She lets out a strangled scream, and the gun that she had in her hand goes flying. I knew it all along. I knew she never intended to let me escape alive, and whatever story she concocted for Matteo would involve explaining away my dead body.
The guard never made her roll down the back window to check the car, for one thing. She lied about that – because he was in on it with her. I never needed to be in the trunk. And why was that blanket so conveniently there? To wrap up my corpse after she killed me.
She could have done anything to me if I were in the trunk, including setting the car on fire or just rolling it off the edge of a cliff.
Concetta staggers back, nose broken, stunned. I grab the gun off the ground and bash her in the head with it again and again.
Then I press it up against her head. “Climb in the trunk.”
“Fuck you! You don’t know how to use that thing!”
I point the gun down and squeeze, grazing the side of her leg, and she screams in shock and pain. My ears are ringing, but I’m free, I’m free!
She climbs into the trunk, sobbing. “I’ll kill you, you bitch, I’ll kill you…”
I slam the trunk shut.
Heart racing, I run to the front of the car and rummage through her purse to grab her cellphone.
Her phone is turned off. I turn it back on again, but it’s locked. I hurry back to the trunk and open it, gun pointed at her, and force her to give me the code.
Unfortunately, we are in the middle of nowhere, with no cell phone reception.
And I have absolutely no idea where we are, so I climb in and start driving. Eventually we come to a larger road, and I make a right on that and keep driving for about twenty minutes until I come to an abandoned dollar store, and I pull over and park. The cellphone works, and I am ready to weep with relief. I’ve seen road signs – I can tell the police where I am.
First I call my mother, and the phone goes to voicemail. Same thing with my father. I leave them both messages. I’m a little puzzled and actually kind of hurt that their messages sound completely calm. If my teenage daughter were kidnapped, I am pretty sure I that I would be sitting by the phone 24/7 waiting for news. And I would have my outgoing message changed. They must’ve been too frazzled.
Impulsively, I use Concetta’s phone to do a quick internet search on my name. And I nearly fall over from the shock. There is no mention of me anywhere. Nobody has reported me missing.
My knees turn liquid, and I stumble and nearly fall. All the air has been sucked from my lungs.
This is impossible. Matteo was telling me the truth all along? What cruel alternate universe have I stumbled into? There is absolutely no way my parents would just blithely ignore my disappearance. If nothing else, my father would at least use it politically.
Frantic, I call my mother’s office, and the secretary answers. “This is Bailey,” I say furiously. “I need to speak to my mother immediately.”
“I have been instructed to tell you that you made your choice and she doesn’t want to talk to you. She wishes you the best of luck.”
Now my fear is mixed with rage, roaring through me like a freight train. “Exactly what choice does she think I made?” I scream into the phone.
The phone disconnects. Seriously. I have been missing for almost a month, and the phone just disconnected.
I call back, and I scream into the phone, using the only threat that I know will work. “I will call the press, don’t think I won’t! That’s my next phone call.”
There is a pause. “Hold on – let me talk to your mother.”
Seconds tick by and tears run down my face. I am sick with shock and hurt. My parents. My sister. I lived my life for our family. I was the perfect daughter. I ate, slept, and breathed their political campaigns. I mean nothing to them, nothing at all?
My mother comes on the phone, and every word she says is dripping with frost and indifference. “Bailey, I’m surprised that you would call, since you seemed to make it quite clear that you wanted nothing to do with us ever again.”
I fall to my knees, drowning.
“Mother, I was kidnapped and held prisoner for the last few weeks!” I scream the words. They sound hollow, weak, all my strength stolen from me. “I was locked up and beaten and held prisoner! How could you not look for me, how?”
“Well, that’s certainly a change from the story you told in your last texts and emails. Run out of money, have we?” she says nastily, in the voice she used when she fired our maid for stealing from my sister’s purse.
I burst into tears. “I was…kidnapped by a man…a man named Matteo Rossi!” I am crying so hard I can hardly talk. “He’s the…the man pretending to be Steven, Dad’s new donor.” Great gulping sobs tear my words apart.
And my mother’s viciousness tears me to pieces. “Oh, really! Steven is now named Matteo? He’s been talking to your father several times a week, you know, and he’s supposedly holding you prisoner while he does that? Even for you, that’s a bit much.”
She’s killing me. Her casual dismissal destroys me. “I am your daughter! Why won’t you believe me? How could you do this to me?”
“How could we do this to you? How could you do this to us, right in the middle of the campaign? Run away, send us those horrible embarrassing emails, threaten to go to the press if we ever tried to find you, threaten to say that your father had molested you if we wouldn’t just leave you alone and let you live your life? And you told Reg’s parents that he’s gay! Reg has moved out of their house now, you know. You’ve destroyed their relationship.”
I gasp at Matteo’s cruelty. He had no right. “I would never do that! Never, ever! The people who kidnapped me took my phone, and obviously they used it to send you those messages.”
“Bailey, we have been on your home computer, and we read your online diary.” Her voice has gone from nasty to just bored now. “You have been talking about these things for months. How much you’ve always hated us, what hypocrites we are, how you can’t wait to get away from us. And as it turns out, Reg is in fact gay. How would anyone else have known that? How would anyone have known so many details about us, and about him? Honestly, Bailey, how stupid do you think we are?”
