24. Mila
MILA
Iclamped my mouth shut as the man ambushed me from the side. His arm smacked into my side with the force of a two-by-two crashing into me like he was up at batting practice. The impact stole my breath. It stayed in me as I tensed, locking into full panic mode.
It wasn’t the sickening anxiety of it that triggered me.
It was the survivalist instinct kicking in.
He surprised me around the turn into another office, this one holding far fewer copies of paperwork and maps and correspondence. I’d just stepped in, and he was there, lunging out like a monster in the dark.
I didn’t have a chance to gasp.
To suck in more air.
To think. To speak. To shout.
Not even a grunt.
He slammed into me so instantly that I could only tense up and fling my arm out to break my fall.
My hand smacked into the desk, and I gripped the edge for support.
All I grabbed was air and a slim piece of plastic, though.
Because I was falling. I was tackled. In a rush of action that blurred so fast that I couldn’t keep up with it, I was plowed over and knocked clear to the floor.
Alarms went off in my head as I was taken down. Panic morphed into determination, because I didn’t need any other cues to know this was it.
I had been found and they wouldn’t show me mercy.
I struggled to get out of his chokehold, realizing that the impact of being slammed to the floor had knocked my hat clear off my head.
It rocked to settle on its side, almost upside down with the bill of the cap turning the headgear into a bowl on the floor.
I slapped my hand out to it, slamming my palm on the corner of the hem where the camera was.
I disabled it so they wouldn’t find it. So they couldn’t notice it and go after Lev and the others waiting by. All that tech was so traceable, and I couldn’t risk their being in harm’s way.
The man ordered me to stop fighting, to stay still.
He was a muscular brute, but not enormous in size.
I fought and squirmed to get free. I tried all the tricks and maneuvers I’d learned under Roman’s training at the facility. I banked on the sheer need to escape to power me into a fighting machine.
But no matter what I tried and how I resisted this hold, I couldn’t get free.
Noticing the air in my ear, I realized the absence of my comms unit too. It had been knocked out in my struggle, and I knew that wouldn’t save me, either.
Lev wasn’t here with me.
His soldiers were waiting as backup too far away to help me.
I was alone. On my own. Captured.
I craned my neck to see past the bulk of the man’s body at my back.
He shouted at me in Spanish to stay still.
The pounding vibration of footsteps filled through me as I lay on the floor.
Others arrived, and I watched as one man’s heavy boot smashed the comms unit as they rushed in.
Even if it had still been functional after flying out of my ear, it was crushed beyond use and repair now.
I had nothing.
No backup.
No weapons.
Nothing but myself.
Like always.
Don’t panic.
Don’t panic!
Breathe through it.
Stay alert.
Do. Not. Panic.
Between the mixed languages from the men as they argued and yelled at me, the common denominator of the message was clear.
They’d found someone snooping. And they weren’t happy about it.
Pulled by my hair to stand, I gritted my teeth and refused to let them hear a cry of pain.
I staggered to place my feet flat on the floor as I battled the loss of orientation.
My arms were held too tightly behind me.
My head was searing with fiery pain with my scalp pulled like this.
I was pitched forward as they treated me like a rag doll.
But as soon as I was upright and they saw that I was a woman, one man growled and cursed at me before he backhanded me.
Again.
And again.
Held up to take the blows, I locked down and hid into that shell that I’d leaned on whenever I’d been abused before.
When I was beaten. Whipped. Hurt and hit, sometimes in punishment and other times for no reason at all.
You will survive.
You will get through this.
You will survive.
Breathe through it.
You will get through it.
I repeated that mantra over and over, letting the determination to live seep into my soul.
They cursed at me and threatened me.
They shouted and struck out, trying to break me.
No matter how many times they hit me and rained punches and slaps on me, I refused to break. I resisted the urge to cry and beg for mercy.
“Who sent you?”
That was the demand they made the most. In varying languages and laced with nothing but anger, they asked me why I was here and who had sent me.
I didn’t answer.
“What the fuck do you think you’re going to do now, bitch?”
That was the other thing they yelled, wanting to goad me into panicking over what would follow now that they’d captured me.
I didn’t react.
When they saw how resilient and silent I proved to be, they changed it up.
Taking me down the stairs—letting me drag down them instead of urging me to walk—they tried a new view. Stuck in a room with drying blood splattered all over the walls, they shoved me to the dirt floor. A corpse rotted inches from where I landed, and I couldn’t stop the reflex of gagging.
Laughing and taunting me, they grabbed my hair and forced me to sit up and face them.
And it began all over again.
They interrogated me, after an answer for why I was here and who’d sent me. They beat me but didn’t resort to knives or guns or whips.
All throughout the torture and scorching pain of the assault, I fought to hold on.
Breathe through it.
Just breathe through it.
I owned nothing in this world. I was nothing.
I held no power at all and I would never let anyone convince me of that delusion.
I was fast, I was smart, and I was strong, but at the end of the day in the life of a contracted slave, I had no power.
No validation of worth. No currency with which to use as leverage when I landed in a life-or-death scenario like this one.
Breath through it all.
And don’t panic.
My desperation to survive was a well-rehearsed process, and they wouldn’t get a single answer out of me.
As time dragged on and my body ached from the hits, I clung to this defiance. Refusing to reveal anything, I stayed true to the fact that my word was the only semblance of power I could ever have. Something that no one could ever take from me.
But as they kept tormenting me and threatening me with worse, I endured the wait.
The wait for death.
No!
I hung my head from them slapping me so hard, I saw stars.
No.
I will not die.
I will survive.
So many times before, I’d silently begged to be free of this misery, knowing that in death, I’d be free from pain. I’d be free from people owning me to do their dirty work.
Now, though, as I closed my eyes and willed my lungs to fill again despite the aching pain in my ribs, I couldn’t repeat that wish.
I didn’t want to die.
I couldn’t die.
Not while I knew that Lev was out there somewhere.
I couldn’t deceive myself into praying he’d save me. That he could pull a repeat of whisking me out of danger like he had in the desert when I was stuck in the middle of that standoff.
As I blinked and lifted my head, silent and refusing to say a word, I realized that this burning need to live and survive wasn’t just a force borne within me.
It was him.
I needed to live to see him again. Because it mattered. He mattered as more than the man who held the contract to my life. Through the blissful moments he gave me and the treasured chance of someone wanting to know what I wanted, I knew what that was now. What I wanted more than anything.
Him.
I truly cared whether I saw him again. I seriously coveted the connection that we’d started, the one that intimidated me into defining him as a man I wanted to belong to in every way that a woman could.
Please.
I never begged. Not even in my darkest moments. No one ever listened, no deity or grace in the universe. I’d always had to rely on myself to make anything happen.
Please let me see him again.
I need you, Lev.
I can’t let this be the end…
I closed my eyes and prayed for the stinging pain to calm on my flesh from all the hits. I willed my mind to stop buzzing with the impact of all this violence I was receiving.
In the darkness behind my closed lids, I refused to see any other future than that one.
One where Lev would be with me.
Because in this dark moment of captivity and pain, I couldn’t imagine having a future worthy of enduring without him in it.
As my owner.
As the man I wanted.
As my reason to stay strong.