“Don’t worry, we’re going to storm into the apartment the moment I get there.”
“Ok, thank you.” She relaxed a bit before looking up again. “And from the people in Paulina’s apartment, you’ll be able to get where Katya is?”
I nodded. “Everything will be over tonight.”
She nodded and laid back into the bed, turning to look toward the window on the other side of the room. With a voice that seemed far away, she said, “I hope she’s ok, and that they didn’t treat her as bad as they did Paulina.”
I looked at her for a while before heading out, leaving three men to guard the door.
Fourteen men in all were waiting for me, not all of them with guns.
I went up the elaborate steps with a gun, loaded, ready, and with a silencer.
The two at the door had bullets in their head before they could register who I was, and I knocked on the door.
Behind me, Frankie and Dom, and behind them were a few of the men Dom had gathered.
The whole thing didn’t last two minutes. In the main living room, they dropped like flies with muffled shots on the light-colored carpet, staining it with their worthless blood. They weren’t shot to be killed, so as they dropped, my men nuzzled them and dragged them out.
“I counted eleven,” Frankie said behind me.
In the kitchen that was separated from the living room by a line of counters, Dom opened a can of beer. “Maybe it’s because of the closed bedroom door and the girl being tortured behind it?”
“I will hit you with the butt of my gun,” Frankie answered.
The door wasn’t locked, but what was behind it made me stop in my tracks.
Even Frankie drew a breath behind me.
“Hey! You better stop there,” one of the men shouting a threat, raising his gun, the others scrambling around for weapons.
I took steps into the room, my eyes on the bed where Paulina lay, almost lifeless. I remembered how she’d looked at the wedding. Even though she didn”t hold a candle to Katya, she was beautiful.
Had been.
Frankie was already saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. The white noise in my ears muffled his voice and made it sound distant when I kicked the door behind me. “Don’t come in.”
“Ales, we need them alive to que—”
The door shut and cut him off, and I turned the lock without looking away from the men.
They must have recognized who I was.
This was what Samantha had meant when she’d hoped Katya wasn’t treated as terribly as Paulina.
There was only one bullet left in my gun, but that was all I needed.
The door thudded wildly as I let loose all the frustrations of Katya’s kidnapping on them. I was holding one of them up by the neck against the wall, lifting him up so his feet were off the ground when the door burst open.
“For fuck’s sake, Ales, we need to find where Katya is. I told you not to kill them.”
The one I was holding up was the only one living, just barely, but I intended to put that to an end soon enough.
“Frankie, get Paulina to a hospital.”
“Fucking shit!” Dom exclaimed behind me. In Russian, he called two men to take her to the hospital soon. “Overdosed her on the drugs too, by the look of it.”
“She’s on her way to a hospital now, Ales, let that one go.”