A big guy came up behind her and bear-hugged her. Just like she practiced, she went boneless. She tried dropping out of his grip, but the trash bag guy was there to nab her, and the third one hit her with a syringe.
He tossed her in the van and slammed the doors.
The automatic sliding door cut off her view to the house, where her kids were cuddled up safe in their beds. She was out cold before they were out of the cul-de-sac.
Middle of the fucking night, late Monday or early Tuesday, unmarked van
Gabby blinked herself awake. Hard plastic bit into her wrists when she reached to swipe her hair out of her face. Her cheek was pressed into the floor of a moving vehicle instead of a pillow, and the sound of tires on asphalt roared dangerously close to her ear. Traveling at freeway speeds to who-knows-where in a dark van throbbing with Russian techno—she had been kidnapped. Through the brain fog, she remembered a van arriving, three guys in masks, and defending herself with a leaky bag of trash. She must have gotten him good. This was the worst-smelling van Gabby had ever been in, which was saying something.
On the bright side, she was alive, and they hadn’t ever gone in the house. They’d thrown her in the van and sped away, meaning her kids were still asleep in their beds. If Kyle was awake, she was sneaking down to the kitchen in earbuds, and drinking a half a gallon of juice, as if the person who restocked the fridge didn’t notice that the raspberry lemonade disappeared overnight. Gabby didn’t know how she was going to do it, but she was going to do her damnedest to get back to her kids. They needed her.
One of the men yelled something. It wasn’t English. Russian? It sounded like Granny.
If Gabby died today, Phil would marry some big-boobed bimbo who could cook and clean, a replacement mommy, younger and prettier but just as dumb as she’d been. Then Kyle would end up in therapy with stepmom issues, in addition to whatever else she was struggling with. Gabby didn’t understand what Kyle was going through. When she’d gone from Kylie to Kyle, Gabby had asked if she wanted to change her pronouns. Kyle had sneered back and said she just didn’t want to be a Kardashian.
One of the guys reached back and squeezed her calf and uttered a guttural, “Hey.” Instead of recoiling, she played dead—the same move she had used when Phil wanted late-night sex.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the darkness and fear, but she couldn’t block out her self-recrimination. Her abysmal sex life, her failed marriage, her daylong career as a spy. She had nodded and smiled her way into a facsimile of Al and Peggy Bundy’s marriage. Agreed to a job she wasn’t qualified for because it sounded sexy and blown it on her first damn day. If, and that was a big if, Kyle was feeling weird about being a woman, Gabby could hardly blame her. She sure as hell hadn’t made it look good.
A blinker turned on, and the van slowed from highway speeds. She couldn’t see out the window, but she could see the lights of oncoming headlights cutting across the roof of the van. They pulled off the freeway, headed somewhere more remote, no doubt. These had to be the guys who had killed Darcy. They were probably going to shake her down for information before they did the same to her.
Waterboarding.
Fingernail pulling.
Electric shock.
She still had a towel on her head and those little gold under-eye patches—getting dolled up for her execution, as it turned out. “Just make coffee and smile,” the EOD had said.
That never fucking worked out. It didn’t get her anywhere in her marriage, and it didn’t get her anywhere as a spy. She was going to have some words for Markus—if she lived.
They turned onto another road, a rougher ride. Her skull bounced against the floor of the van with each rut and pothole. No more lights from oncoming traffic. No chance of rescue.
The music changed to “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics. In a dark van, being driven to her death to one of her favorite songs—this was surreal. One of the Russians started singing along in a heavy accent. She wanted to scream, “You’ve got the wrong person! I’m just a mom.” Did being a spy for one day even count?
If Gabby died today, her kids wouldn’t even know that she went down as an undercover EOD agent. If only she could live long enough to let her daughter know that she could do more than make bad casseroles. With Phil as his only influence, Lucas might become a finance bro.
If she made it out of this, she needed some way to defend herself. Maybe she sucked at shooting the first time, but she had fired literally only one shot. Didn’t everyone need practice? A bag of leaky trash and an old tube of Avon lash-extension mascara would never cut it.
The van slowed. Gabby was tied and lying down, but from the thin slice of sky, she could see the top of an industrial building. Gray concrete splashed with half-assed graffiti. She’d seen those shows where kidnapping victims guided the authorities to theirlocation by describing a few left and right turns, the sound of a traffic noise, and the honking of cranes that only lived in one patch of grass that happened to be next to the bad guy’s lair. All Gabby had was a gray building with some gang tags.
After some rapid-fire Russian, they slid the door open. One of the guys grabbed her upper arm and yanked her up and out of the van. She stumbled out and scrambled to stay upright with her hands tied behind her back.
“Suka,” one of them yelled, and another guy laughed.
Gabby knew that word from driving with her grandma—bitch. Russian road rage vocab was all she knew.
With the slam of a heavy metal door, she was inside. A quick scan of the room showed nothing but a warehouse filled with boxes, some kind of illegal import-export business maybe. Her stomach flipped weirdly, and she struggled to move forward. Was this where she was going to meet her end?
They pushed her to a room in the back outfitted with a desk and some chairs, a makeshift office. Behind the desk sat a bear of a man, with tanned, leathery skin, and a pelt of thick dark hair.
In a Russian accent as thick as gravy he said, “Darcy. Good of you to join us.”
Darcy?
She gave him her best deer-in-the-headlights impression.
“Don’t pretend you’re surprised, Agent Dagger.” He leaned into “Dagger” hard.
