Chapter 24 Sadie
SADIE
The hood was yanked off my head so quickly that the coarse fabric rubbed roughly against my cheek. Stinging stabs of pain radiated from the still-healing cut I’d received when one of the masked thugs backhanded me for screaming for help.
Between the musty stink of the hemp hood and the thick strap they secured as a gag around my mouth, my mouth was raw and my skin was chapped.
Sunlight instantly blinded me, warming my flesh and searing my retinas. Red filled my vision as I flinched. From total darkness to this overwhelming brightness, I suffered whiplash. Tensing, I squinted to protect my eyes.
Not being able to see anything was half the torture.
I was robbed of being able to track where I was going.
No landmarks. No roads or signs. When I was moved, they concealed my vision.
Every time. From the first second they surprised me when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom at that apartment Emil had taken me to, and they’d snuck in to capture me, I was blindfolded or under a hood.
I saw nothing to gauge where I was, what time it was, and when this could end.
Carried harshly in muscled arms was one mode of transportation. Other times, I was forced to run with the hard press of a gun poking my back. Then there was the blurring memory of being tossed into a trunk, urged to get on a boat, a plane, then some more.
According to my best estimate, which seemed hazier with every passing day, I had been relocated and moved in captivity for weeks. Two and a half? Three?
The longer I was deprived of using my senses normally, blindfolded and kept in the dark, the more it increased the confusion in my mind.
And the more that I was held like this, separated from the man I was ready to align with for good, the worse my heart sank that this would be the end of my life.
When a month came to pass, I tired of this desperation to stay alive. I wasn’t an animal to cage up and relocate. I wasn’t a toy to displace and ignore.
In the embers of rage that my captivity couldn’t extinguish, I resolved to never break. To never give up.
My baby kicked within my belly, a physical reminder of why I had to fight so strongly. All my life, I'd vowed to make the world a safer place, but in the position of bringing a child into existence, I had to home in on how to make that happen for him or her.
I had to survive so I could give this baby all the love and safety possible.
I had to endure and make it to another day because this couldn’t be the end.
Hungry, thirsty, tired, and disoriented, I clung to the fading hope that this just couldn’t be the end.
They didn’t want to end me, at least.
Instead of beating me, orders were given to the thugs to leave me be.
No one outwardly touched me. No one bothered with me to make me fear the horror of rape.
And no one ever seemed to touch my stomach as a means of wounding my baby.
That didn’t keep me from holding my handcuffed hands over my growing bump, using my arms to shelter this new life.
Because I wasn’t starved or beaten, I learned early on that whoever had taken me saw me more valuable alive than dead.
It was a small mercy.
A slight silver lining.
But on the tails of that thought, I had to consider why I was taken.
If I was supposed to be relatively unharmed and alive, they had to want something from me. Due to my career of spying on crime families and obtaining intel about a variety of Mob bosses, I convinced myself that whoever ultimately wanted me was after the secrets and facts I could share.
Please. Please let this be the last day.
Something had to give. Something had to change. My sanity was about to snap with this constant darkness, being hooded and deprived of knowing where I was in the world. My baby was growing faster, heralding the end of my pregnancy.
Are they waiting for me to deliver? Did they take me to hold me until I am in labor, just to take my child?
That was a real and present fear I couldn’t shake. Despite my loose concept of the date, I felt how much further along I was. How my body changed more and more. If I were to go into labor early, I could do so like this. Blindfolded, handcuffed, and without any medical care.
No. It can’t happen.
I squeezed my eyes shut again, forfeiting the view of the alley where I’d been chained up.
If I focused hard enough, I could relive the security Emil showed me when he put his hand on my bump, as if he wanted to help hold the burden of the weight on my body. To shelter this new life we’d created in the midst of so much antagonism and unshakable desire.
These moments of revisiting those memories were all that could keep me going, to encourage me to stay strong and hold on.
Something has to give.
If I wasn’t taken in that coordinated raid for the sake of their taking my child, there had to be a motive behind it all.
Yet, that wasn’t so easy to discern, either.
I was taken and moved, but per the sounds of a fight, others had captured me again.
Then once more, based on the sounds of fighting, I was recaptured by another.
Hearing too many different voices and accents threw me off.
They never spoke to me, other than to interrogate me on what Luka Dubinin planned.
I told them nothing. Obviously, I had no clue what Emil’s father planned. I was in the dark, literally and figuratively.
Other times, I was questioned about the Vipers. The Riveras. Other factions of more families in Europe.
Regardless of where I was, who was speaking, and what they demanded, I said nothing. Not a single word. The only thing I had to control was that. My voice. My secrets. So long as they didn’t try to harm my baby, they would get nothing from me.
I exercised that same tactic when Emil captured me, but with him, I broke.
I snapped and entered our strange friendship without actually telling him about my big case of dismantling the Obsidian Eye group before it started.
The night I was taken, I began giving him vague details.
That next morning, I would’ve been detailing all I knew for Luka Dubinin and his family.
It has to be connected. All of it. They took me because I was investigating Emil and the Dubinins’ potential impact on the group.
Since Emil told me that he knew nothing about it, I realized that these leaders behind the Obsidian Eye were nervous about the Dubinins resisting their alliance, whatever it would consist of.
And because they saw me with him, somehow, and knew that he’d knocked me up, they took me?
That still didn’t make sense, though.
Why hold me for so long without more interrogation?
Why take me at all without appearing to demand ransom from Emil?
Or from the agency?
I wondered, not for the first time, if they were the ones behind it all.
Something has to give!
The fact that I was kept alive felt like a tease, but with the many moves and changes of hands with my captivity, I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. All I could believe was that as an agent, or a former one, many criminal organizations would want to pry the secrets and intel out of me.
It was very much so a case of me against the world. With that jaded perspective, I couldn’t help but come to appreciate Emil and his family even more.
Their sense of law would be a drastic change to adjust to, but in this regard, when I was captured and exchanged like this, it seemed that no government, no agency, and no boss would ever be able to combat all the evil and villainy in the world.
Stuck as a captive and running out of hope, I opened my mind to wonder if it mattered how justice was delivered. Just that it was, by any means possible. Whatever it took to keep the worst of the criminals in check.
Because as I was given food, then ungagged by a masked man again, I ate the disgusting bland slop just to keep my strength up. Doing so with the solid belief that my life had well and truly gone through a one-eighty.
I couldn’t pray for any officer to save me.
No one from those offices I once worked at would be assisting in my rescue.
Only my assassin would.
He would be the hero I needed when I was at my lowest and most desperate state of captivity.
The Dubinin name would be the one I clung to with respect and hope for survival.
But when?
When will you find me?
Please, Emil. Please come for me.
It didn’t matter how often I begged the universe like this. It seemed that time was running out for my life and the arrival of this baby.
Please.
Please come to me.