18. Kidnapped, Again
eighteen
The majority of a week had passed since Felicity had been introduced to Cristiano’s cousins. It was Thursday again, and she found herself finishing up another emotional appointment with Dr. Laura while her original escort was missing-in-action. Not that she blamed him. He had multiple people leaning on him for support and expecting him to find every single one of their enemies every single time he went out. She was the only one who saw how frustrated it made him when what was supposed to have been a promising lead inevitably fell through.
Three times in the past week, Cristiano had thought he’d been closing in on Tristán. Yet, as of that morning when she had stepped into Dr. Laura’s office, Tristán remained the elusive boogeyman he’d become since his escape. She had suggested trying to reach out to him herself, acting as a lure. She despised the idea—merely saying the words made her want to be sick—but for Cristiano, and her new family, she was willing to suck it up. Cristiano had refused outright. He’d even threatened to lock her in the bedroom again if she tried.
If that would get him to stay in there with her for an entire day, she’d probably do it.
Felicity hesitated at the sight of a man she didn’t know in the lobby. Dr. Laura had another patient to prepare for this time, so she hadn’t walked out with her, and for the moment they were alone. Was this the patient? Or her replacement escort?
He stood at about six feet tall by her estimation, had buzzcut brown hair and striking amber eyes that might have been alluring if his overall expression didn’t look so … angry. Plus, there were the cliché facial tattoos. Two teardrops under one eye, seemingly random numbers in large print on his forehead, and something she couldn’t as easily identify on his opposite cheek. It almost looked like a pair of splatter marks.
Her stomach dropped. Oh crap. Those weren’t splatter marks. They were ink blots.
The stranger raked his gaze over her briefly, lips curling in a sneer. And when he spoke, he spoke with all the attitude his expression exuded. “Lookit you, all dressed up like you’re some kinda princess.” He scoffed. “You’re gonna come with me now, princess, real quiet-like.”
Felicity’s fingers clutched over the strap of her newest purse. She was definitely going to ask Dr. Laura if she could switch days. Thursdays were clearly not working out for her. Felicity licked her lips. “I’m not in the habit of going places with strange, rude men.” Arguably a lie, but it felt valid.
The stranger narrowed his eyes at her and pulled a gun from his waistband. “You’re under the mistaken impression I’m askin’ nice,” he said. He raised the gun, aimed it at her, then swung it toward the open hall. “I’ll kill your shrink, every other dumbass that enters this building, and then you. In that order. Or you can spare them and come along with me.” He thumbed something she assumed to be the safety. “Decide now, princess.”
Felicity pulled both her lips between her teeth and bit down, hard, in an effort to keep herself from trembling. There was no choice to be made, after all. She couldn’t condemn who-knew-how-many innocent people in the hopes that Cristiano or one of his people happened to show up before a bullet with her name on it kissed her skull. “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay, just, please don’t shoot…”
He waved the pistol at her. “Leave the fuckin’ bag.”
“Bag?” Her gaze dropped to the purse, realizing he had to have meant that. “Okay,” she said again. She forced herself to unclench and slowly stepped to the side in order to set her purse, as it was, down on the floor. Out of the way. She wanted to do something clever like they did in movies and somehow sneak her phone into her hand as she straightened, but the fact was she was not that girl. Her phone was somewhere, loose, in the main pocket of the purse and she could definitely not slip her hand inside even to grab whatever was on top without being caught. So she didn’t try. It seemed the smartest way to remain bullet-free.
The guy with the gun grabbed her by the wrist that had mostly healed up and pressed his weapon against her temple. “’s a real pretty ring you got, princess,” he said, barely glancing at the diamond adorning her finger.
Fresh fear churned inside her. Not the ring. She couldn’t let him take Cristiano’s mother’s ring.
He smirked, the expression entirely depraved, and this close Felicity could see he even had a tattoo on the inside of his lower lip. “You wanna keep that fancy ring, I bet.” It wasn’t a question, so she only nodded carefully. His smirk vanished into a hard glare. “Then you cooperate with every fucking thing I say startin’ now, understand? Otherwise I’ll shove that pretty diamond down your spoiled rotten throat, then tape your mouth shut so you can’t puke it back up.”
He’s insane.She kept the realization to herself and, as carefully as the first time, nodded again.
“Good. Now c’mon.” He turned, jerking her with him, just as the door opened.
Her eyes widened as a man in a simple, faintly wrinkled suit entered the lobby and came to a dead stop. One of his hands lifted as if he were reaching for something, at the same time as his mouth opened to speak.
Her abductor swung his pistol around and pulled the trigger two times in quick succession. The first bullet went into the other man’s chest, the second into his throat. Blood spewed from the neck shot for a long second and bloomed rapidly across the front of his light gray button-up.