I’m gulping for air, mad with panic. Matteo did this. All of this. He had been planning this for months. Once they found me, he was smart enough to know that he couldn’t easily get away with just kidnapping the daughter of a senator, that it would be too risky. So he set me up, perfectly.
But how could it have been so easy? Why wouldn’t my family fight for me?
“Mother,” I try again, brokenly. “I did not write those entries, and I did not send those messages. I love you. You’re my mother. Don’t you love me?”
“If you come home, we will have you committed to a mental institution, she says briskly. “We have enough evidence, from your computer and from this phone call, which I am recording. Believe me, your father can get you locked up for life. After everything we’ve ever done for you—”
I can’t take it anymore. I hang up on my mother, my lifeline, my hope for freedom, and I climb to my feet and lean on the car’s hood and just bawl. I howl with sorrow, clutching my stomach.
I knew that my parents – or rather the Baileys – were cold, calculating people, fueled by ambition and worshiping harsh gods of power and influence, but this… I never let myself see their true selves. They were my mother and father, and I wanted to love them. Wanted to believe in their innate goodness.
And I hate Matteo for turning my family against me, for stripping away my life of lies, for forcing me to stare right into their rotten, loveless souls and see what they really are.
I lean on the car, lost, as a cool breeze whips through my hair and rattles a crumpled-up newspaper across the weedy parking lot. A patrol car glides by, and the officer glances out the window at me but drives on.
Concetta starts kicking against the inside of the trunk and uttering muffled cries, and a horrible thought hits me like a lightning
bolt. I am in a parking lot with a woman I have just beaten up, tied up, shot in the leg, and stuffed in a car trunk.
Cars are driving down the road – too far away to hear Concetta’s screams, but if anyone pulled into the parking lot they would hear her. My fingerprints are all over the inside of this car. What the hell am I going to do now? I have no money, Concetta has nothing in her purse but credit cards I can’t use, and my family is threatening to have me locked up in an institution. And if I were locked up in a mental institution, I’m completely sure that Matteo and his family could get to me, and they would, to make sure that I never talked about all the things I learned when I stayed with them.
I am beyond screwed. I am dead. The Rossi family can find me anywhere. If I let myself get arrested and thrown in prison, I am dead. If I let myself get carted away to an asylum, I am dead. And then the phone rings, and I see Matteo’s phone number come up.
My hands shake as I answer the phone.
“Concetta, you fucking bitch, I will gut you with a rusty chainsaw right now if you don’t tell me what you’ve done with Natasha.”
“Matteo, it’s me. It’s Natasha.” I don’t even recognize my own voice. It’s hopeless, drained of life. “Help me, Matteo.”
Chapter 18
Natasha
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes?” I say, confused. “How is that possible? I thought you were away somewhere.”
“I’ve been on your tail for hours. I was notified as soon as Concetta left the property. The car she stole had a GPS tracker in it.”
My heart thuds in my chest. She thought she was being smart turning off her cell phone so nobody could trace her, but she couldn’t outsmart Matteo. What a fool she is. I can hear her yelling and banging on the inside of the car trunk still. I almost feel sorry for her, despite everything, because I know what’s coming.
Matteo is there in ten minutes, with another car pulling up right behind him. I don’t feel anything when I see him; not fear, not anger, not even relief. My parents crumpled me up and threw me in the gutter like a used candy wrapper. I am numb. I am nothing, nobody, unloved and unworthy.
I watch as if from a million miles away as Matteo walks over to the car and punches the trunk. “Shut up, Concetta!” he barks.
There’s instant silence. I can’t imagine what Concetta must be feeling right now. He opens the trunk and I hear wailing, babbling, lying. I look away, hugging myself to remind me that I’m real. I still exist, don’t I? Even if my parents have completely erased me.
Concetta’s gone quiet again. I glance back and I see that he’s duct-taping her mouth shut. Then one of his men slams the trunk shut, climbs into the driver’s seat and drives away.
I stand there with no fight left, a lost, broken thing. He stalks over to me and I brace myself – for a blow, a punch, insults…can I even feel anymore? Can I feel anything but pain?
What he says is the last thing in the world I expect.
Curses, insults, rage, disappointment…that’s what I expect.
Instead…
“When I was eighteen years old, I made a list.” He runs his fingers through his hair. He looks frazzled and tired and…worried?
“You…what?” My voice is weak and shaky. I struggle to find strength inside me, but I feel so lost right now.
“Mischa wants you dead. He’s using my list to try to end you.”
“What are you talking about?” I’ve never seen Matteo rattled before.
He glances around, scowling. “I’ve turned off my phone. I need to talk fast before Mischa figures that out. I’m supposed to be allowing him to listen to us at all times right up until we’re married.”
“I don’t understand why Mischa has anything to do with our relationship,” I protest. “You told me that he’s the boss this year when it comes to inter-family disputes. What does that have to do with you and me?”
