He stares at me, his chocolatey eyes brimming with emotion that I can’t read, but when his mouth presses against mine hungrily, all of my barriers crumble down. All of my fears, my apprehension, wash away, and his arms wrap around me urgently.
Though it seems like only seconds have passed before there’s a tap at the window, and a stern police officer is looking at us like we’ve just robbed a bank.
Dimitri and I both laugh nervously as he turns the ignition and slowly backs out onto the road, heading us back towards his place.
23
I can’t believe how lucky I am. I wake up in Dimitri’s plush bed, a light breeze pulling me from a happy dream. We’d spent the entire night in one another’s arms, and even though he’s absent now, there’s a note on his pillow.
I smile as I open it up, finding his handwriting.
Sarah,
I’ve made breakfast for you. It’s in the oven to keep warm. I had to head to the office early and you looked like an angel, so I didn’t want to wake you. I’m handling the will, and getting you your trust back.
Tonight, I’ve made a reservation for dinner. Take the day off work if you like and go find something amazing. I’ll be home at six to pick you up.
Love,
Dimitri
He makes me feel like a giddy school girl, and beneath the note is his black AmEx card. I swing my legs, pulling myself reluctantly out of bed. It’s so comfortable, but at the same time, I’m looking forward to doing a bit of shopping.
Last time it was for the event I didn’t want to go to. This time it’s to knock his socks off for a dinner date.
The smell of breakfast is rich in the air, and I head to the fridge to grab a glass of orange juice. Opening the oven, I find eggs, bacon and pancakes, all arranged into a cheesy smiley face. I giggle as I take it out, putting it on the table and taking a moment to really say thanks for how perfect life is.
No sooner had I lifted my fork, though, that my world goes black.
24
Whoever it was has been quiet, and prepared, because I never heard the slightest sound as they got behind me. Never felt or suspected a thing until that black sheet is wrapped about my face and pulled back. I am gagged and blinded at once, and their strong grip doesn’t allow for me to get away.
I kick out my legs and grab at the material, but now I’m restrained. There must be more than one of them, but I’m panicking, flailing, and they’re strong. Practiced.
In my panic I strike the table with my foot, and I hear the jarring sound of the plates and utensils shifting. My would-be captors are tying my hands and yanking me back, but I strike out again randomly, and kick the table hard, sending dishes crashing to the floor, smashing.
My muffled cries don’t do much but make me panic more, I can’t even call out, everything feels so futile!
I’m being dragged across the floor, over the carpet and towards the door, but before we get there I can feel one of them pinning down my legs beneath his weight, and wrapping something about them. It’s painfully tight, restricting me, pinching my flesh.
“Stuff her in the bag,” I hear, the words gruff and perfunctory. As if abducting me is just some tedious task in their routine.
I’m panicking even worse at that as their arms retract, but even still, bound as I am about the face, arms and legs, all I can do is rock from side to side. I can’t see a thing, but I hear a long zipper open, and then I’m picked up from the shoulders and feet, lifted and then placed down inside some large, thick bag with a stiff bottom.
Then, just like that, they shove something else into my mouth, through the black cloth, tie it at the back of my head, silencing even my pathetically muffled cries, and the zipper tears shut.
And that’s that.
I’m hoisted up and trotted out, like some piece of furniture on moving day.
The bumping and jostling as I’m taken out into the hallway, to the elevator and then out onto the streets is only minor. It’s when they throw me into the back of some vehicle and my head bangs off the bottom of the bag painfully. Where is the doorman? How’s this happening to me?
Doors slam shut and like that, I’m off. To god knows where.
And Dimitri won’t even know I’m gone for hours.
25
It smells... sterile. Like that weird scent of a doctor’s office; bleach and other cleaning solutions muddled together into a different sort of funk. It’s unpleasant, yet I’m trying to gasp for breath, the bag and the hood all stifling my ability to breathe.
Not to mention the panic.
Tears soak the bag, but no matter how much I struggle, I’m trapped.
