I can get out of this. I have to.
Every vibration of the van was a reminder that I was moving farther from everything familiar. Everything I had ever known. These men could very well kill me, but I did not understand what any of the Romanovs had done for me to be treated like this. My brothers ran an honest hotel business that they wanted to expand to the United States. None of which waswrong. I tried to memorize the turns, the stops, the sounds outside of waves, traffic, and maybe a bridge, but the city bled away too quickly.
After a while, there was nothing but an eerie quiet and the low humming of the engine.
Time dissolved. It could’ve just been minutes or hours before the van stopped. I had lost all track of it.
Rough hands pulled me out, and this time, my feet met the dirt. Damp air. Crickets. It was evident we were in a rural area, a little farther from the city. All hope of trying to run away from here and getting home died in my heart because the prospect suddenly seemed even more impossible.
They dragged me down a hallway that smelled of mildew and bleach, and a door opened. I was pushed inside, cold concrete under my knees as the wires burned against my wrists.
Finally, the hood came off.
Light stabbed at my eyes, and I blinked until the blur shaped into four men. Three of them were masked, nothing visible except their eyes, while one of them still remained unmasked. He was clearly older, bald, and his nose crooked from a break that never really healed right. He watched me like I was an animal up for inspection.
“Ilana Romanov,” he said slowly, testing the name on his tongue. His voice immediately told me he was the one sitting up front. “You are quite a pretty little package, aren’t you?”
I stared at him, refusing to lower my eyes, forcing steel into my voice while I talked to him. “You have no idea what you are doing. My brother—”
“Your brothers won’t risk a war for one girl.”
“You don’t know them. I am not some random girl. I am their only sister.”
He smiled, yellow teeth flashing in the low light. “We know enough.”
He turned and left, the door slamming shut as each one of them filed out, the lock clasping shut in place.
How am I going to escape this torture?
The next few days blurred together, all of them the same. Dim light, the stench of damp cloth, footsteps echoing down the hall at odd hours. They fed me once a day, mostly bread or water, and sometimes nothing. I tried to keep track of time, but it was impossible in a windowless room.
Instead, I learned their voices. The tall one with the gravel tone liked to whistle when he walked past me, but the one with the scar on his neck said nothing at all. Every night, when I lay on the thin mattress they had thrown inside the room, I tried to piece together why. It was impossible to decipher.
My brothers ran a luxury hotel and restaurant chain, or at least that’s what I’d been told. They had always been busy in meetings, with investors, or endless amounts of travel. They never talked about business in front of me, but I’d seen the bodyguards, the encrypted phones, and the way they changed topics whenever I entered the room. I was beginning to doubt everything as if I had been living in the middle of an elaborately fabricated lie.
Maybe I hadn’t wanted to know. Maybe I’d been stupid enough to think we were normal.
But this clearly tells me we are not.
I didn’t cry. I refused to give them that satisfaction.
But when the door opened to what I could only assume was the third night, and two men came in with a black dress draped over one’s arm, my stomach turned uneasily.
“Get up.”
I still didn’t move. “Why?”
“Because you’re on the list tonight.”
“The list?”
They didn’t answer. One of them threw the dress at me. Silk as thin as paper, smelling faintly of perfume and fear. The dress was soft and clean in my hands, but despite that, I had no urge to put it on.
“Change. Or we will be forced to do it for you.”
My fingers trembled as I simply obeyed the command, slipping out of the dress I had been wearing for three days now and slipping into the black silk. A beautiful dress couldn’t have magically fixed my appearance, but I didn’t care. My reddish-brown hair was greasy from not being washed for three days now, but looking pretty was the least of my priorities in that moment. My only priority was escape. Maybe this could be my chance to run.
I will have to make it count.
