Sarah craned her neck, looking over the couch to see him.
Red blood bubbles clung to Blaze’s battered face, and black scabs had dried under his swollen lower lip.
Sarah tried to reach toward him, to wake herself up because this must be a nightmare.
The two mercenaries dragged Blaze to the doorway to the kitchen, where the one with the injured shoulder told the other in Russian that he couldn’t carry Blaze this way, that he would have to walk to the car on his own two feet.
The skin-headed mercenary pulled a knife out of his boot.
Horror jumped in her veins. “Don’t hurt him!” Sarah called out.
He glared at her and popped the zip tie around Blaze’s ankles with the knife, then he grinned horribly at her. “You wiggle funny when I cut off your air. We’ll have fun with that.”
Blaze glared at the guy through blood-swollen eyelids, a laser-sharp glance that should have combusted him on the spot.
The guy didn’t burst into flame, though. The two mercenaries shoved and yanked Blaze out of the living room, and the kitchen door slammed a moment later.
Sarah flopped back on the floor from where she’d been holding a curl to watch Blaze be taken away. This was insane. No one in Kalona got kidnapped by mercenaries sent by the Russian mafia.
The town would gossip about her fordecades.
Although now that she’d told Katie who her father was, they would probably nod and indulge in magical thinking so they could believe it couldn’t happen to them and feel secure in their beds at night, because their ancestors were not bad people.
Actually, that was exactly why it wouldneverhappen to them, because their ancestors had lived here for generations and weren’t on the run from the Russian mafia.
Yeah, it was unfair, but farming was unfair. The weather was unfair, corn smut was unfair, and declining seed generation rates were unfair.
Everything was unfair, so she might as well get used to it.
She sighed, not that she was going to have time to get used to anything.
The two of them came back and jerked Sarah to her feet, the one guy getting a little gropey around her backside, but they seemed to be in a hurry to shove her in the back seat of an SUV.
The awful one who wanted to suffocate her asked, “Why your phone make so much sound all the time.”
Notifications from people seeking tarot card readings, most likely. “Because I have friends who love me and will notice I’m missing and will call the cops!”
“Yeah, whatever.”
In the SUV, the guy sitting next to her was one of the mercenaries, a sallow skinhead type who moaned and clutched his shoulder.
The dweeb who’d been her nemesis this whole time skidded into the front seat beside the driver and slammed the door.
Terror clutched her heart. “Where’s Blaze?”
That jerk angled his head slightly as if she wasn’t worth the effort of fully turning around. “Blaze Robinson is in other SUV. We separate you so you can’t work together. Fucking chickens.”
Driving to the airport took almost an hour, and Sarah didn’t flippin’ talk to any of those jerks the whole time.
They talked to each other in Russian, though. Mostly directions on getting to the terminal.
Sarah was certain of rescue at the Cedar Rapids airport because Iowa folks would not mind their own business when two tied-up people were being hustled through security to one of the seven gates. Iowans were brave, fair people. Even strangers would intervene because it takes a village, and theywerethe village.
Not like the East Coast, you know?
The SUVs spun away from the airport’s low terminal building and drove to a hangar where a turboprop plane with a spiky blackKGpainted on the tail slowly rolled onto the tarmac.
A private plane.
