My phone buzzes as I get my door shut and turn on an old lamp.
“Stewart here.”
“Lucas. It’s Cormac.”
My grip tightens on my phone and the screen cracks. “Aye, Chieftain.”
Fecking Chieftain Cormac MacTavish shouldn't be calling me. He made it clear I was dead to the clan.
“Catriona, she’s-” His authoritative voice deserts him for a moment before he regains his composure. “She’s been taken. We’ve got nothing. No sign. No trail to follow.”
“I’ll charter a jet and be there within twelve hours.”
“I’m sending my personal jet for ye,” he says.
“Takes too long.” My sentences shorten when emotion clogs my throat. “I’ll be there.”
Then the Chieftain - who nearly shot me when I visited him that day three years ago - says something shocking.
“Thank ye, Lucas. I… we need ye.”
***
Molniya - Russian for Thunderbolt
Gallus - Scottish slang for cheeky, arrogant and pretentious
Braw - Scottish slang for fine or attractive
Paleerie - Scottish slang for a tantrum
Sovietnik - the second in command in a Russian Bratva
Otets - Russian for father
Chapter Two
In which Catriona wakes up in a fairytale gone wrong.
Catriona…
I’m not sure which is worse.
How I feel, or how I smell.
Cautiously raising one shaky arm and sniffing, I scrunch up my nose. Aye, I smell like a cat vomited on me. Or fifteen cats.
As for how I feel, this tops my twenty-fifth birthday when the girls got me absolutely blootered by lining up twenty-five shots of Scotch. I made it to twelve before I passed out. The expression on Ma’s face when I woke up in my childhood bed was chilling.
“Why’m I here?” I groaned.
She folded her arms, gazing down at me icily. “You somehow escaped your cousins. And your bodyguard. And your driver. An Uber dropped you off here. The driver said this was the only address you could remember. I paid your two-hundred-and-twenty-pound tab. I’ll be expecting that back.”
“Ah, sweet Mother Mary, tell me Da dinnae see me,” I’d whined.
There was an arch of her elegant brow. “He wanted to leave you to sleep it off on the front lawn.”
That’s pretty much my current state.