I can hear at least two men speaking in Russian, and my blood runs cold. Is this what Dimitri was warning me about? Did Viktor see me, and this is the end? Everything was so perfect, my life was just getting on track, and now it’s over.
I sob, and there’s a firm kick to my ribs. It steals my breath, and my eyes widen, looking at the dark nothingness before me. I’m all alone, no one knows where to find me, and I can almost smell the death in the air.
Is this where the Italian accountant was killed? It’s cold, and that would explain the smell of bleach. I can’t even beg for my life, though, with this gag in my mouth.
I hear more talking in Russian, and then the bag is unzipped, and very abruptly I am yanked out of it and lifted up. But not all the way, the two men holding my arms let my legs drag upon cold cement floors before I’m shoved down into a hard, metal chair. It’s a rough move, they slam me down so recklessly and without missing a beat I can feel handcuffs strapped to the chair and then me, both at my wrist and ankle.
More muttering in Russian, and then the gag is stripped away, and with a sudden yank the black cloth is taken off and I’m blinded by a bright light shining directly into my eyes.
“You think someone with your ties would know better than to stick your pretty little nose into a man’s serious business,” comes the harshly accented voice. But as I’m blinking my eyes and struggling to see, he slaps me across the face, hard, and I’m reeling and sputtering.
My body stings and burns as I struggle to get a better grasp of where I am. There’s no windows, no light except for the one burning my retinas.
“I don’t know anything, I swear,” and I find it so much easier to lie with conviction when it’s potentially life or death. I’ll say anything to get out of here. Anything!
“That no longer matters,” he says so casually, grasping a hold of my hair, coiling it about his fingers as he cruelly twists and forces me to stare up at him and the light. “You stuck your nose into the boss's business, and now it’s too late for questions about what you know. You’re a risk,” he says, almost hissing the final words.
Oh God. This is it. I close my eyes to hide my fear, so that I can pretend I’m anywhere but here. I think of how my day was going to be, buying a dress to make Dimitri’s jaw drop before he takes me out on the town. I imagine him coming home to find his apartment ransacked and me missing. He’ll know exactly what happened, and will blame himself.
“Please, please. I have money. Lots. I’ll give it to you,” I plead desperately.
“Little rich girl,” he says with such scorn, “money will not solve all your problems.”
And then, through my bleary eyes, I see Dimitri. Like an angel arisen to come save me, he pierces even that murky, hard-to-see film of tears.
“We caught this one trying to sneak in,” says the guard with a gun to Dimitri’s back, shoving him along.
I hear more Russian cursing, then the guy in front of me speaks loudly:
“How did he find us? Huh? You idiots,” he curses again.
“He was following us all the while, must have arrived just as we were making off with her,” explained the other man. But my eyes were solely for Dimitri then.
I blink away the tears to see him, standing there, half-business executive hunk, half disheveled would-be rescuer.
And yet now we’re both
here, caught and soon to be dead.
“Dimitri,” I whimper, leaning towards him the fraction of an inch that my bindings allow, as if just being nearer to him would make this all go away. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“He really shouldn’t have,” my captor says, a smug look on his face as he cracks his knuckles.
“Don’t worry, Sarah,” Dimitri says, sounding so calm. “I’ll have you out of here in just a moment.”
“The fuck you will!” says one of the brutes, and the guy with a gun to Dimitri’s back draws back his hand and strikes Dimitri in the face with the butt of the gun.
From there, everything happens so fast I can barely even fathom it.
Dimitri takes the hit, and I hear a crack as his broad jaw reels from the blow. My cry fills the air, but then without missing a beat, Dimitri takes hold of the man’s arm holding the gun with both hands. He head-butts the guy, twice, in quick succession, and a spray of red blood spurts out, covering Dimitri’s once expensive and stylish suit.
I stare in shock, as in mere fractions of moments it all unfolds.
