Chapter 44
THEA
Isit with my hands flat on the table, my vision blurring as I stare down at nothing in particular.
I breathe. That’s all I can do—focus and take slow, steady breaths.
I try to push everything else away and devote myself to the single thing I seemingly still have control over, moving air in and out of my body, while my mind tries to catch up with what’s happened.
He knows about the baby. He’s going to kill us both.
Stop.
I press my palms harder against the table until my arms shake. I can’t go there right now. I can’t think about his threats and the danger that my baby and I are in, or else I’ll come apart. And I don’t have the luxury of doing that, not with everything at stake.
I don’t know how much time I have. Kolya could come in right now with a gun in his hand and end it all, or he could wait, take his sweet time, make me stew and squirm.
I breathe in one more full breath, release it slowly, then wipe my face. I don’t feel strong, and I sure as hell don’t feel brave. But I have to. I don’t have any other option.
Sylvie’s still seated in the booth across from me. There’s a strange, almost dazed, look in her eyes, like she’s physically there, but her mind is a million miles away.
I’m scared to talk to her, scared to face what happened, what I did. I could’ve tried harder, could’ve pushed nonstop from day one to find her, to save her. But I didn’t. And the consequence of that is whatever hell she’s gone through. Is still going through.
But I have to try.
“Sylvie.”
Nothing.
“Hey. Sylv.”
That gets her attention. Her face comes alive, and she flicks her eyes to me. Her expression is annoyed, closed off. She crosses her arms. There’s anger and hurt, but there’s also something else, something familiar.
It’s enough to make me think that Kolya hasn’t completely broken my best friend.
Good. That means it’s worth a try.
“Sylvie,” I repeat, keeping my voice low. “Please. We have to get out of here. Help me.”
She snorts. “Help you? Why, so you can get back to your boyfriend and forget about me again?”
The words hit hard, and they hurt.
I neither flinch, nor do I argue. I don’t try to excuse what happened. Instead, I let her be angry, because the anger is hers and she’s earned it. The worst thing I could do right now is take it from her.
“Do you have any idea what happened to me? What I’ve been through? Hell. Pure hell.”
I say nothing. I watch her wait for the defense that doesn’t come.
“You left,” she says. Her tone is sharp, a knife slipping through my ribs. “You were taken, and then you were gone. And I was all alone.” She glances away for a moment. “I get that you couldn’t help me in the moment. But what about after? Gabriel has power, money, resources.”
“It’s not that simple. There’s a war about to happen and…” I trail off, reminding myself not to put up a defense.
“I waited,” Sylvie goes on. “I thought you’d come back. I thought you’d send someone. Something. But there was nothing. Just nothing.”
“I know.”
“You know.”
“You’re right,” I say with a nod. “I left you. I told myself there was nothing I could do. But that was a lie. Maybe. I don’t know.
The truth is, I was scared. I didn’t know where I was, what Gabriel had planned for me.
I didn’t know whether he wanted to kill me or make me his slave.
But I can say this—I never stopped thinking about you. ”
Silence. Her mouth forms into a hard line, her eyes flicking with slight surprise, as if she expected me to put up more of a fight.
I go on.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to help me. To help us. You’re mad at me, and I understand that completely. You can curse my name until the end of time, and I’ll say you’re absolutely right for doing it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to save ourselves now. It’s not too late.”
She looks away, her brow knitting in worry.
“You don’t understand what it was like after you left. When Kolya took me, he was patient. He explained what the world was really like, how people like him and Gabriel and the rest of the Bratva and Camorra survived. He told me that the world I knew was just a fairy tale. He took care of me.”
She turns her eyes to me.
“Don’t forget I was in the same place you were, Thea—scrubbing toilets, coming home to a rat-trap apartment I could barely afford.
Kolya showed me a different life. Sure, I had to do…
things.” I shudder at the word, putting it out of my mind as quickly as I can.
“But for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to worry about money or anything like that.
And I had a place. It sounds screwed up, but I had a place with him, here. ”
“It sounds like he isolated you,” I say carefully. “Cutting you off from everybody but himself, making him your whole world.”
