7. Sandrine
Sandrine
Inside the plane I was dragged onto by the man with the blue eyes, I go inside myself. Tune everything out. The man who thinks I should know him doesn’t speak to me for the rest of the plane ride.
He and the burlier man talk among themselves further up in the front of the plane. There is shouting, and calls are made.
Sandrine. They keep saying that name. Clearly, they made a mistake and grabbed me instead of someone else.
My cheek resting against the soft leather seat, I breathe in a nice smell. Clean. Sharp. It feels familiar in a way, but with no memory, familiar is a shock to the system. I don’t trust it. It speaks of a past I’m not aware of.
Elodie threatened these men with Ares. But the man with the blue eyes didn’t care. Said he knew Ares. Maybe this wasn’t a mistake. But why is he calling me by the wrong name?
Out of nowhere, pain detonates behind my eyes. I press my fingers into my temple. With my eyes closed, I hear a clang and feel something cool. My gaze locks in the metal around my wrists.
Handcuffs.
The man who wore the mask just fucking handcuffed me. I scramble back, pressing myself into the corner of the seat. My pulse races so fast it makes me dizzy. “Stay away from me.”
He just stares at me. I don’t know him, but I somehow know the shape of his jaw and the set of his shoulders. His scent triggers something in my brain, as does the way the air seems to rearrange around him.
I clutch my head, shaking strange thoughts away as if I can physically dislodge a vague and blurry memory. “Why did you remove the mask?”
He narrows his eyes at me. “I don’t need it on my plane.”
“Why are you—”
“We’ll discuss everything when we get home.”
“Home? Where?” I press.
“You know where we live, come on.”
“No, I don’t know that,” I whisper. “You have me confused with someone else.”
Before he can answer, the plane starts its sharp descent. The man reaches for me, and I wince again.
“Stop it. It’s me, Sandrine.” He brings a seatbelt that had been tucked into the cushions around my waist. “I’m just making sure you’re safe.”
That familiar scent surrounds me, and a cloudy vision I can’t make out jars my brain. When I gasp, he stares at me, and our eyes lock.
God, he’s beautiful in a way that feels wrong to notice and be affected by.
His face looks carved, defined in hard, deliberate lines. His mouth and full lips are a calm slash parting to breathe me in. But it’s his blue eyes that hold me, despite every instinct screaming at me to look away.
They’re not just blue. They’re cobalt.
I’ve seen these eyes before. That exact color. The flecks of gold that give them depth, while so many other blue eyes I’ve seen look like glass. In just a flash, those same eyes are looking at me with warmth and love. And then it’s gone.
We land, and I open my mouth, ready to beg him again to call Ares. But then I remember that he and Lourdes are in Santorini, Greece.
“Let’s go.” The blue-eyed man unbuckles the seatbelt and steers me by my bound hands.
At the top of the airstairs, I take a step and slip. But the man is there, catching me. The air is bitterly cold, and I’m in shorts and flip-flops. I’m brought to a car, and I hug myself in the seat even though the interior is warm.
“Home. Now,” the man says.
I drag in a breath and force myself to look out the window. We’re in Chicago!
Winter-bare trees, dirty snow, and flat, colorless parks whiz by. That realization slams into me so hard, my lungs forget how to work. Why am I back in Chicago?
I wait for my stomach to settle. I start to taste the ice cream I had with…
“Oh God, Elodie,” I gasp, jerking upright, panic rising fast and vicious. “My cousin. Where is she? What did you do to her?”
The man doesn’t answer, just watches me.
The cold metal cuffs bite into my wrists when I instinctively pull at them. I’ve never worn handcuffs, as far as I remember. I’ve seen them on television. Those were props, I guess. These feel too heavy to be a prop. The kind of man with his own plane would have.
“Wait.” I raise my hands, the chain between the cuffs clinking a sinister metallic sound. “Are you bringing me back to Lakeshore?”
The man frowns. “We don’t live on Lake Shore. We live on North State.”
“We? I don’t live with you.” The thought makes my skin crawl. “You’ve made a mistake,” I say, louder now, because I need him to understand. I need someone to understand. “I don’t know you.”
“And I don’t know you either,” he snaps back, his voice low and edged with anger.
It doesn’t make sense. Nothing about this makes sense.
The SUV slows, stopping in front of iron gates, tall and black and impossibly final. Is this a prison? Was I some wanted criminal before the accident?
Beyond the gate, a mansion rises into the sky. Its stone facade is dusted with snow. Its windows are arched on higher floors and bowed out below. Everything is trimmed in black lead.