“Anything to do with the Peredyshka agreement comes under that category. And when we found out that you were alive, he immediately wanted you put to death, to discourage any of the other women in the family from doing what your mother did. Her disobedience was an enormous slap in the face to the Dubrova family, and he wanted you to die, very painfully.”
Fear blooms in my belly, burning away the numbness. “Why didn’t I?”
“Because I successfully petitioned the Council. We couldn’t let you be free, a living testament to betrayal. The only option was for me to take you as my bride – or you would have been dead within a day of the DNA test coming back.”
So my horrible, skeevy real father hadn’t lied about that – they did a secret DNA test from my discarded coffee cup.
“They’d have tortured and murdered me, an innocent woman who had nothing to do with them…” I sway on my feet. Every time I think I understand the depth of evil in the world, I find out that I’m wrong. There’s really no bottom.
“But you are one of us, Natasha, whether you knew it or not.” There’s sympathy on his face. Understanding. He’s finally acknowledging how hard it is for me to understand his world. “The Council and I came to an agreement, despite Mischa’s protests. I had to come up with a way to ensure that your disappearance wouldn’t cause too much outcry that could lead back to us somehow. That is why I spent time turning your family against you. And then I had to test that you were a virgin. If you lost your virginity for any reason before our marriage – yes, even rape – under the Peredyshka agreement, you would be put to death. I am sure that Mischa is behind both attempts to rape you, but I can’t prove it.”
The numb feeling is burned away by anger. “So you have to just sit there and take everything he dishes out?” I say indignantly.
He shakes his head, his expression solemn. “There is one option. I can challenge him to a fight to the death. I have considered it, but I am a man who is realistic about my abilities. I could kill most men with my bare hands. Mischa is not most men – no head of a family gets there by being a weakling, and he and I are evenly matched. Also, he would find a way to cheat, I am sure of it. And because the Council doesn’t want a bunch of pointless, macho death-feuds every time the two families disagree, there is a heavy price to pay for the loser’s family. They have the right to take custody of any female child under the age of eighteen from my immediate family. Valentina, for instance. That is why Valentina is staying with me this month; the council insisted, to force me to see what was at risk, every day. And they can marry her off to anyone they like when she’s of age. The few times that’s happened, the winner has married the girls off to absolute brutes, to make a point.”
I suck in a sharp breath. “No! That isn’t fair!”
That earns me an angry look. “Please don’t say stupid things, Natasha. It is the law of our world. Complaining about it is like complaining about cancer or gravity. You deal with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. All right, I need to explain this to you. The list… When I was eighteen years old and selected to be married to a Peredyshka bride, I was asked what I wanted in a wife. That is part of the truce agreement. I was to write up a list and hand it over to the family raising my future bride, so that they could start to train her specifically to please me.”
I don’t bother to hide my grimace of disgust. It feels so good to be able to show my real feelings for once.
He ignores me and continues. “Believe me, I would like to go back in time and beat the shit out of my eighteen-year-old self, but I had no idea any of this was coming. The list is supposed to just be a suggestion. The men never marry before they are at least in their mid-twenties, and by then they will have matured considerably. My list was typical dumb teenage bullshit. The stuff about learning fluent Italian, that wasn’t so bad. But the other stuff… My wife should learn my favorite dishes and cook every meal for me. My wife should clean our entire house spotless every day. My wife should never complain. My wife should accept that I will have many mistresses, because she should only be concern
ed with my happiness, not hers.”
“Eighteen-year-old you sounds like a real asshole.” I don’t usually use language like that, but the situation calls for it.
Matteo glances around again, as if afraid we’re being listened to. “Most eighteen-year-old boys are, and I happened to have an excess of machismo at that age. Bu what Mischa did, he argued to the Council that in order to say that the truce agreement was being followed and you were a successful Peredyshka bride, you would have to follow the list to the letter.”
I’m speechless. My entire fate is in the hands of lunatics.
“First your father was supposed to take you and train you. He isn’t the one who sent your would-be rapist, by the way. I was.”
“What?” I cry out furiously.
“I had to, because I needed an excuse to take you away from your father. The man who I sent there thought he was being hired by Mischa, but it was me. I timed it to make sure that he wouldn’t actually be able to rape you. If I hadn’t, your father would have found an excuse to kill you within days of bringing you home.”
I can’t believe how many people want me dead.
“So, after that, Mischa and I argued with the council again. e They agreed that he would be allowed to move us into a house of his choosing that was wired for surveillance, so he could monitor us the entire month up until the wedding. And I could not tell you about it, or tell you the consequences of any defiance on your part.”
“The Council agreed to this craziness?”
He just shrugs resignedly. “They’re not exactly rooting for you either. My family is well-respected by them – It’s the only reason that they agreed to this at all. Mischa actually tried to have us moved into a forty-room mansion, and I had to argue my way down to a smaller house, because you would never have been able to clean the house he chose for you. The Council agreed to give me a little bit of leeway because of the unusual situation, but they said that if you did not quickly come around and embrace your role, you would be committing treason, and that is a crime punishable by death.”
Matteo: A Dark Mafia Hate Story Page 15
