaughn to slice and dice the sonofabitch.
My men were going to go ballistic when they found out I had been kidnapped. Jamie would lose his mind. Sparks would go dark. Ky would be lost. I swallowed a sob, refusing to think about what might happen if I didn’t make it back to them.
Abi.
Amala.
Fuck.
I closed my eyes. They would be fine. Vaughn had so many trackers on her, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them monitored her blood pressure and heart rate at all times. As soon as she started freaking out when she discovered I wasn’t waiting on her with the promised cookies, he would be alerted. Probably Sammy, too. All that mattered to me at that moment was that they were safe.
He walked me toward an exit sign on the opposite side of the bathrooms then down a flight of stairs down to the ground floor. All the way out to a nondescript car that was parked in a handicap space, I tried to keep my cool. And fight the freaking stomach acid playing chicken with my gag reflex. I didn’t make a sound, terrified he would actually go back and do something to harm Abi and Amala. I had a strong suspicion he wouldn’t touch them, but I couldn’t chance it. It was me the creep had been stalking. Me whom he was desperate to get alone.
The entire walk to the car, we passed person after person who didn’t give us a second glance. Not a single one of them noticed the gun that was digging into me through my hoodie.
When we reached his car, he opened the back door and pushed me forward. As soon as I was inside, the driver’s door opened, and another man with a baseball cap got behind the wheel.
“I thought stalking was a solo gig,” I snarked as my kidnapper got in beside me. I was ready to fight him now that he was out of the same building as Abi, but he grabbed a handful of my hair, jerking my head back sharply. Definitely not the fun kind of hair-pulling I liked so much with Jamie.
He shoved the gun into my belly, and every maternal instinct inside me stood up and screamed at the threat to my precious baby. I wished I had Sammy’s super-sick assassin skills. I would have disarmed the motherfucker and shot him right between the eyes without a single moment of remorse.
“Try it, and I’ll empty this magazine into your gut, chica .”
“Would you, really?” I taunted, trying to look at his face. But he kept his head ducked, the cap shadowing his facial features from me, even up close. “Don’t stalkers typically want their prey alive to do depraved things to them first? Killing me so soon after you caught me seems anticlimactic. But I have a feeling that’s what all the ladies say about you.”
Another check in the stupid decision box. He backhanded me so hard, my ears rang, completely stunning me for a moment. By the time I blinked back into awareness, I tasted blood on my tongue and the driver had pulled into traffic. The guy next to me had put on the cable ties while I was momentarily out of it and then pressed the gun to my temple.
“Another word out of you and your brains will be decorating this back seat.”
Swallowing the acid that was boiling in my stomach as hot as the rage in my blood, I kept my mouth shut. Instead of smarting off, I tried to focus on where they were taking me. If by some miracle I found a way to get free from them, I had to know how to get back to Abi.
I needed to stay focused. Not only so I could get away, but because I needed to keep the baby growing in my belly safe. And more than anything, so I could return to Ky, Sparks, and Jamie. I needed to be smart so I could at least tell them how much I loved them one more time.
Holding back the emotions that overwhelmed me, I sent out a silent prayer to all of Emmie’s gods. Maybe one of them would actually pay attention and give me the Christmas miracle I desperately needed.
Thirty minutes later, the city traffic had thinned out. Neither man had spoken since I’d gotten the little love tap to the face. My cheek was throbbing, my head pulsing, the taste of blood lingering on my tongue. The driver pulled into an empty parking lot and drove around to the back of a run-down building. When he pressed a tiny remote, a garage door opened, and he pulled inside.
I kept my shit together until the guy who had the gun stepped out. “Let’s go,” he commanded, the bite in his voice rubbing me the wrong way.
Fear wasn’t something I handled well. My reaction to the emotion had always been to face it and fight, to take away the power of whatever scared me.
Another slap to the face was my reward for throwing verbal abuse at them both as they dragged me to a room with no window. Fucking assholes. There was just a chair, a single harsh light hanging over it, that they threw me into and a tiny table with the camcorder that looked like it belonged in one of the Home Alone movies.
One guy cut off the plastic restraints, but only so the other could jerk my hands behind me and secure them with another cable tie. Then they left me there.
That was more than an hour ago.
And I was back to making stupid decisions, yelling at the recording device. I was tired, scared, and pissed off. My hands were numb and so was my ass from sitting for so long in one position. Nausea and heartburn had been the only distractions I’d had as the temperature in the room had slowly risen until each inhale seemed to be full of fire.
That stupid camcorder was at least thirty years old, so I had my doubts that the CCTV could be hacked easily. But if anyone could accomplish that, it would be Vaughn.
Looking straight at the lens, I spoke to the device in Russian. Abi and I weren’t nearly as fluent in the language as we were in Spanish, but we could hold full conversations with Vaughn, Sammy, and other Vitucci family members. Amala had a better understanding of the vocabulary than I did, but I was learning more every day. But just because I could speak Russian didn’t mean I stopped busting Vaughn’s balls over his switching to Russian when he didn’t want some people to know what he was saying.
“Yo, Vaughn. Have your skills dulled? Why the fuck haven’t any of you blown a hole in one of these fucking walls yet? I can’t feel my fingers. Snap-snap, shithead. I’m ready to go now.”
The squeak of a rusty door hinge pulled my attention from the camcorder to the door, and I stopped my flow of Russian to the man tapping away somewhere on his many phones while he attempted to locate me. There was a long, silent pause in the hall, but I could hear the person breathing heavily outside my new prison.
Someone wanted to make an overdramatic entrance.
Rolling my eyes, I tilted my head, curious which of the two dumbasses who had brought me there would join me in the hot room.
An older man in a suit stepped inside. I had to squint against the harsh overhead light a few times before his face came into complete focus. When it finally did, my mouth snapped closed, all the insults on the tip of my tongue turning to dust.
Someone wanted a magical family reunion for Christmas.
Ah, fuck.