He kneels in front of me. “If I take these off, will you promise not to fight me?” he asks.
It takes me a while to decide, but I still nod in the end. I don’t want to cause more harm to myself, and I’m really not in a position to deny him. It’s going to be hard to get these off myself, and who knows what this man would do to me if I tried. Even if he said he wouldn’t hurt me, I don’t trust him not to if push comes to shove.
After all … he looks like he’s from the Mafia.
Did Marcello’s men already find me?
An inkling of hope swashes through me like a wave crashing onto my soul, and I hate what it does to me, how it makes me yearn for the safety and comfort of Marcello’s home.
But I must not let it tempt me.
The man in front of me undoes the belt laced around my feet first, then the string around my wrists. There are red marks all over my skin now, and it hurts. But at least my anger is quelled a little when I look at the druggie on the floor bleeding out of his brain.
“Are they dead?” I ask.
“You won’t be harmed by them,” he says, and he extends a hand.
I glare at it with great suspicion. “Who are you, and why did you come here?”
A soft smile forms on his face. “My name is Cillian.”
Finally, a name. I take his hand, and he lifts me from the floor.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
My heart sinks into my shoes. So I was right.
“Took us quite some time, but I’m glad,” he adds, and he grabs my arm and suddenly drags me along. “Come. We have to go before more of them arrive.”
I try to jerk myself loose, but his grip is too strong. “Wait. Where are you taking me?”
When he doesn’t reply, I slam a fist down on his arm, forcing him to let go. “Did Marcello send you?”
Cillian pauses, glancing at me over his shoulder, the look in his eyes not so sweet anymore. “Marcello?”
The silence between us is deafening.
“You think Marcello sent me?”
My pupils dilate.
“Then …?”
“You know who.”
It takes a few seconds for it to click. There is only one other person in this world who could be looking for me.
My father.
I choke on my own breath.
But he’s dead, isn’t he?
I choked him behind the steering wheel and watched him drown along with me. No one came to save him.
I shake my head. “That’s not possible …”
“When our family heard of what happened at the warehouse, we mobilized immediately and went out to do a search and rescue. You vanished with Marcello, only to resurface in this town out of all the places you could go to,” Cillian explains, and he grabs my wrist once more. “Now, come. Unless you want me to do this the hard way.” The look in his eyes is murderous, and his free hand hovers over his gun.
I can’t possibly win against a man like him. Not with this much of a disadvantage. And something tells me he wouldn’t blink twice to use it on me. Not to kill me, but at least wound me in a way to make me comply.
And I’m not about to risk that.
So I sigh and let him pull me through the house, carefully stepping over the dead bodies and around the pools of blood as though it will prevent the dead from waking up. And he leads me right out of the house, straight into the sunlight, all the way to a car parked in front.
“Get in,” he barks, opening the door.
I sit down, and before I can even say a word, the door’s already closed.
Just like that, my freedom has been stripped away from me again.
This time, not by Marcello’s henchmen … but by my fake father’s.
Cillian hops in front of the steering wheel and shuts the door tight. The locks click into place, and the sound makes me jolt up and down in my seat.
The car begins to drive, and I gaze out the window at my hideout, which quickly vanishes from view. I don’t think I’ll ever see that place again, and that saddens me a bit.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
But I already know the answer. I just ask because I need to hear it from someone else’s mouth. Because my brain can’t cope with the undeniable truth.
“Home. Your real home. Where your mother, Molly, is waiting for you.”
Marcello
Days later
I cannot stop thinking about my Kitten.
How lonely she must be, all alone out there in the wild, with nothing and no one to help her.
No money, no car, no home.
The men who sold her at the auction took it all away from her, and now she has nothing left except her memories.
I wonder where she’ll go.
She won’t go back to the fucking church after I chased her there. No way in hell would she want to put Andrea in that kind of danger. But where else can she go?
A shelter?
Fuck, I’ve searched every one of them and still haven’t fucking found her. Where the fuck could she be?
The days since she ran have been endless, each one more exhausting than the last. Every day has been spent searching for my Kitten without so much as a trace.
Now, Claudio and I are camped out at a twenty-four-hour diner for a much-needed break. A lone waitress comes over to refill our coffees. It’s my third cup since we walked in less than fifteen minutes ago. Yet it’s not doing a damn thing to stop the anger from coursing through my veins.
“You boys doing all right?” she asks.
She seems genuinely concerned. We must really look like shit.
“Just trying to find out where the fuck my girl ran off to, and whether or not a dead man came back to life,” I drawl before I can stop myself.
Her eyes widen. She’s not sure whether I’m joking or not. Claudio stifles an exhausted chuckle.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” she finally recovers. She whisks away from our table with a worried glance back over her shoulder.
When she’s gone, I turn back to Claudio. “Now, where were we?”
He stirs cream and sugar into his coffee as he runs through everything yet again.
“You saw the car with Harper and Frank go over the edge into the water. You went in after them. You pulled her out. The car sank. You left.”
I’ve told him this story at least a dozen times to try to piece together what route she might’ve taken so I can find her. That needs to be addressed, along with the fact that Frank somehow magically disappeared.
“The first recovery team arrived about twenty minutes later. They saw the tracks and secured the perimeter. We had a dive team there within the hour. They went down and found the car. Empty.”
“Empty,” I repeat. “Fuck,” I say under my breath. “Where the fuck could Frank be?”
“I know it’s hard to believe, Marcello—” Claudio begins.
I let out a short barking laugh. “Drowned men don’t walk out of the river.”
“We have to assume he did. We have no other choice.”
I sigh and relent. This isn’t Claudio’s fault. I need to breathe, think, recalibrate.
I glance out the window. The dawn traffic filters by. Normal people on their way to work. Oblivious to the shit that happens right underneath their noses.
Turning my attention back to Claudio, I muse, “So let’s say he’s alive. Let’s say he levitated right on out of the goddamn river. Where would he go? What would he do? The Russians just watched him put a bullet in Igor’s head. I don’t think he’s gonna be welcomed back there with open arms.”