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THE CAR PULLED TO A halt outside her apartment building, and she raced out the door a moment later. As soon as I saw her face, I knew something had gone wrong.
Nadia looked terrified as I went to climb out of the car and meet her. She practically jumped into my arms as soon as she laid eyes on me, and I wrapped my arms around her tight, pulling her close.
“Hey, hey,” I murmured to her gently. “It’s okay. You have nothing to worry about, all right? I’m here.”
“I don’t know about that,” she mumbled against my shoulder.
“What happened?” I asked. “How are you back so soon?”
“Can we go somewhere else?” she asked me, and I nodded.
“Of course, how about my place?”
“No, somewhere public,” she replied, shaking her head. I furrowed my brow at her. What the hell was going on? And why wouldn’t she tell me what had gotten her so utterly and completely freaking out?
I gave the driver the address to a restaurant and told him to take us there as fast as he could. In the back of the car, Nadia was huddled against me. Her whole body was trembling, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out what seemed to have gotten her in such a state. Why was she so panicked? What was going on? None of this made any sense to me, and it was enough to set my teeth on edge. I knew something bad had to have happened, something seriously off, but there was nothing I could do to get it out of her until we were somewhere public.
We arrived at the restaurant and we headed inside at once. The hostess took us to a table, not even asking for my name before she did. She knew who I was. They all did, here.
Nadia sank down into the seat opposite me, her arms still wrapped around herself, as though she was trying to scare off someone watching her. Her eyes were darting this way and that, like she was scared that there was someone keeping an eye on us right now.
“What’s wrong, Nadia?” I asked her, finally. “What’s going on? Why are you back in New York so soon?”
She lifted her gaze to meet mine, finally, and I could see the fear in her eyes. I hated seeing her like this, I hated not knowing what was going on inside her mind – I wanted to help her. I wanted to make it better, but I had to wait for her to fill me in on what was going on right now.
“We didn’t make the trip,” she admitted. “We... we were taken here.”
My heart dropped.
“Shit, what are you talking about?” I asked her, and she shook her head.
“I fell asleep in my apartment, back in Miami,” she explained. Her voice was shaking, so full of terror that she hardly managed to get the words out.
“And when I woke up in the night, there were people there,” she continued. “Like, shadows, I suppose. I couldn’t make out who they were, but they... I think they injected me and my father with something, and brought us back to the city.”
“How did you get out?” I demanded. “Where were they keeping you?”
“That’s the thing, they weren’t keeping us anywhere,” she admitted. “I woke up and we were back in our old apartment. My father’s still there, he’s sleeping, I guess sleeping off whatever they dosed us with to get us back there without a fight.”
My eyes widened. That was a curveball. Someone kidnapping her, yes, I could understand, but someone snatching her just so they could deposit her back in her old place? That didn’t make any sense.
“That’s crazy,” I muttered. I was wracking my brains, trying to come up with something that would fill me in on why someone would have done this. What the hell were they trying to achieve? It didn’t make any sense to me. My head hurt as I attempted to put it into some kind of order. There must have been something that I was missing, some part of this that I was skipping over.
“I – it wasn’t you, was it?” she asked me, finally. My eyes widened.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You didn’t send people to get us out of Miami, did you?” she continued. She didn’t take her eyes from mine, the first time she had really seemed assertive since we had arrived here. I shook my head at once.
“Of course I didn’t,” I shot back, angry that she would have thought for a moment I could do something like that.
“You were coming back anyway, I wouldn’t have gotten anything from dragging you out of there when you hadn’t agreed,” I pointed out. Her face didn’t change.
“And I wouldn’t have done something like that even if I had gotten something out of it,” I corrected myself quickly. I had to remember that she was expecting more from me, expecting me to step up and show her that I wasn’t a dangerous person to be around. I knew it was going to be tough, but I had to start somewhere.
“So who did?” she asked me, biting her lip hard. I was pretty sure that she already knew the answer to it, and didn’t need me to run it through for her again. There was only one group that I could think of that would have gotten something out of fucking with her.
But why would they have just dropped her off back home? Wouldn’t they have done something to make more of a statement than that? I supposed they were trying to mess with both of us, making sure that she was thrown off her game and could translate some of that fear to me.
They knew they could have power over me through her – that, if they played their cards right, they would be able to get me willing to do anything to ensure she stayed safe. I hated that it had worked. I didn’t know what they had done, exactly, or why they had done it, but I knew I would do anything to make sure that the woman sitting opposite me felt safe again sooner rather than later.
“You can come and stay with me for a while,” I told her, and she shook her head.
“I don’t think I want that,” she admitted. “I need to stay with my father, he’s... not doing so well. I think it would be better for us if we just stayed at our apartment.”
