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I WAS LYING ON A HARD surface, which was moving. My head hurt, my wrists did, too. And my shoulders felt like the joints had been wrenched out of their sockets.
The floor under me lurched again, jolting my body with a renewed wave of pain everywhere.
A loud moan reached me, then the realisation that it was me moaning filtered through to my brain—like thunder following the lightning.
“She’s awake,” a male voice announced too loudly for my aching head, making me wince. “Should we put her under again?”
“No.” This was another one. “We didn’t get that much of this stuff from the German guy.”
“German? I thought he was from Switzerland—”
“Whatever. Same shit. Don’t waste it on her. I’ll find a better use for it. This is some good stuff, man.” The voice filled with appreciation. “The Germans really know how to do things, I tell ya. One shot knocked her right out for hours.”
I understood the meaning of their conversation. However, it took me a few moments of painful concentration to determine they spoke Russian.
The awareness of my surroundings slowly trickled in. We were no longer in the car. The plush seats had gone. I lay on a cold metal floor of what must be another moving vehicle, as the shaking and lurching of it hadn’t stopped, making my insides churn.
With a groan, I made an attempt to rise, afraid I’d throw up.
“She’s gonna barf,” someone stated calmly.
“Hey, give her the bucket, Shorty!” This one came from the driver’s seat and sounded much more panicky. “I’m not driving for a whole hour with her fucking stench in the van.”
I opened my eyes just in time to see the one who must have been referred to as Shorty scurry with the bucket to me.
He grabbed my hair, yanking my head up, and I scrambled to get my knees under me to heave myself off the floor.
My stomach emptied itself into the white plastic bucket that he’d shoved under my face.
“Fucking gross,” he squeezed through his teeth in disgust. “What do I do with this shit, boss?”
“Toss it, you idiot. Do I have to spell everything out for you?”
Shorty kicked the back door open and hurled the bucket full of vomit onto the dirt road outside.
It was dark out there. Since they talked about hours, not days, I figured it must still be the same night. I spotted no headlights on the road behind us. If Zayne or Vadim had followed us, my kidnappers must have managed to evade them.
I was on my own.
The van shook on the uneven ground. Fear tightened my stomach. I had no clue where they could be taking me and opened my mouth to ask, but the words refused to form into sentences yet.
“Water,” I croaked instead. The inside of my mouth felt dry and disgusting after vomiting.
“Boss, she’s asking for water,” Shorty forwarded my request, taking his seat on the bench along the wall opposite from me.
Left a few feet away from him, by the back door of the van, I briefly considered shoving it open and jumping out. We couldn’t have been moving that fast, considering the condition of the road.
Shorty had locked the doors, though, after tossing the bucket out. With my hands tied behind my back, I wouldn’t be able to unlock them.
As my head cleared a little, jumping out of a moving vehicle on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere no longer seemed like a good idea after all. Even if I managed not to break any bones in the process, the fact that the goons would simply stop the van to pick me up again made me abandon this plan for now.
“Thirsty, is she?” the Boss asked mockingly, tossing a plastic bottle of water my way. “Here you go.”
The bottle hit my shoulder and rolled under the bench. With my hands tied behind my back, I was unable to catch it, not to mention open the lid.
The two of them found it hilarious, guffawing loudly at my helplessness. Shorty bent over, laughing so hard, he nearly fell off the bench.
I caught the eye of the Boss. Glaring at him, I gathered whatever saliva I could and spat his way, getting rid of at least some of the foulness in my mouth.
The gesture, combined with the resentment I was sure was imprinted on my face, infuriated him.
“Suka!—You bitch,” he hissed, launching himself from his seat towards me.
A hand in my hair, he yanked my face to his.
“I may have to deliver you alive,” he gritted through his teeth, assaulting my senses with the stench of stale tobacco. “But no one said you have to be well and sound on arrival.”
His eyes shone wild and unhinged as he squeezed my throat with his other hand— hard—his whole body shaking with strain.
Choking and struggling for oxygen, I realised he was lying.
It took him visible effort to contain the obvious rage coursing through him right now. His own willpower would hardly be strong enough to hold him back, I suspected. The type of person that he’d been proving himself to be wouldn’t hesitate to beat the living hell out of me were it not for the orders of someone with more power forbidding him from harming me.
“No one can stop me from fucking your ass right now, so you better behave.” Every word dripped with irrational hatred.
Defiance burned through me, urging me to do something stupid, like spitting straight into his rage-distorted face. I forced my gaze away from his, lest he spot the hatred I felt for him, too.
Unstable as he was, I had no desire to test how well he’d follow orders. If they indeed had been to deliver me in one piece, I preferred he stuck with that.
Probably taking my avoiding eye contact with him as submission, he gave me another shake and jeered with satisfaction, “There you go, suka, know who is the boss here.”
He tossed me to the wall of the van and returned to his seat in the front.
For a while I kept quiet. When I could trust my tongue to obey my brain in forming the words, however, I turned to Shorty, who was sneering at me all this time from his seat on the bench.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked quietly, not wanting to attract any more attention from the Boss.
“Fuck if I know,” Shorty replied cheerfully, displaying chipped, yellowed teeth in a smirk. “I’m gonna get paid in an hour. After that, you can go to hell for all I care.”
“Great.”
Curling up in the back corner of the van, I huddled inside my coat from the cold and the fear and tried to ignore Shorty’s mocking stare crawling all over me as we kept bouncing along the dirt road on the way to the unknown.