Felicity clapped her free hand over her mouth to keep from screaming, her eyes burning and her throat constricting. She couldn’t look away. She desperately wanted to look away. That was the man who was supposed to have come to get her, probably. And she couldn’t even remember the name Cristiano had texted her.
The man flicked his fading gaze to her before collapsing to the floor.
“Let’s go.”
“What the hell’s—” Dr. Laura’s voice was lost as Felicity was dragged forward, over the slumped and still-bleeding figure of the man, and out the door. Her own name was the last thing Felicity heard before the door swung shut, and Felicity found herself a strange mix of petrified and grateful. She was glad, at least, that Dr. Laura hadn’t also been shot.
Her abductor dragged her to the parking area, to an almost startlingly nice-looking Mercedes, and released her wrist in order to open the back passenger door. “Get the fuck in, buckle up, and don’t speak. I don’t wanna hear you, and you better not make a mess in this car, either.”
Felicity opened her mouth to acquiesce, realized her almost-mistake, and clamped her lips shut. She nodded again as she hurried to tuck herself inside. She definitely did not trust that he wouldn’t shut the door on her fingers or something. Her hands shook as she buckled herself in and she had to bite her lips again to hold back her sobs.
She wanted to cry over the idea of that man dying for no reason other than walking through the door at the wrong time, but she couldn’t. Not yet. She wanted to rage at being abducted by some guy probably affiliated with her goddamn half-brother, but she couldn’t. Not yet.
Her only job, right then, was to survive. To keep herself as intact as she possibly could.
Cristiano will come for me.Cristiano would come, she trusted that, and he would bring the wrath of Hell with him.
“Hey, Boss wants you.”
Cristiano looked over, arching a brow at the sight of Ryōma holding out his phone. His own phone was in his pocket, and he realized he may not have raised the volume since he’d left Dr. Laura’s office. Not that he was expecting a call so soon since he’d been called away to chase down some dumb-shit firebombing Ink Blot initiates. Punk brats who barely knew how to tie their fucking shoes, but they’d caused a hell of a ruckus.
Cristiano jerked a thumb at the boy they’d just caught up to, indicating for his friend to take over the impromptu interrogation while he took the call. Then he stepped slightly away and put the phone to his ear. “Looks like the bastards are using Molotovs to taunt us now,” he said into the phone.
On the other end of the line, Dante released a breath. “That’s irritating, but Romeo can handle it. He’s en-route. There’s…. Cris, I’m sorry to be calling about this.”
Cristiano’s nerves spiked. Dante wasn’t one to apologize, so when he actually did, it tended to be only after shit had hit the fan. His voice tightened. “What happened?”
“Someone we haven’t identified yet pulled at gun at Dr. Laura’s—”
Cristiano’s stomach dropped, bile rising up his throat and his head spinning.
“Felicity’s been kidnapped.”
The world tipped sideways. Cristiano shot out his free arm to catch himself against the wall of the alley he stood in front of. His mouth was dry, nightmarish memories flashing through his mind again.
His uncle, always a strong and proud man, holding him tight and sobbing.
One oversized, freshly dug grave.
His mother, telling him she’d only be an hour.
His father, reminding him how bad his mother was at being on time when she shopped.
How long had it been since he’d been able to remember the last things his parents had said to him? He’d thought those memories were lost.
He’d decided not to barge in this time. He’d decided texting her was acceptable, because they’d discussed the possibility of him being called away while she was in-session. And because she was no longer in hiding from his family, they’d agreed she would be fine if he arranged alternate transportation for her. So he hadn’t even stuck his head into the room before he’d left, he didn’t even know if she had been crying again or if she’d checked her phone before walking into that lobby.
Cristiano dragged in a hard breath, Dante’s voice in his ear.
“Cristiano, I need you to focus, cousin. I know this is hard—”
“When?”
Dante was silent a beat. “Depending on how long it took Dr. Laura to pull herself together, close to ten minutes ago.”
He arched back, head angled toward the sky, sucking in air. It didn’t help him maintain his balance but he didn’t give a fuck. Ten goddamn minutes. “What about the man I sent to pick her up?”
“Dead.”
Well, he would have been if he hadn’t already been. Cristiano supposed it was better that the enemy had done it. But they’d probably done it in front of her, and he was less satisfied with that.
“The doc has a security camera in her foyer,” Dante said. “Mikey’s headed over to take a look, see if we can identify the guy. I did text her the picture we have of Garcia, she says it wasn’t him. She got a look at his profile; this one has facial tattoos.”
Cristiano’s fingers dug into the brick of the building he was still using to hold himself up. He’d heard that description before. “Sonofabitch.”