“Isn’t that what Gabriel did to you?” she asks. “He didn’t let you leave his home, told you where to sleep, what to wear, how to please him.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t like that. We only did what I wanted.”
Her eyes flash, as if the idea of being asked what she wants is a luxury she’d long forgotten about.
“It’s different for me,” I say softly. “Gabriel was sworn to protect me. He’s—”
“I know, I know. You’re some Bratva princess and he’s your brave knight in shining armor. You’ve got that life to look forward to. What about me? As soon as I leave here, I’m nothing again. Back to being a nobody, scrubbing toilets for a living.”
“You’re not a nobody. You’re my friend. Or at least you were. Sylvie, we can leave here and start over. You can start over. I can’t leave you here. I can’t.”
My hand drops to my stomach. Her eyes follow the movement.
“He’ll kill me.” I say plainly. “Me and my baby.”
Silence falls once again. She doesn’t speak. The hardness is still there on the surface, but I can sense that underneath, something is shifting. Not dissolving, but moving, like icebergs when the temperature starts to change. She doesn’t look away from my hand.
“You can hate me. I deserve it. But please, this baby is innocent. All I want more than anything is for him or her to come into the world safe and sound. If I could give my own life to make sure that happens, I’d do it in a second.”
“How far along are you?”
My chest tightens. That question means she’s thinking about my baby as a real being, as a life worth saving.
“Almost two months.”
She nods slowly, doesn’t look up.
Another long silence follows.
Then she brings her eyes to mine.
“There’s a service corridor,” she says, low and fast. “Behind the DJ booth. Back left corner. Unmarked door. Kolya uses it when he doesn’t want to walk through the main floor.”
I nod.
“It leads to the alley on the east side of the building. We’re in Jersey now, if you didn’t know that. It’s a trek back to the city, but if you can get clear of this place, you should be able to make it.”
I hold very still, waiting for her to finish.
“It isn’t guarded. Most of the staff doesn’t even know about it. But I do.”
The implication of how she knows about it settles sour in my mind. I push it aside.
“Come with me,” I say.
She shakes her head. “No. I can’t. If I disappear with you and he comes back to an empty room, he’ll know right away what’s going on. He’ll have every exit covered before we hit the alley.”
“If he comes back and only I’m gone, he’ll know what’s happening,” I say. “And you’ll be here for him to take his anger out on.”
When the color drains from her face right away, I understand it’s something she’s been through before.
She looks away.
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
Her voice trails off, and I can sense that she has no idea what she’d do if she were to escape.
“You can come with me,” I say. “We’ll go to Gabriel’s. We’ll take care of you. Please. I can’t leave you behind. Not again.”
Tears form in her eyes. She blinks, and one trickles down her cheek.
“What if he catches us?”
“We can’t think about that. We have to go.”
She purses her lips and takes a slow breath.
“Okay. But you’ll need a distraction.” She glances at the two guards on the other side of the room, posted at the door Kolya left through. “Just get ready to run when it happens.”
“When what happens?”
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
Without another word, she slides out of the booth, grabbing the bottle of Kolya’s expensive vodka. I watch as she makes her way over to the bar, then behind it. She reaches up with the bottle, standing on her tiptoes to place it on the shelf and—
It drops.
The bottle smashes onto the bar, shattering into a thousand pieces.
“Oh no!” she shouts.
The guards come to life, rushing over to her.
“What the hell happened?” one of them asks.
“I just slipped!” Sylvie puts a ditzy spin on her words, doing her best to sound hapless.
“That’s Kolya’s favorite!” the other guard snarls. “Do you have any idea how much this costs, girl?”
“A lot?”
“More than you’re worth!”
The guards are preoccupied.
This is my chance.
I slip out of the booth quietly, hurrying on bare feet toward the DJ booth. Once there, I spot the door. I press up against the bar and push. It opens.
The commotion of Sylvie and the guards is silenced as the door gently shuts.
Time to get the hell out of here.