The guy to Dimitri’s right comes at him, reaching out and grasping the back of his hair and yanking on his head. But Dimitri pries the gun from the other man’s hand that he holds tight, and fires off three shots into this guy’s torso.
Cursing fills the air, but Dimitri’s movements are swift and precise. He turns the gun back on the guy he bashed open the nose of, a single shot rings out as he fires up beneath his jaw, blowing out the top of his head in a gory mess.
But no matter how fast and sure Dimitri is, there’s still two guys to one of him. The other thug comes at him, but as Dimitri raises the pistol to fire, he bashes down on Dimitri’s arm, so he can’t fire at him.
Dimitri’s undeterred though, and as if he saw that coming, his free hand rockets up and he punches the guy right in the throat. One brutally hard punch and the man is choking, eyes wide.
I watch in horror as the lead thug in front of me pulls out his own gun, slower than the others, clearly not used to getting his hands dirty quite so often as his henchmen. But before he can get a shot off, Dimitri pulls the other guy down and rams his knee up into the man’s face, breaking another nose and sending another spurt of blood across his pants.
Shots ring out, and I know they’re not Dimitri’s. It’s the creep in front of me, but they miss their mark. Dimitri’s not sitting still for half a second, constantly in motion.
The head gangster is angry, he’s fired off twice, but Dimitri spun around, taking cover behind the brutalized man. He shouts out in a fit of rage:
“Stop or I’ll—” he doesn’t get to finish his words, or even point the gun at me to complete his threat before Dimitri unloads five rounds into him.
Like that, it is all over.
The most gruesome and gory scene I had ever imagined occurred, and it lasted but a few seconds. A brief, ghastly rescue, where Dimitri went from captive to savior.
A final shot and he ends the dying thug he’d hid behind, and then he comes to me, running a hand back over his sleek, tousled hair. He rummages through the leader’s pockets, grabbing the keys to the handcuffs.
His motions are seemingly calm, smooth, calculated, but as he comes to me to untie my binds, I can see that faint cracks in his facade. He killed four men to rescue me, and did so with a precision and practiced grace that stuns me. But he’s not unshaken.
“Are you alright?” he asks, and there’s some worry in his voice. This time he wasn’t fighting for survival, he was fighting for me. And that changes the equation. It changes everything. Made the stakes so much higher than he was used to. I could tell that just by the sound of his voice, the look in his eyes.
There’s blood and gore all around me, but I beg myself not to look at it. Instead. I focus on him, on the fear and anguish in his eyes, and I truly understand why he’d tried to push me away all those years ago. He never wanted to feel this, to have me grasped by his life.
I nod, but I need to get out of here. I need to run from the smell of coppery blood and bleach, from the reality of what’s just happened. My arms wrap around his neck, and I can barely stand or walk I’m so badly shaken.
It’s horrible. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I want to throw up.
Dimitri picks me up into his arms as if it was nothing, the most casual of things. But as he’s carrying me towards the stairs to exit, we hear the sound of the heavy metal door down the stairwell swing open and he rushes to the side, and just in the nick of time.
The door to the room soon after is jarred open, and we only got behind it barely. Dimitri puts me down as we watch a thick, stocky goon push his way past, gun pointed and at the ready.
But he’s not looking the right way, and Dimitri swings his own gun up just in time to fire and put an end to him in a spray of red.
Another guy emerges out of the stairwell behind the first, and he grabs Dimitri’s arm, pulling it down and twisting the gun away. He rounds the corner, pointing his own gun at me and for a brief flicker of a moment I think it’s all over as I hear a gunshot go off.
But Dimitri grasps the other man’s arm in return, pushing him wide, and the bullet is fired just to the left of my shoulder, causing me to cry out.
The two are grappling, but Dimitri’s gun is knocked away!
“No!” I shout, but it was a false alarm.
Instead, he just drops it, and rather than trying to shoot the man he twists his arm free and punches the guy in the gut. It’s enough to knock the wind from him before he head-butts the man. He crumples lower, his arm pointing up now, but the gun still pointed away from either Dimitri or I.
