“Who the fuck are you?” one of the men shouted while he fumbled for his gun.
Within a split second, I found myself dragged out the second story window and onto the roof while my father’s men fired at us out of the same window by which we had left. I understood them shooting at my kidnapper, but what if they shot me? Hadn’t my father told them to protect me at all costs? Not kill me?
I was so terrified that I couldn’t even begin to think. I just followed the man who had a death grip on my wrist. He seemed to know where he was going—I hoped. All I wanted was to get out of the line of fire.
We skirted around to the side of the house, and he released my arm a moment before I watched him jump off the edge of the roof. If a bullet hadn’t whizzed by my head at that point, I might have cried out, but I was struck dumb by just how close I had come to dying. Even before I got to the edge of the roof, though, I could hear him trying to order me around.
“Jump down! I’ll catch you!”
“What?” I peered very cautiously over and saw that he was standing next to a dirt bike. I held on to my jewelry box, clutching it to my chest as if it would somehow give me strength.
“Jump!”
“Are you crazy? I’m not jumping off the roof of my house! To you!”
I shouldn’t run. I was innocent in all of this. I was the one who was taken against her will, I supposed, although I wasn’t at all sure if what happened really fit the description very well. I didn’t want to follow him—did I?
But then again, the men shooting didn’t seem to care just how innocent I was in all of this.
Fucking idiots. They were going to kill me in their arrogant and prideful determination to capture the invader. Earn points with Vittorio Costa.
Sorry about your daughter getting shot.
“Jump, Aria, or so help me I’ll come up there and beat your ass for not doing as I told you, even if I have to come back from the grave to do it! You don’t want to get shot, and those men don’t give a fuck who you are. They won’t stop until we are both dead. You will just be collateral damage in what they want… which is me.”
Collateral damage. Death.
Escape. Escape. Yes, I could escape. But who did I want to escape?
“Aria.” One word, one very powerful word, said by a man who clearly expected to be obeyed.
But it was the next, even closer bullet buzzing by me to lodge itself in the side of the garage next door with a spray of wood chips that had me closing my eyes and jumping.
6
Aria
I was surprised, hours ago, to have ended up in my room with a man lying on top of me doing unspeakable things to my body. But the thing that had surprised me the most out of the past several hours had to be that I had actually jumped off the roof of my house and been caught—plucked out of the air by the man who had kidnapped me, settled in behind him on his Indian motorcycle, and driven off my father’s estate through a hail of gunfire. And this all clearly wasn’t a dream. I couldn’t blame the champagne for this one. I was as alert and awake as ever.
I had kept myself as physically separate from him as I possibly could, which wasn’t by much since there wasn’t very far to go on the motorcycle seat. But I leaned as much as I could away from him. It made me feel better psychologically, anyway, as I tried to work my way through what I was barely beginning to come to grips with about what had happened to me.
But even as the truth began to sink in, I found myself settling back against him, even though I was in the middle of the woods stuck on a bike with a man who was apparently on the wrong side of my father’s law. My kidnapper was the closest thing to safety I had at the moment, and I had to come to grips with that fact.
Plus, it was cold.
Why in the world were we on a motorcycle in Aspen with snow all around?
“You could have picked a better getaway vehicle,” I yelled above the hum of the motor, speaking for the first time since we’d left my roof.
“Don’t worry, we won’t be on the bike for long. This was for a fast getaway if needed.”
“Did you come to the party planning on kidnapping me from the beginning?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I told you. He stole from me. Tit for tat.” His reply was short and to the point.