No sign of him.
The tempo of my pulse kicks up a notch as it nears the two minute mark. I strain my ears, listening hard for any sound outside. There’s nothing — not the rustling of tree leaves, not the rattling of a trash can lid, not the sound of footsteps or — god forbid — gunshots ringing out in the early morning sky.
Two minutes.
Sighing deeply, I turn on leaden feet to face the pantry. The last thing I want to do is barricade myself in there… but even without him here to yell at me, I can feel the weight of Conor’s disapproval looming large over my head.
Bossy, infuriating man.
I’m halfway to the pantry when I hear the soft rap of his knuckles on the back door.
Oh, thank god.
He’s back.
I race across the room to let him in, fully prepared to scold him for scaring the shit out of me for no reason. After I kiss him. With tongue. And maybe a little butt-groping.
What can I say? The man has a killer ass.
“Two minutes on the nose,” I say, smiling as I pull the door wide. The smile falls off my face when I see the man standing just outside, grinning back at me.
“Shelby Hunt,” Lefty says in a faint Russian accent. “We meet again.”
A millisecond later, his hand rears back and slams into my face, knocking me out cold in a single punch.
Chapter Fourteen
GONE HUNT(ING)
When I wake up,I’m in a dark, enclosed space. It takes me a moment to realize it’s the trunk of a car. A car that’smoving— I can hear the distinct rumble of tires against the road beneath me. Where we’re headed, I have no idea.
Probably straight to Alexei Petrov, if I had to guess.
I try to scream, but there’s a piece of duct tape covering my mouth. I try to struggle, but the zip-tie binding my hands together makes that virtually impossible.
I suppose there’s a lesson to be learned in all of this about opening the door for strangers… but my head is pounding too hard to discern what it is. Probably due to the golfball-sized welt on my left cheekbone, swelling more with each passing moment.
Ow.
Lefty really clocked me.
I try to slow my breathing rate, dragging air in and out of my nose as I take stock of my situation. There’s nothing in the trunk that can help me escape. And, even if there were, I probably couldn’t reach it in my current predicament.
I’m barefoot, wearing nothing but a thin pair of yoga pants and one of Conor’s baggy t-shirts. It still smells like him, which might be a comfort if I knew whether he was alive or dead, right now. I’m relatively certain nothing in the world will be able to soothe me until I know the answer to that question.
So help me god, if the Evanoffs laid so much as a hand on him… I will make them pay.
Brave words for a girl tied up in a car trunk.
If I knew how long I was unconscious, I’d have a much better idea of where we might be headed. As it is, I’m cut adrift without any sense of time or place.
Minutes? Hours? Days?
If the latter, I could be anywhere in the world by now. Hell, I could pop out of this trunk and find myself in Moscow. (Okay, so, it’s more likely I’ll pop out and find myself somewhere like Malden or Medford… but the point remains the same.)
My head feels like it’s been detached from my body, put inside a dryer, and set to a sixty-minute tumble cycle. Everything is jumbled up. I try to focus on finding a way to escape, but it’s not an easy task. Between the blow to my face and the not-so-minor fact that, for all I know, the man I adore is lying somewhere in a pool of his own blood… my thoughts are one great sloshing wave of panic, ebbing and receding with each passing moment.
He is not dead,I tell myself over and over as the car rolls onward to destinations unknown.I refuse to even contemplate that possibility.