ELENA #2
The second man is closer now. I can hear the scuff of his shoes on the concrete. I take one step back. “If you touch me, I’ll scream this building awake.”
“You can try,” the first man says, and his voice stays flat. “But by the time anyone opens a door, you’ll already be in the van.”
He isn’t bluffing. I know that at once. I reach into my coat pocket slowly, as if for my phone. His gaze drops. That’s enough. I rip my pepper spray free, fire it straight at his face, and run.
He curses and jerks back, one arm flying up.
The other man lunges for me. I duck badly, slam into his shoulder, nearly go down, then drive my elbow back with everything I’ve got.
It connects with something soft enough to make him grunt.
I tear free and sprint for the gate, my boots slipping on painted concrete, my lungs already burning, and I get within three steps of it before someone catches a fistful of my hair and hauls me backward so hard my neck screams.
I go down hard.
My phone skids away. My bag spills open. Papers, pens, lip balm, keys.
A knee pins my thigh. A hand clamps over my mouth.
I bite.
The man swears viciously in Russian and slams my wrist into the ground until the spray drops from my fingers. The first man is blinking through a red, streaming face, furious now, and when he crouches beside me his control is gone. “I told you,” he says, breathing hard, “not to make this harder.”
I twist under the weight on top of me and manage to get my mouth free for one second. “Go to hell.”
“Later,” he says.
Then something sharp presses into the side of my neck. I instinctively know it’s a needle, and cold terror hits so fast my limbs go weak. “No,” I choke, bucking hard enough to make the man on top of me shift. “No, no, don’t you dare, don’t you dare.”
“Hold her.”
I thrash, kick, claw, catch fabric, skin, something. It doesn’t matter. The drug burns going in. My vision jerks, blurs, rights itself, then slips again at the edges. The strip lights above me smear into pale bars. The men around me keep talking.
I try to hold on to anger because it’s cleaner than panic.
I think of my mother’s face, my apartment, of the hot pizza and garlic and Yulia stealing olives and how normal my life felt two hours ago.
Then I think of my father, vanished into whatever filth he built, and I understand with sick clarity that this didn’t begin tonight but years ago.
The men drag me upright between them and half carry me toward the garage exit. Cold night air hits my face. Gravel crunches under heavy tires. The van doors open.
I fight again, weaker now, stupid with it, but I fight. One of them leans in close enough that I can smell smoke on his collar. “Save it,” he mutters. “You’re expected.”
Expected where, I want to ask, but my mouth won’t work right anymore.
They shove me into the van and the doors slam shut.
Cold night air keeps hitting my face in bursts through the crack of the van door, then it’s gravel under tires, darkness beyond the glass, the sweep of high beams over iron gates, and the sick lurch in my stomach every time we turn deeper into the trees.
By the time the vehicle slows for good, my head feels too heavy for my neck, but I force my eyes open anyway. If I’m going into hell, I want to see it first.
An estate rises out of the dark in hard lines and old stone, and it immediately reminds me of the Gothic novels I love to read. Floodlights cut across the front drive. Men with rifles stand at fixed points like they were placed there with a ruler.
The van door opens, and cold cuts across my skin so cleanly it makes me shiver.
One of the men grabs my arm. “Careful.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I mumble, though it comes out blurred.
He doesn’t answer. They haul me down from the van, and my boots skid on gravel before I find enough balance to stay upright. My hair is half out of its clip and falling in my face, and I don’t know where my bag and phone are.
My coat hangs open. I hate that they’ve brought me here like this, drugged and handled and made weak before I even know whose ground I’m standing on.
The front door opens with a resounding creak and for a second, everything in the drive seems to shift around that.
A man steps out onto the stone landing and stops there, one hand at his side, the other sliding into the pocket of a dark overcoat he wears open over black clothes that fit him too well to be accidental.
He’s tall enough that every man near him looks slightly diminished, broad through the shoulders, narrow at the waist, built like somebody who knows exactly what his body can do and has spent years proving it.
There’s no rush in him. No wasted motion, no need to announce who he is.
The sight of him strikes me in a way I immediately resent.
He has a strong jaw, dark stubble, a straight nose, cheekbones that make the shadows on his face look sharper. When his eyes track to mine, my heart riots.
He’s tall and broad, suit jacket straining faintly over shoulders packed with muscle. Every subtle shift in his stance pulls fabric over a chest built to absorb recoil, muscle moving under expensive cloth with controlled force.
A vein pulses at his throat, and the dark peak of his clavicle rises when he breathes. His hands are large, veins raised across the backs, and when he rolls his wrists, his tendons ripple and flex.
He looks older than his underlings, but with the kind of maturity that comes with ownership.
He’s finished, a fully formed predator who’s taken his time, paid his price, claimed his throne.
Every other man near him looks unfinished, like they’re still waiting to prove themselves, while he radiates the kind of dominance that makes women’s mouths part and tongues wet just picturing what those muscles could do when he drops the suit and stops pretending to be civilized.
I hate how beautiful he is, and I hate it more because he looks at me like he has every right to.
The man holding my arm tightens his grip and starts moving me forward. I stumble once on the steps, catch myself, and lift my chin because I’ll die before I let these people think I can be dragged anywhere without at least trying to bite.
When we reach the landing, the man from the door hasn’t moved. Up close, he’s worse. His gaze drops over me once, taking in the split lip I must have earned in the garage, the torn hem at my sleeve, the fact that I’m still standing.
He looks at the man holding me. “Did you drug her?” His question is quiet, asked in a voice so deep and low that it makes a shiver run down my spine.
The man beside me straightens. “She resisted.”
“I asked if you drugged her.”
“Yes, Pakhan.”
Pakhan.
In front of me is Maksim Volkov, Pakhan of Moscow. Dear God, what did my father get me into?
Every ugly rumor I’ve ever heard about the Volkov Bratva rushes back at once, but they don’t help me much when the reality is standing three feet away looking like this. I had expected older, maybe. Something more obviously cruel.
My mouth goes dry.
I tell myself it’s the drug.
He steps closer, and now I can smell winter air on his coat, clean soap, expensive liquor somewhere under that, and something male and warm that makes my stomach tighten. He reaches out, then lifts two fingers and brushes a strand of hair off my cheek.
I jerk back on instinct. His eyes flick to my mouth, then back to my eyes. “Good,” he says with a small smile. “I’d have been disappointed if you came in meek.”
My heart is pounding so hard it makes me dizzy. I want to ask him who he thinks he is to stand there looking at me like he’s been expecting me. What actually comes out is rougher and weaker than I want. “You kidnapped me.”
“Yes.”
His gaze goes to the bruise already rising on my wrist, then to the man beside me again. “Take your hand off her.”
The grip disappears instantly and my knees nearly give, but I lock them fast and stay upright through sheer fury. Maksim notices and his eyes narrow just slightly, as if that pleases him in some way he has no business finding pleasing. “Hello, Elena,” he murmurs.
The way he says my name sends an electric jolt to my nerves. He steps in close, stops just short of contact, and for a second all I can see is his mouth, the slight drag of his lower lip as he speaks. “I’ve been waiting for you far too long.”