He smells of tobacco and sweat, and every instinct in my body wants to pull back from his touch, but I don’t have the strength to even push myself slightly away.
“The bastard is going to love this photo.”
I don’t know how many minutes pass, but my mind starts to clear. I take in that I’m in some kind of house where all the furniture looks like it hasn’t been replaced in at least forty years.
Chicago is over fourteen hours away by car from Massachusetts, but I know they’ve received my signal, so within a few hours they’ll be here. Because I know my sister, and she’s capable of teleporting if she knows I’m in danger.
What if we are not close to Massachusetts? What if we are not even in the US anymore?
Breathe, Amalia!
Maksim prepared me for situations like this and explained that the best strategy is silence. Not to try to gather information, but to stay still and observe.
I can see two more men somewhere at the far end of a hallway, and I know that even if I managed to get up from this chair, I couldn’t get past them without being hurt.
Could these people be connected to human trafficking? Has someone made the link between me and Julia?
But as I try to work through it, I look at the man in front of me, and a memory surfaces.
Silas’s apartment. This man coming to ask for his help, and Silas refusing.
My heart has started pumping too much blood, and I think I’m hyperventilating, because these people have nothing to do with Julia and Maksim, they have something to do withhim.
The man who broke my heart and kept all the pieces.
There’s laughter from the far end of the hallway, and when I look toward them with a knot in my chest, Silvio — the man in front of me — drops to one knee. With a smirk, he tells me, “I hope Silas is ready to make a lot of money disappear, because otherwise,bella,you’d better get ready to work in his place.”
My first instinct is to flinch, to drop my head, to make myself small.
But no.
Julia and Maksim are coming. Until then, I retreat into my own mind, the only place where they cannot touch me.
Strike.
Scream.
Strike.
Scream.
That’s the cycle I’ve been repeating for fifteen minutes with an Albanian soldier who won’t explain how ten children left their territory in a single shipment.
“I swear I don’t know anything! I only received instructions to get them on that vessel, that’s all.”
I believe him. It’s just not what I wanted to hear, so I need an outlet for my disappointment.
Six souls we couldn’t save because they had already arrived at God knows which port on the planet.
The head of the Albanian mafia in San Francisco seems to have developed a fondness for the money that comes from human trafficking, and with the entire system Ivan built, continuing without the operation’s architect at the helm wasn’t difficult.
They still have key people in place willing to risk a lot just to keep the money flowing.
My fist connects with his jaw, and I know from the sound it makes that I’ve broken it.
Damn it.
I walk to the sink, resolved to leave before I kill him, when my eyes land on the phone I’d set aside.