It should look beautiful, but it doesn’t. It looks like the exact place I don’t belong.
As we pass through the gate and head toward the back of the house, a large row of windows exposes a vintage interior. A flash of bodies flickers behind my eyes. Yelling. A man bruised terribly in the face, wheezing. Blood, lots of blood.
I feel sick. Was it him? Did someone hurt him here in this house?
I suck in a breath and press my cuffed hands to my temples.
“Stop,” I whisper. “Stop it. This can’t be happening.”
I was nineteen when I fell. I had nineteen years of a life that no one can give back to me. Lourdes showed me pictures of us as children. Smiling. Playing. Hugging. But what happened after that? Between then and my accident?
What about the woman I was before I woke up in a hospital bed with a stranger telling me he was my father and that my name was Jessica? A name that never felt right. But what choice did I have? I had to accept it.
My gaze flicks back to the man with impossible blue eyes and a presence that stirs feelings inside me in a way I don’t understand. Even with fear clawing at my throat.
Even with a gun pointed at my head.
Elodie’s voice echoes in my brain, teasing and curious.
Have you ever had sex?
Heat creeps up my neck, misplaced and unwelcome. A connection I don’t want to this man stirs in me. It’s deep and unsettling.
The car rolls to a stop at a side entrance, and everything moves quickly after that. It’s a blur of doors opening, cold air flooding in, and hitting my skin. Sharp. Biting.
Hands reach for me, strong and unyielding, pulling me from the seat before I can brace myself. My flip-flops dangle from my feet as I’m lifted completely and carried like I weigh nothing.
“Put me down!” I shout, thrashing, punching the man’s back. “Let me go!”
The man with the blue eyes steps out from the other side of the car.
“Quiet.” Gun in hand, his gaze locks on mine as he follows me being carried.
I’m brought inside this prison. A prison with a pleasant scent of something savory.
But before the smells register completely, I’m moved swiftly through corridors I don’t get a chance to process either.
Then down a winding staircase we go. It seems to spiral into the earth until all I smell is dirt.
At the bottom, the large brute sets me down, but everything tilts, my balance gone. My legs give out, and I pitch forward.
Strong hands catch me. It’s him. The blue-eyed man with the gun.
“Sandrine,” he says, his voice suddenly in a different cadence. “Baby, I got you.”
The contact is brief, just enough to steady me, but it also ignites flashes of recognition. Memories, sharper and clearer than any others.
There’s a park.
Sunlight through leaves.
Arms around me. His?
His voice is sweet, like right now. He’s calling me—
Baby…
Then it’s gone. Snatched away.
I jerk back like I’ve been burned. “No,” I growl. “I’m not Sandrine. Don’t touch me.”
He watches me with eyes that have gone dark. Those eyes are messing with me. Hypnotizing me, putting false memories into my head.
But why? I’m nobody.
Wait, I’m not nobody.
I pull away completely, calling on the lessons drilled into me after years of careful, controlled therapy. There are men with guns everywhere. Men who can hurt me. Men who can force themselves inside me.
This is what they meant.
I’m slammed with a thought I had never even considered. I’m an unattached woman flown to Chicago and brought into a strange mansion.
Trafficking. The other man named Scava accused the blue-eyed man of trafficking.
I know who traffics women. The mafia.
“No!” I push out that word again. “I told you I know Ares Zervas. You said you know him, too. He’s married to my sister. Please call him. He’ll pay for my release if that’s what you want.”
“Oh, I’ll call Ares,” the man says, his tone vicious. “I’ve been looking for you for years. He had the chance to hand you over.”
My stomach drops. This man has been looking for me? For years? Is he a man from…before? Before the accident?
And Ares knew?
“It didn’t have to be like this, Sandrine,” the man adds.
Hearing that name again makes my skin prickle. Before I can respond, he jerks his head toward a cell behind me.
“Get in.”
“What?” I blink at him, disoriented. “No, I—”
A hand clamps around my arm, firm enough to hurt. I’m steered toward a set of bars. Several rattle open, and I’m pushed forward into the cell.
It’s not exactly dirty. It’s clean, in fact. Stark and clinical. But a harsh reality crashes into me all the same. I’m being held against my will.
Behind bars.
“What is this?” I demand, spinning back to him. “Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?”
He steps inside the cell, and the space shrinks instantly under the weight of his presence.
“You know damn well who I am and why I’m doing this,” he says slowly.
I swallow roughly. “I told you, I don’t know you.”
Then a cold, dead expression takes over his handsome face. Dark stubble covers the jawline of a Hollywood heartthrob.
“You better get to know me,” he says, leaning in. “I’m your husband.”