The two men flinched and then redoubled their efforts to regain control of the computer.
Dree made it past the van to the garage door, and she slipped around the side and into the night.
The winter night was colder than the warehouse had been inside. She began running through the parking lot toward the dark street. The frigid wind sliced through her thin ball gown.
Gravel slid under her high-heeled shoes, which she hadn’t known were worth thousands of dollars but Kir Sokolov had been pretty sure of it. Still, slipping and sliding, she made it to the road, which seemed to be in a semi-industrial part of the French town.
The bright lights of traffic flickered in the dark street at an intersection just a hundred yards away.
Dree ran.
If she could reach that intersection, there should be more people around, and she could probably find a store or a hotel to duck into and lose her kidnappers. Maybe she could figure out how to use Max’s cell phone that she’d shoved into her bra, but it was probably locked, and she didn’t know his PIN and couldn’t figure out any other way to unlock it off the top of her head. Or maybe she could find a store clerk to call the police for her, if she could communicate with him somehow. Dree didn’t speak French.
Tall skinny trees lined the road, a dark wall on the side. If somebody was following her, she’d veer off the road and go overland.
She couldn’t hear any cars behind her, but her breath was rasping in her ears and her heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest as she pumped her legs and sprinted on the asphalt road. Dree was not a runner.
At the intersection, the fenced-in lots on the corners were dark, closed for the night. The block building with a sign that bore a car and a wrench was probably an auto mechanic.
All the way down the street, the empty road sliced between darkened businesses. The plants, leafless for the winter, swayed in the cold wind. If she’d been in New Mexico, a tumbleweed would’ve rolled across the road at that point.
Dree kept walking through the commercial area of town. Streetlights poured yellow light at the street like spilling mustard.
Her shoes’ straps dug into her feet, and her arches were beginning to cramp.
A block down the road, and a stoplight blinked on a cross street. Dree jaywalked against the red light to get to the other side of the street because if the police came out of nowhere and arrested her, that would be just fine.
But none did.
As she peered down the street, cars crossed the road a few blocks farther away.
Dree got to walking. She ignored the pain in her feet and in her shoulders where those goons had wrenched her joints when she’d been tied up. She needed to get to that street, and it was just a matter of time until she got to that street.
Graffiti scrawled on the buildings, and Dree wished she could read French. Dead grass spiked up between the panels of sidewalk and poked her ankles.
Dree finally got to the intersection with the more heavily traveled street, but there were just a few taillights off in the distance in one direction, and one set of white-blazing headlights coming from the other.
As the headlights neared, Dree jumped up and down, screaming “Hey!” and waving her dress’s jacket like a white flag.
The sedan slowed and pulled over next to her, obviously having seen her distress.
She was saved.She was saved!
Dree pounded on the car’s window as the glass slid down. “Oh, thank you! Do you speak English? I need the police.Policía?No, that’s Spanish. I don’t speak French. No parlor Frenchy. I’m sorry. I’msosorry.Ustedes hablan español?”
The back doors of the car flapped open.
Inside the car’s front seat, a matronly looking woman with mahogany- and oak-colored hair smiled at her. “Dree Clark, imagine finding you here.”
Dree backpedaled, but two thugs had already emerged from the back seat. She only ran a few steps backward before they grabbed her. They forced her into the back seat.
Matryona Sokolov swiveled in her seat, shaking her finger and tutting at Dree. “You should not try to get away. You don’t want to make me angry. Next time, I would send someone much worse than my brother Kir to find you.”
Chapter Six
THE PIRATE KING
Maxence
