Prologue #3
And that doesn’t matter at all right now. I need to be thinking about getting us out of here, not the hateful things my father has always said to me.
We shoot past the counter and into the kitchen, and suddenly I’m sliding across a floor littered with the remains of a night full of cooking, my feet skidding rather than running as I try to keep my balance.
The door to the alley is ahead of us, though, and I start to feel like we might actually make it.
Behind us, in the main cafe, a bunch of men start shouting, then screaming in Italian, and I hear footsteps coming after us.
Shit.
Then the shooting starts, and I want to duck and hide under the closest countertop.
Taryn grabs my hand and yanks me forward, though, and I can hear her chanting to herself as we run.
Behind me, I finally hear Stella saying something, and I’m trying to figure out what it is when a shadow suddenly blocks out the light.
Taryn comes to an abrupt halt and I run right into her, then huff when Stella runs into me.
I look up and around my friend, trying to figure out what the fuck she’s doing, and realize there’s a man in our path.
She ran right into him.
And I know who he is.
“Professor Hawke?” I ask, my brain too overstimulated to think of anything more helpful to say. Save us, it belatedly adds. There are men! it shrieks.
None of that, of course, gets out of my fucking mouth.
I’m too busy trying to figure out what the fuck my Business 115 professor is doing in the kitchen of our favorite cafe at midnight on a Tuesday when men are shooting up the actual diner behind us.
And then I’m busy trying to figure out why Stella says what she does.
“Benjamin?”
Wait.
Benjamin?
She says it on a gasp, like she’s just as shocked as we are, but there’s something else behind it. Something that sounds like... relief. Yearning.
Like she definitely knows him by that name, and this isn’t the first time she’s called him that.
She’s also evidently not concerned about how he came to be here in the middle of the night or what the fuck he’s doing hiding out in the kitchen when a bunch of cos-playing mobsters are running around behind us.
He doesn’t act like this is anything out of the ordinary, either. Just reaches out quickly, grabs my hand and then Stella’s, and yanks us around Taryn like we’re fishes on hooks, both of us flying past our friend and into his arms in some sort of unrehearsed dance.
He spins in a continuation of that dance, tucks us into his sides, and then sprints out the door, leaving Taryn alone in the kitchen.
I struggle to turn and look at her and take in wide, shocked eyes and a mouth open in a scream, and then the door behind us slams and we’re in the alleyway, Professor–Benjamin?
–Hawke hustling us forward into the snow.
I try to wrap my head around this, make sense of what’s going on and where we might be going–and why the fuck he left Taryn behind–when things go sideways again.
We reach an intersection with another alley and men pour out of it, dressed in black with their faces covered and their eyes intent.
Professor Hawke turns to them and shoves Stella at them, throwing her like she weighs almost nothing.
She gasps in indignation and, when one of the men grabs her arm, tries to shake him off.
“Benjamin, what’s going on here?’ she naps. “Who are the men in that cafe? Where’s Taryn? Who the fuck are these guys?”
I look up, wondering all the same questions, but no longer see the friendly, hotter-than-he-should be professor. Instead, I see a cold, hard man who doesn’t even bother to look at Stella. He only has eyes for the man holding her.
“Take her to the first holding house,” he says sharply. “She doesn’t belong to us.”
The man’s eyes dart from me back to Hawke, considering. “There was supposed to be a third.”
“She had to be left behind,” Hawke snaps. “It doesn’t matter. Two will do. Keep to the plan. I’ll see you in three days.”
This is evidently enough of an answer for the other guy because he nods sharply and then turns, towing Stella with him.
I watch her face go from confused to furious, and then see her decide to fight back, and by the time Hawke whirls me in the other direction, picks me up, and throws me over his shoulder, she’s screaming in defiance.
The scream goes quiet a moment later, though, and when I manage to look up, I see that they’ve knocked her out and are now carrying her down the alley in the opposite direction.
While the man I thought was an economics expert sprints away from the men and my best friend with me thrown over his shoulder like a sack of fucking potatoes.
My heart has remembered how to beat now, and it’s pounding out a frantic tattoo, terrified, but my brain has shut off completely. No more panic. No more ideas.
Just the cold, hard realization that Stella and I have just been kidnapped.
And though Stella’s family might pay whatever ransom they ask for her, I don’t think my father will give two shits about losing me.
He never has.