My gaze flicks down to his waist. I can see the bulge of a gun beneath his jacket, ruining the lines of it. How did I not see it before?
“Now,” he hisses. He grabs my wrist with his other hand, yanking me to my feet and pushing me towards the door, bending my arm behind my back as he keeps his other hand planted firmly over my mouth. “When we walk outside, I’m going to take my hand off of your mouth. You’re going to be very silent, or it will be much worse for you.”
My heart is pounding in my chest as he pushes me out into the hallway, so hard that it hurts. My throat feels closed off, choked, and I’m not even sure that Icouldscream. But as soon as his hand leaves my mouth, every instinct in my body tells me that’s absolutely what I should do.
The music is loud again, pumping through every inch of the club, drowning everything else out. The man sees my face, and leans close again. “No one will hear you. If they do, they’ll ignore it, if they don’t, I’ll kill them and go back and shoot your friend too. Now go.”
He shoves me towards the exit. I stumble forward, even more clumsy in the heels. “Hurry,” he hisses, and I feel the poke of something in my back. It feels round, like the muzzle of a gun, and my blood runs cold.
The man pushes the exit door open, shoving me out onto the landing at the top of the stairs that lead down to an alley behind the club. The spring air smacks me in the face, warm and fresh and as clean as New York City air ever is, but I can barely breathe. I’m on the verge of tears, but so terrified that I can’t even cry. I feel paralyzed with it.
“Let me take my shoes off. I can’t go down the stairs—”
“You’ll manage. Now go.” The man pushes me forward again, and I cling to the railing as I stumble down, the fear of twisting or breaking my ankle adding to the churning terror in my stomach. If I hurt myself, I won’t even be able to run if I get a chance. My head swims with the gin and tonics I drank tonight, and I wish fervently that I’d stayed home. That I’d turned Ana down like usual.
If I had, would she be the one where I am now? Or did they seek me out, specifically?
I don’t know why anyone would want to kidnap me. Years ago, when I was Giovanni Ferretti’s daughter, maybe, but now I’m just a orphan violinist. I only know a little about what my father did, the kind of people that he worked for, but I can’t see what that has to do with me now.
The money. I think of the zeroes in my bank account, the deposit that shows up every month. Do they know about that, somehow? Are they kidnapping me so that they can force me to pay my own ransom?
There’s a sleek black car idling at the curb. The door opens as we reach it, and the man shoves me towards the car. “Get in,” he says coldly, and I balk. Every woman knows that if you get in the car, your chances of rescue drop dramatically.
I feel the weight of the gun at my back again.
“Get in.”
I don’t want to die. But if they truly want something fromme, they’re not going to shoot me until they get it. So I turn around, swallowing back the fear as I feel the gun poke into my belly.
“If you want the money, you can have it,” I say bravely, looking up into the man’s cold blue eyes. “But I’m not getting in the car.”
He curses under his breath in Russian. “Get in the fucking car.”
“No. I won’t—”
“Get in the car, or I go back inside and shoot your friend.”
“No. If you turn around, I’ll run.”
The man lets out a long sigh, and looks over my shoulder. I start to turn my head, to see what he’s looking at, but before I can I feel a burning sensation in my neck.
“What the—”
It takes only seconds before the world starts to blur. The blond man pushes me backwards into the car, and I fall onto the leather seat next to another man dressed all in black, with the same buzzed hair and blue eyes.
The last thing I see before the world goes black is the needle in his hand, and I know exactly what’s happened.
I’ve been drugged.
Luca
Thirty minutes into the engagement party and I’m already bored out of my mind.
The Rossi family has rented out an vintage bar for the occasion, emptied entirely except for the family and their guests. Caterina is glowing in a white lace dress that goes down to her knees, with a neckline high enough to keep her generous cleavage hidden. She’s wearing her mother’s ruby jewelry—I remember seeing that same necklace, bracelet and ring on Mrs. Rossi a few years ago at her anniversary party, an equally mind-numbing affair.
The rubies, though, are taking a back seat to the ring that everyone really wants to see, the one on her left finger. I’m pretty proud of it myself, because I helped Franco pick it out. He was a clusterfuck of nerves, freaking out about the prospect of insulting both Caterina and her father with a ring that wasn’t good enough, and so I went with him to pick out the ring. The Rossi women wear everything from Cartier to Tiffany to Harry Winston, but for something this important, there’s a private jeweler who has worked with the families for generations. He designed the ring and had it ready in a flash—a five carat rose cut diamond that looks as if it’s weighing Caterina’s hand down, surrounded with a halo of perfectly cut diamonds on a pave platinum band.
I had no idea what any of that meant when the jeweler explained it to me, but apparently it was perfect, because Franco confided in me later that his new fiancée had rewarded him with a blowjob in the back of the limo on the way back from the proposal. “She really liked that fucking ring,” he’d told me with a smirk, clapping me on the shoulder. “Thanks, man.”