33
Aleksandra
My mouth is covered in duct tape, my hands bound with a zip tie behind my back.
“I’m sorry, Aleksandra, but you’re marrying me, and we’re moving to Russia,” Luka says.
I’ve never known him to be a monster, but he works for Mikhail.
I try to scream, plead for Luka not to do this, but the duct tape makes it impossible for me to say anything intelligible. Every word is muffled and mumbled. He could easily silence me with his gun, but he doesn’t seem to want me dead.
We’re in the back of an SUV, parked across the street from the children’s preschool. Two of Mikhail’s thugs are just watching my kids play outside the gate.
I kick and fight back with my body, not letting Luka have control of me.
They’ve already slaughtered one man, Gian, my bodyguard who had accompanied me to pick up the twins from preschool.
He’s lying dead in the vehicle behind us.
After Luka shot Gian in the head, he dragged me out of the SUV and thrust me into the back of his vehicle. I should have put up a bigger fight, but the other two men with him, Dmitri and Nikita, made it clear that they’d kill Sophia and Liam.
With Dmitri and Nikita across the street, I take the opportunity to slam the full weight of my body into Luka.
He curses in Russian and snarls at me, grabbing me by the neck. “I’m trying to protect you.”
Luka is a liar.
If he wanted to protect my children and me, he’d leave us alone.
He relinquishes his grasp on my neck long enough for me to use my legs to beat him in the chest. My aim is for his crotch, but he’s a moving target, making it difficult to land a blow every time I attack him.
“Antonio will hurt you,” Luka says, like he can reason with me, and he’s not physically hurting me. I want to scream at him, but the duct tape makes it difficult to say anything out loud.
I back myself up against the car door and slam my legs forcefully across the backseat at Luka. I’m trying to reach for the door handle, and I manage to yank it open. I can almost reach the sidewalk if I can thrust my body out of the car.
As soon as I’m up on my legs, I can run.
But Luka has other ideas.
He grabs my legs and yanks me farther toward the opposite door, my back against the bench seat as he towers over me. His hands come up around my neck, choking me.
I scream and plead against the duct tape, but he can’t make out a word I’m saying, and no one else can save me, either.
The back door is slightly ajar, and I’m struggling to get away, but without my hands, I can’t fight back, and his body pinned against mine makes me unable to move.
“You’re going to die, Aleksandra, and then we’re going to slaughter your children,” Luka threatens. His face is red, his eyes black as night. There’s a darkness behind them that I’ve never seen before.
Tears burn my eyes, and my vision goes blurry and then black.
For a second, I think I might be dead.
That it’s all over.
There’s a rush of commotion, of noise, of voices that I don’t recognize. All I hear is ringing in my ears, and I can’t focus on the sound.
Luka is no longer holding me down. Someone is pulling him out of the vehicle.
Is it Antonio? Did he come to save us?