It becomes a contest of raw strength until Dimitri knees the guy in the face, then raises his leg up. While holding the man’s two arms, Dimitri kicks down into his throat, stomping it in until he’s down on his back and finally… his limbs go limp.
I’ve never seen anything so gruesome as I have in the last few minutes, and I clutch the wall as my stomach tries to bring up the bile in my throat. I haven’t eaten for so long, though, and there’s nothing to throw up no matter how much my body wants to.
Dimitri simply pries the gun from the guy’s hand and holds it at the ready as he reaches out, taking hold of my hand.
“Come on. Let’s not linger here any longer, Sarah,” he says urgently, pulling me around the door and down the stairs as he hurries us along the cold, empty stairwell.
He keeps his gun ready to fire, but as we reach the bottom of the stairs and he cautiously peeks out along each direction of the street outside, he dashes out with me in tow. It’s not long before we come to his car, parked just around the corner, and he casts off the gun into an alleyway dumpster before helping me into the car then hopping into the driver seat.
I’m shaking, but I brush off Dimitri’s concerns. I don’t want to be near this any longer than he does.
So many thoughts are rushing through my mind, and yet I can’t focus on any one long enough to actually speak. I rock myself back and forth in the passenger seat as he pulls onto the road. I don’t know where he’s headed, but I just want to be away from it all.
I look down and notice there’s blood spattered on me, and it makes me dry heave again, my hand gripped so tight on the armrest that my knuckles are turning white.
Dimitri glances at me, concern evident in his expression, but he must realize how bad I need to get to a shower. He turns onto a more familiar road, heading back to my place as it's nearer.
We don’t talk the rest of the way home. What is there to say? There’s no way to bring what I just saw into words, my feelings of fear and anguish and disgusted relief all rushing like a tsunami within my heart.
He saved me, but at such a high cost.
He’s a killer.
Some part of me knew it all along. The part that watched as he and Slava kicked the shit out of Anton knew it was a possibility. That it would escalate, become something more terrifying. I didn’t want to admi
t it to myself, but now, there’s no denying I knew what he was.
It’s not that he killed those men. It’s that those weren’t the first men he killed. He was too quick, too practiced, for that to be his first time. And now, he seems on edge, but I have a feeling that it’s more about his concern for me.
I glance over at him, the harsh, mid-day light making the shadows on his face more dramatic. He’s driving cautiously, trying not to alert anyone to our bodies still marred with blood, and when he finally pulls up to my house, we both breathe a sigh of relief.
“Joanna won’t be home, she’s at work,” I say and he nods, exiting the vehicle and opening my door for me. I don’t have the keys, but I go to my bedroom window and wriggle it up. It’s never locked right, despite me complaining to the landlord a dozen times, and for once I’m grateful that she’s lazy.
Dimitri slips in after me, glancing around my room. It’s plain, bare, and to him it must look pathetic. Like a poor college girl’s dorm, dank and slightly smelling of mildew.
“I’ll wait,” he says simply, I guess because he wants to give me time alone to process what just happened. To give me an out, in case I want to run. In case I can’t handle who he really is.
He has no way of knowing that I’ve known all along. That his violence, his connections, at once drew me in and repelled me, a powerful force keeping me in his orbit.
“You can join me,” I say gently, and it’s the most surreal moment. Both of us covered in blood spatter, standing in my dark bedroom, and that tension between us growing to a fevered pitch.
His hand clasps my face before I can move, his mouth finding mine. Seconds later and both of his hands are beneath my ass, hoisting me up and pressing me against the wall. I’m trapped between him and it, his heart pounding fast against his ribs.
I feel his hardness throb against me, and I grind back, making him growl his approval. Pulling me from the wall, he heads towards the bathroom with my guidance, but we barely separate for more than a second as we turn the water on and strip free of our bloody clothes.
Captive of the Hitman: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance Novel Page 29
