I tried to breathe through my mouth, tried to keep the panic at bay, but my lungs felt like they were wrapped in iron bands. Every bump in the road jolted through my body, my bound hands scraping against the metal floor of the van.
Stay calm. Stay present. You've helped patients through trauma. You know how this works.
But knowing and doing were different things when you were the one with a bag over your head, being driven to God knows where by men who'd killed to get to you.
I forced myself to focus on what I could control. My breathing. The details I could gather through senses that weren't sight.
The van had been driving for a while—twenty minutes, maybe thirty. We'd stopped and started several times at first, probably at traffic lights, then the stops had become less frequent. Highway, most likely. The road beneath us had smoothed out, the engine humming at a steady speed.
North. Dimitri had said they were heading north, toward the bridge. Were we out of the city now? In Westchester? Connecticut?
I tried to count the turns, track our direction, but the hood disoriented me. Everything blurred together into a nauseating soup of motion and fear.
Think about something else. Think about the baby.
My hands moved instinctively toward my stomach before I remembered they were bound. The zip tie bit into my wrists, plastic edges sharp against my skin.
Five weeks. Maybe six. A cluster of cells smaller than a grape, already changing everything.
I would not let these men hurt my child. I would not let them win.
The van stopped.
Doors opened. Cold air rushed in, carrying the smell of pine and wet earth. Hands grabbed my arms, hauling me upright, dragging me out of the vehicle. My feet hit gravel, unsteady, and I stumbled.
Someone laughed. A man's voice, harsh and foreign. "Careful, princess. Wouldn't want to damage the merchandise."
The hood was ripped off my head.
I blinked against the sudden brightness—not sunlight, but floodlights, harsh and artificial. As my vision adjusted, I saw where they'd brought me.
A manor house. Massive, Victorian, three stories of gray stone covered in creeping ivy. It might have been beautiful once, in that old-money way of estates built to impress. Now it looked abandoned. Haunted. The windows were dark except for a few on the ground floor, and the grounds were overgrown, nature slowly reclaiming what had been taken from it.
"Welcome to your new home," the same voice said. I turned to see him—a thick-necked man with a shaved head and a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Don't worry. You won't be here long."
They marched me inside.
The interior was worse than the exterior. Dust covered everything—the furniture, the floors, the chandelier that hung from the ceiling like a skeleton of crystal and cobwebs. Theair smelled stale, unused, with an undertone of something else. Something chemical.
I counted men as we moved through the house. Six in the main hall. Two more on the stairs. At least eight total, possibly more in rooms I couldn't see.
Too many. Even if Rodion came—when Rodion came—the odds were against him.
They took me up two flights of stairs, down a hallway lined with closed doors, to a room at the end. The thick-necked man opened it and shoved me inside.
"Make yourself comfortable," he said. "The boss will be up to see you soon."
The door slammed shut. A lock clicked into place.
I stood in the darkness, breathing hard, waiting for my eyes to adjust.
The room had probably been a bedroom once.
A four-poster bed dominated one wall, its mattress bare, its canopy in tatters. A wardrobe stood in the corner, doors hanging open to reveal empty shelves. A vanity with a cracked mirror. A fireplace that hadn't seen flames in decades.
And windows. Two of them, tall and narrow, covered with iron bars that had been bolted to the frame from the outside.
I moved to the nearest one and looked out. The view showed the back of the estate—a terrace, an overgrown garden, and beyond that, dense forest stretching toward what might have been a river in the distance. No other houses. No roads. No sign of civilization at all.