“Whatever you need, Cris. We will find her. I’ve already initiated the emergency message system; I just didn’t want you hearing this from a text.”
In his peripheral vision, Cristiano noticed an SUV swing into position behind Ryōma’s car. Three men hopped out as he forced himself to straighten, two of them angling for the alley, the third coming to him. “Romeo’s here. I’m hitting the road.”
“We’ll be in touch,” Dante said. “Don’t get yourself killed.”
Cristiano lowered the phone and faced Romeo, struggling suddenly to hold himself still.
Romeo clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll clean this up,” he said. “Just don’t get too reckless out there.”
Cristiano scoffed and shoved past his well-meaning cousin. “I’m not the one you need to worry about.” He should have been nicer, but knowing Felicity was in danger and had been for the past ten minutes already, he didn’t have a lot of nice in him. “Ryōma! You’re with me.”
His friend and sometimes partner loped up to his side, craftily retrieving the phone from his grip and tucking it away. “Thought for a second you were having a stroke or something. Who we gotta kill?”
Cristiano pulled his keys from his pocket. “Everyone who gets in our way.”
Her grumpy kidnapper hadn’t bothered putting any kind of blindfold over her eyes, and Felicity very much disliked the implications of that. He drove her through town, obeying every traffic light and even using his blinker, until the city was behind them. He’d pulled off the main road, onto one that was not as busy and curved enough to disorient her mental map, so all Felicity was positive of when he hauled her from the car was the general direction of Newark and which river it was, she could hear so close by. She didn’t really feel any better about hearing the Passaic so loud than she had about not being blindfolded.
“This way, princess,” Grumpy said, dragging her by her elbow toward the industrial-looking building ahead of them. He walked her through the first door he came to, not bothering to reach for his gun, and paid no mind to the pair of bodies lounging on the ratty sofa in the first room that opened beyond that. Nor did the two seem to even notice them through the literal haze surrounding their heads.
A terrible, petrifying suspicion crawled up Felicity’s spine. Her feet stumbled.
Grumpy gave her a jerk, forcing her properly upright with a grunt. “Don’t start playin’ games now.”
She gasped, barely biting back a response, and willed her feet to straighten. She was not taking the chance that she was allowed to speak yet.
He said nothing more—to her or any of the sporadic, peripheral people they passed—as he pulled her down an adjacent hall. Then they entered a room with a full-sized, four-poster bed in the center of the space. A kitchenette was against the far, long wall, and one corner of the room had been cordoned off with a curving curtain. There was also a single, worn-out recliner shoved between the bed and the far corner diagonally opposite the suspiciously separated space.
Seated in the recliner was the individual Felicity would have done nearly anything to never see again. Her half-brother, Tristán.
Felicity jerked back on instinct, her fight or flight instinct snapping full-force in the other direction. “No!”
Grumpy growled audibly and the next thing she knew her back was slammed into the wall, a gun in her face. “Don’t get stupid, princess. Get that uppity ass in the room … or choke.”
She curled her hands into fists, his meaning crushing her. She let herself glare at him, but fought back her instinctive need to struggle this time. As soon as her compliance was clear, he lowered the gun and shoved her into the room.
“She’s your problem now, T. You owe me.”
Tristán stood, his glare focused on Felicity. “Yeah, Cezar. Thanks.”
Felicity held herself still, forcing herself to listen. Cezar? Cristiano had mentioned that name before. She was sure he had. Grumpy was someone important to the gang waging war with the De Salvos, then.
The room echoed with the hard slam of the door as Cezar closed her in. Trapping her alone, without any reasonable hope of a rescue, with her greatest fear. Tristán.
Her half-brother stood in front of her, raking his all-too familiar, wild-eyed stare over her. His lips thinned into a displeased line. Tristán was three inches taller than her, visibly leaner, and boasted perpetually messy brown hair that had always been a couple shades darker than hers. She hadn’t seen him in the better part of a year, but he looked exactly how she remembered. Dangerous, unkempt, half-feral—like he was one wrong word away from lighting her skin on fire just to see if it burned.
For nearly all of her life, she’d cowered to her fear of him. Yes, she’d struggled in the moment when he’d tried to assault her when she was seventeen, but that hadn’t been something she’d thought about. It had been instinct. Every other debatably aggressive thing she’d done had involved establishing and fighting to maintain distance.
Moving to California, changing her number, neglecting to share her address. Refusing to move back into the family home when she did let herself get guilted back to New Jersey, and instead taking an apartment of her own choosing. Keeping that apartment when her parents moved to Trenton. Refusing to attend functions where she knew she would only be ignored or insulted at best.
That had been how she’d fought. That was who Tristán thought he was facing now.
He was wrong.