I bit back a protest – I knew that she wasn’t going to take well to being told what to do, especially after everything that had happened. I could station guards on their apartment to ensure they weren’t dealing with any more random attacks, but I couldn’t drag her out of here unless she wanted to go.
I needed her to feel in control with all of this, as though she was the one calling the shots – I needed to make sure that there was something I could do to help, though. I wasn’t going to leave her out on this alone. She needed help – I was the one who had gotten her into this mess, and that meant that I was the one who was going to get her out of it.
“I’ll make sure nothing like that ever happens again,” I promised her. “You have my word, okay? You have my word.”
“Okay,” she murmured, but she didn’t sound sure. After what she had been through, I could hardly blame her.
“Let’s get something to eat,” I suggested, and I waved down a waiter and ordered for the both of us. She didn’t seem with it enough to so much as look at the menu, but she had to eat something. I would get them to make something for her father, too, something she could take back with her. I could tell she wasn’t going to be much able to take care of herself. She seemed in too much of a state to do that. I would have much preferred it if she had just come back to stay with me for a while, but I knew that she wasn’t going to give in to that one so easily. She had decided she wanted to stay with her father, and I knew how much he meant to her. Hell, if my own father had still been around, I was sure I would have felt the same way she did right now.
She barely picked at her food when it arrived, clearly too scared to eat much, and I asked the waiter to box it up for her and make sure that she had enough to take home. She smiled at me – a small smile, but a smile nonetheless.
“Thank you,” she murmured, and I shook my head.
“Don’t mention it.”
I was just glad that she seemed to feel able to come to me with the shit that she needed help with. She wasn’t hiding from me anymore, wasn’t ducking and diving from the reality of what was going on. She knew I was the only one who could help her in all of this, and she was finally willing to let me do that, thank goodness.
I held her hand outside the restaurant, as we waited for the car to arrive to take us back to her place.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come stay with me?” I asked, and she nodded.
“I’ll be okay,” she replied, but her voice was so tiny as she said that, I could hardly believe her. How could I? I knew she was in pain, I knew she was scared, and I knew she was looking to me for some way to make it all right. I wished there was something I could do to pull it all together, but I had no idea how that was going to work. If it was even going to work at all.
We rode back to her place together, and I held her hand in the back of the car. I wished there was something I could say to make this all feel a little clearer to her. But I knew she had to build that back up for herself, that sureness, that sense that she could take control of things again and that she didn’t have to worry about losing herself in the mess following her around.
I got out of the car with her and walked her to her door. She looked up at me, and I could see the mess of emotions in her face – the fear, the hope, the doubt. I cupped her face in my hands, just like I had when we were saying goodbye to each other back in Miami, and looked deep into her eyes.
“I’ll get this under control,” I promised her, and I leaned down to plant a kiss on her lips. It wasn’t enough, but it was the best I could do for now. I just needed her to trust me, to understand that I was doing this because I wanted to help her. I knew she was scared, I knew she still had doubts about me. But I was going to do everything that I could to ensure that she knew that she didn’t have to. She didn’t have to hide from me, she didn’t have to fear me. I was going to be here for her, and I was going to fix everything.
“Okay,” she replied. She didn’t believe me yet, not quite, but that was going to change soon. I would make sure of it. She had no reason to doubt me. She knew that I would never do something like this, I just needed to make sure she understood how serious I was about protecting her. And her father – I knew that she would be just as worried about him, too, and I hoped that I would be able to go some way to assuaging that fear.
She headed back inside her apartment building, and I watched as she went, making sure that she got there safely. I needed to be certain she was okay. I knew she would only let me so close, and I didn’t blame her for that, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a part of me that wished she would just let me in. I understood she still had her doubts around me, my family, everything we had done, but it was up to me from this moment out to ensure that I proved that she could trust me.
And now, that meant doing what I could to protect her. I needed to talk to Mauro, get something under control and in place for her now that she had come clean about what had happened. I couldn’t wrap my head around why someone would do something like that – just to scare her? It seemed like a possibility, but why would they want to freak her out without doing any damage to her? It didn’t make sense to me.
But that was part of the deal – part of the fear was not knowing why someone would do that, what motivations they might have had, what they intended to bring down on her now that they clearly knew where she was. I would call up a couple of my guys to stay near them for the next couple of days, watch the people coming and going and ensure that they didn’t do them any harm. There was no way in hell that I was going to let something happen to her, not now that I had brought her back to the city. I had promised her she would be safe here, begged her to come home so I could look after her, and for the first thing that happened to have been as twisted as this – it was like someone was trying to undercut me.
“Take me back to my place,” I told the driver. I pulled my phone from my pocket and texted Mauro, letting him know that we needed to see each other now. I was sure that he had plenty on his plate already, but he was going to have to drop that and make some room for the woman that I cared about so much. She came first – she had to.
Especially if she had just become the target of whatever the Serbians wanted from me.
