As a result, she was not in the best of moods come Friday morning, and as she’d already learned, Mr. Williams was rather old-school and could get very cranky if she wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows when she reported for work. So whether she was feeling it or not, she’d have to plaster a smile on her face sometime between her front door and her boss’s office. Which was the other reason she’d chosen to walk, hoping it would give her enough time to put on her happy face.
She was so lost in her thoughts, she didn’t hear the footsteps behind her. And she had only a split second of awareness that anything might be wrong before the world went black.
Panic locked around her lungs, froze her blood in her veins as a set of unfamiliar arms came around her, lifting her from the ground.
Oh god, oh god, oh god. Killian was right. They want my baby.
That single thought unlocked her muscles and she came alive, fighting and screaming for all she was worth. Fabric filled her mouth every time she tried to inhale, threatening to smother her, and tears burned at the backs of her eyes.
“Help! Fire! Someone HELP!”
But no matter how hard she kicked or thrashed, her assailant’s hold never faltered.
One of her flailing punches landed, and a dark thrill pulsed through her veins at her attacker’s grunt of pain.
“Grab her fucking hands, would you?”
Shit, shit, shit. Was there more than one?
Of course there’s more than one, criminals run in packs.
Someone else grabbed her hands, as instructed, yanking them behind her back and securing them with something that seemed like a zip tie. A second zip tie wrapped around her ankles, effectively binding her in place.
Blinding terror flooded her body. “Please,” she whispered. “Please let me go. You have the wrong person.”
“’Fraid we can’t do that, sweetheart.”
Bile rose in her throat at the thought of being called sweetheart by someone intent on killing her. “Fuck you.”
Quiet, menacing laughter met her ears a moment before she was laid down on a floor of some kind.
A trunk, she realized when the lid slammed over her. She could work with a trunk. Hadn’t she seen enough action movies to know exactly what to do in this scenario?
Willing her heart rate to slow, she struggled to think through her next steps. First things, first, she needed to see. Which meant getting whatever they’d draped over her head off.
Okay. She could do that. Tilting her head to the side, she rubbed her temple against the floor of the trunk. The bag or whatever it was moved, but only so far, and she realized with growing dread that they’d tied it around her neck so it couldn’t be removed.
Aria swallowed down the hysteria threatening to rise up and choke her. Even if she couldn’t see, she knew what to do. Kick out the taillights and pray a cop stopped them or some Good Samaritan noticed and called the police.
Should have let dad hire Holden and his fucking guard dogs.
She wiggled as much as she was able, reaching out with her bound feet until they pressed up against something. But when she kicked, hard enough to send the vibrations radiating up her spine, she realized she was kicking the side of the trunk.
It took several clumsy tries, but at last she found what she was pretty sure was the taillight and kicked at it for all she was worth. Not that it did her any good. If it was the light, it stayed stubbornly in place, no matter how hard she tried to dislodge it.
She was still kicking desperately at it when the car slowed, then stopped. And that bone-deep terror returned, sending her heart hammering against her ribs so hard it was a wonder it didn’t leap right out of her chest.
“Let me go, you fuckers!” she screamed when the lid popped open again and those same arms from before lifted her from the trunk.
But as before, her demands were ignored, and she was carried… somewhere. Into a house, maybe? She was pretty sure they went down a set of stairs at some point.
Wherever they were, there was a chair, and as soon as they cut the zip-ties from her wrists and ankles, they bound her to the hard metal beneath her with some kind of rope.
“All right, sweetheart.” Assailant number one, she was pretty sure, his voice rough but with a hint of amusement that was somehow more terrifying than anything else he’d done to her so far. “Boss man is on his way, but in the meantime, we have some questions for you.”
“You can shove your questions right up your ass.”
“Feisty little thing, isn’t she?” The second voice was so similar to the first, she almost couldn’t tell them apart. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she could still sense the first assailant standing in front of her while that voice had clearly come from behind her, she wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference at all.
