She was never going to be able to eat cotton candy again, on principle.
Reiko tried to at least flex her fingers, hoping to keep some life in them despite the wretched angle. Every movement made her shoulders hurt worse. She’d have whimpered if not for the thing in her mouth.
If I could just see…If she could see, she could have tried rolling to her knees. Maybe tried knee-walking to something that would help her up, or even better, cut her arms free. She didn’t think her wrists were bound by handcuffs. But then, what did she know?
She knew she had to pee. And she had no way to communicate the need, let alone to help herself.
The soft thud of footsteps alerted her to Turkey Carver’s approach, and sure enough, his taunting voice reached her ears moments later. “Well, my bad. Looks like I forgot to offer you a blanket before I took my nap.” She jolted—bringing herself more pain—as he ran the pad of one finger down her arm. “Your skin’s all bumpy and everything. Almost makes me feel bad.”
Prick. Asshole. Dick-face. Walking dumpster pile.
His touch receded and he made a sound like a chuckle. “I bet you’re real fuckin’ thirsty, right?” Something whispered lower, over the front of her thighs, and she squeezed them as tight as she could manage. “Relax. I’m not interested in Jap pussy, let alone my fucking cousin’s sloppy seconds. I just figure, you’ve been here a few hours, you probably gotta pee, right?”
Her heart clenched.His cousin?Santino had been worried about trouble with his cousin.Segreti.That had to be what this was.
She almost missed a muted sound, as if it carried through walls, or insulated windows. A sound that couldn’t be Turkey Carver Segreti, since he hadn’t moved far enough away to take his stench with him.
Segreti exhaled, his boot sliding on the hard floor, and the sense of his presence retreated a bit. Not fully from the room she pictured herself in, but far enough that he couldn’t reach out and touch her.
She heard him mutter a curse. Something was wrong. Something was not going according to his plan.
Her heartrate doubled and Reiko wiggled her fingers and toes again, carefully, in her miniscule efforts to be mobile if she ever got the opportunity. A moment later, she heard something crash, followed by the tell-tale rapid-fire popping of gunshots. They went off in bursts, like they were aiming before firing rather than just doing broad sweeps.
As if they were trying to avoid hitting a particular target.
Segreti stomped around, muttering something in Italian.
Reiko ignored him and sucked in the largest, deepest breath she could through her half-congested, entirely raw nose.This is it.She held it for a beat to wait out the next burst of gunfire, and then she pushed out the loudest, most painful scream she was capable of around the gag trapped in her mouth.
Chapter nineteen
Blind Rescue
As their small, last-minuteentourage pulled up to the location where they believed Reiko was being held, Santino dropped his gaze back to the screen of his phone and the most recent photo of her one more time. It’d been hours since her captors had taunted him with the despicable picture. The imagewas seared into his brain like a scar after all the times he’d looked at it, and he loathed it—but it was the last he had.
His precious Reiko, stripped practically bare, bound nearly to the point of sensory deprivation, and for all intents and purposes dropped to the ground like trash. Taking her at all was a disrespect to him. The choices in how they held her were downright dehumanizing.
Santino’s grip on the phone tightened. Had they left her like that?
Did he want them to?
It was hard to breathe through the intensity of the emotion that burned up his throat as he rolled that back and forth in his mind. There was no good answer. None of it was fucking acceptable.
Seatbelts slid back. He heard a door from a nearby SUV slam.
Santino sucked in a rough, unsteady breath. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so shaken. He lifted the phone close and pressed his lips to the image briefly.I’m coming, beautiful.He lowered the phone, tucked it away, and exhaled slowly. His hand came to rest on the doorlatch before he broke the silence that sat heavy in the car. “Let’s go.”
If they’d been able to coordinate better, if this attack had been foreseen, he could have—wouldhave—accepted Mikey’s offer of reinforcements. But between the time it would take to rouse and gather the men, prep their jet, and then actually fly out to St. Louis from wherever the De Salvos parked their fancy plane, they wouldn’t have arrived until damn near dawn. Santino hadn’t been able to tolerate the idea of that. As it was, even with Mikey’s super-computer and one of Santino’s own on-scene techs, too much time had passed.
There was still information they didn’t know. Santino was trusting the nerds to do the rest of their thing without him, because all he truly gave a shit about was rescuing Reiko.
The fact that Armando and Ciro practically had to sprint to keep ahead of him as they made entry into the old, supposedly abandoned building they’d found to be owned on paper by Aronne’s deceased brother was a testament to Santino’s mindset. Santino was usually much better about not waltzing head-first into a potential deathtrap.
Aronne himself wasn’t there, of course—Santino had received coded confirmation that that particular thorn had been thoroughly removed from his side—but he had obviously already dispatched men to defend the space. The majority of his men, it seemed.
Shoot-outs were always some degree of chaotic, no matter how clear-headed a man was when he walked into one.
Santino had not walked into that building with a clear head.