Felicity stomped up to him and smacked him hard across the face. It certainly was less than what he deserved, but it was more than she’d ever done. “You son of a bitch! You had your buddy come and kidnap me out of my therapy appointment? What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Tristán’s eyes widened and he rubbed at his cheek, rolling his jaw as if she’d hurt him. “You hit me.”
She glared at him. “You had me kidnapped.”
He dropped his arm back to his side. “You disappeared, Lissy. I was worried ‘bout you. Some real scary dudes have been breathin’ down my neck lately, and one of ‘em was seen recently around your place.” He reached out and curled her hair around his finger. “I couldn’t have them puttin’ hands on my baby sister, ya know?”
Felicity smacked his hand away, simultaneously fighting down the instinct to step back and put distance between them. She was not the weak, timid girl she’d been the last time she’d interacted with this monster. She was the future Mrs. Cristiano De Salvo. She would get through this, even if it scared her. Even if it hurt. “The only scary guys who’ve been haunting me lately are you and the sickos you send after me.” She lifted her chin. “Did you even know about the way the guy in the apartment across the hall would talk to me? The guy you and your gang friends sent to spy on me.”
Tristán’s head tilted to the side. “He mistreated you?”
She fought not to shiver. It was almost worse the way he presented like some caring, protective brother at times. “Only every time I had the misfortune of running into him. And he made a point to come greet me whenever he saw me in the hall.”
“I’ll fucking kill him.”
Felicity gave him her most unimpressed look. “Don’t pretend you care. You had multiple spies set up in my apartment building, including my landlord. Who thought it was apparently more important to keep me locked down than protected, and that bruise took a whole damn week to heal.” She took a sharp breath and plunged ahead, letting herself rant. “But obviously the absolute worst is sending Grumpy Asshole back there to barge into my therapist’s office and kidnap me at fucking gunpoint, even murdering a man right in front of me because that guy had the bad misfortune of walking in before we could leave. Yeah, that screams ‘my brother cares about me’.”
“I only asked Cezar not to be too rough with you,” Tristán said. He shot out a hand and twisted it in her hair until her scalp stung. “You’ve gotten mouthy while you were away. You learn that at the grocery store?” He tugged her closer, into his space, and lowered his voice. “Or did De Salvo teach you that?”
Shit.She’d really hoped he somehow didn’t know about that connection, despite where she’d been found. But she refused to assume what he knew. “Get your fucking hands off me.”
His eyes narrowed until they were little more than slits and he promptly twisted, dragging her toward the bed by her hair. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, Lissy. Let’s get comfortable.”
Fear and adrenaline surged through her, fueled by not-old-enough nightmares. She wrenched herself painfully, throwing her elbow into the first part of him she could reach until his hold dislodged and she was free. Her whole body reared back as his grunts of pain filled the air and she sprinted around to put the bed between them. It was imperfect, but she had no desire to let him touch her, and even less desire to allow him to get her on a bed.
“Goddammit, Lissy,” he snarled. He stalked around the bed, absently rubbing his side. “I’ve told you a hundred times, you belong to me.”
She backed around the next corner, matching his pace. “I am not property! And what the hell is wrong with you, acting like that toward your own sibling?” It was a wasted argument. She didn’t even care about his answer anymore. She just wanted to keep him talking and not fighting.
“That’s what’s so wrong with this world,” he said. He came to a stop, watching her with nearly half the bed between them. “This fucked up society’s tryin’ to tell us we can’t have each other, but they’re wrong, Lissy. Just like they were wrong about Manny. His girl deserved what she got for steppin’ out on him like some whore. And me? I deserve you!” He lunged over the mattress as he shouted, arms outstretched.
Felicity screamed on reflex and bolted, abandoning the bed strategy in favor of the kitchenette. She couldn’t see any obvious weapons, like knives, but there was a small pot on the counter. She snatched it up, not bothering to remove the lid, and spun around swinging.
The pot connected with Tristán’s head at a slight sideways, upward angle. The clear, faux-glass lid popped off and flew halfway across the floor, skidding to a stop beneath the suspicious curtain. Tristán himself reversed course abruptly, dropping to the ground and groaning in pain. His eyes fluttered, as if he struggled to maintain consciousness.
Felicity hesitated, not sure what she should do next. Trying the door was out of the question—even if it was unlocked, she had no friends out there. So, keeping one eye on her psycho sibling, she carefully shuffled through the drawers in search of anything potentially useful. She found a few towels, a concerning selection of rope and zip ties, plastic cutlery in a box, an old and stained recipe book, and to her amazement one item with a metal point. A potato peeler. It wasn’t ideal, but perhaps she could use that and the rope to her advantage.
Tristán coughed, rolling slowly onto his side and raising a trembling hand toward his already swelling face.
Or maybe I’ll stick with the pot.