Kissing My Killer (35 page)

Gabriella

I was sitting on something hard and smooth and I was hunched up tight: my knees were drawn up to my chest, my arms were wrapped around them and my head had been pushed down. Something was in my mouth and my head throbbed and spun from whatever drug he’d given me.

I tried to uncurl myself but immediately there was pain, biting into my wrists. I’d been bound with something hard and it was cutting into me.

Voices. A couple discussing which restaurant to eat at for lunch. Then the sickening sensation of the floor dropping out from under me. I was in an elevator. I wanted to call out for help but my tongue wouldn’t move and I didn’t seem to have even the strength to move air in my lungs.

The
ding
of the elevator as it reached a new floor. More voices, all around me, as people got on. Everyone sounded happy, relaxed. It made no sense.
Why don’t they help me?
I was sitting right next to them, bound and gagged.
Can’t they see me?

But no one could.

Alexei

I moved slowly at first, saying her name again. Was it a joke? Was she hiding in the bathroom, waiting to pounce on me? Then, when I found the room was empty, the panic slowly grew.

Could she have gone out? She’d have left a note...and then I saw her laptop on the counter and I knew she’d been taken. Gabriella would never go anywhere without her laptop.

All of those things I’d been wishing I could feel up on the roof came back. Worry. Anger.
Fear.
They had her. God knows what they’d do to her.

Think!
I’d been up on the roof terrace for no more than ten minutes. Whoever took her might still be in the hotel. I could catch them, if I moved fast.

I felt my old army training take over. They’d taught us to track enemies, to look for clues. What did I see? What did I
not
see?

The door was intact. Either he’d had a key, or she’d let him in. Either way, he must be disguised as someone who worked at the hotel.

The breakfast plates were missing.
A room service waiter!
I’d seen them wheeling their trolleys around on my way up to the roof. The trolleys had a lower section covered by a white cloth—just big enough to conceal a person, if that person was tied up small.

Jesus, he was wheeling her right through the fucking hotel!

I ran for the stairs and sprinted all the way down to the ground floor. He’d need to get her outside, to transfer her to a car or van. I hit the buttons for all the elevators and stood there panting as I waited for them to arrive. Too late, I realized I hadn’t brought a gun. Well, fuck it. The mood I was in, I’d tear the guy’s head clean off.

The first door opened. Tourists.

The second. Two women, chatting.

The third. A whole group of tourists and, at the back, a room service waiter with his trolley. Breakfast plates on top, a white cloth covering the bottom. He started to wheel it past me, eyes down—

I grabbed him by the collar of his starched white shirt and hurled him against the wall. A woman screamed. I ripped the white cloth off the trolley—

More dirty dishes.

Shit!
I whirled around. A few of the elevators were still on their way down. I could wait for them...or maybe I’d already missed her. Where would the guy take her? Out the front?

No. The back. Through the kitchens and the service entrance.

I raced into the kitchen, ignoring the angry shouts of the chefs.
Shit!
There were at least six waiters wheeling trolleys around and they all looked the same. And I couldn’t pick out the guy who’d taken her—I had no idea what he looked like. I tried to narrow it down by the breakfast plates on top, looking for ours, but I couldn’t see them. Eggs—we hadn’t had eggs. Waffles—we hadn’t had waffles.
Where was she?!

I searched and searched, eventually resorting to tipping over every trolley I could find. But I already knew I’d made a mistake. I could feel her slipping away.

I missed something.
We must have been followed, when we left Konstantin’s mansion. Or word had gotten out about a half-naked woman showing up at the hotel. I should never have let Gabriella talk me into this place; we shouldn’t have stayed there so long….

This is all my fault.
I was meant to be protecting her but I’d lost my edge. I’d gotten lost in a dream where I could have some sort of life with her. And now I’d lost her, probably forever.

I stood there in numb shock, ignoring the chef and the hotel manager who were yelling for an explanation. If I’d been able to see past them and out into the lobby, I’d have seen the final elevator arrive. I’d have seen a room service waiter push his trolley, its plates sticky with maple syrup and strawberries, out through a side door to the parking lot and into a waiting van.

Gabriella

I was standing...no, I was
dangling.
Slumped over, my knees slack and my head lolling down. Why hadn’t I fallen over? It would feel so good...a split-second of pain as my head hit the floor and then blessed sleep. Concrete would feel like a feather mattress, I was so tired—

Water hit me in the face and I woke up fast, spluttering and coughing. I discovered that I hadn’t fallen over because my hands were tied above my head, my arms already aching from bearing my weight. I managed to get my feet under me and straighten my legs. Where was I? Back in Konstantin’s dungeon? I remembered the manacles hanging from the ceiling. I blinked the water out of my eyes and looked down to see if I was naked. No, fully dressed. And this wasn’t Konstantin’s dungeon.

This was much, much worse.

It seemed to be a sawmill, but one that had closed many years before. There was still a faint tang of sawdust in the air and some lengths of lumber, but all of the tools hanging from the ceiling alongside me were brown with rust. It didn’t make them look any less dangerous, though. There were hand saws with tarnished metal blades and circular saws as big as my head with huge, jagged teeth. There were drills, some as slender as a pencil and some thicker than my finger. There were chisels and awls, tools for slicing and chopping and—

I looked away, trying not to go into full-on panic mode. But the Dread was back, creeping up inside me. I was alone with a strange man, I had no idea where I was...and no one was coming to save me. Alexei would have no way to find me.

Seventeen stepped forward, screwing the cap back onto a bottle of water. It was the first time I’d gotten a good look at him. He was a year or two younger than Alexei and a little smaller—still heavily muscled but in a less balanced, more pumped-up way. And he didn’t have Alexei’s presence, that way of holding himself that told other men he feared nothing. Konstantin had had that, too, but Seventeen didn’t.

He made up for it by being simply, utterly terrifying.

There are some things that are just
wrong.
Disturbing. You can’t explain why they are, they just are. If someone asks you why you don’t like spiders, you can talk about them having too many legs or the way they scuttle too fast or the thought of them running across your face in the night, but you can’t really define it. You just get a sick fear when you see one. It’s a survival instinct, a primal urge to run.

That’s what it was like with Seventeen. He didn’t have scary tattoos or horrible scars. He wasn’t holding a gun or even a knife. He even smiled. But I’ve never, ever felt such an overwhelming desire to flee.

“You’re Gabriella,” he said. “I am Slava.”

The voice was wrong. Subtly, yet hugely wrong. The intonation was too flat. It was as if he’d read a book on how to talk to people, but hadn’t understood it...or didn’t care.

He had sandy-blond hair, but he’d either started to go bald very young or something had happened to him to make him lose it because his hairline went way, way back. What hair was left was cropped very short, little more than blond, patchy fuzz. His eyes were a faded blue, like a copy of a copy of a real person’s.

I knew the question I was meant to ask was,
what do you want with me?
But I was terrified of hearing the answer. I glanced around me at the tools designed to cut and shred and I prayed I was wrong about why he’d brought me there, but I knew deep down that I wasn’t.

“I don’t know anything,” I croaked.

Seventeen nodded understandingly. And then he lifted down a rusty circular saw blade the size of a dinner plate and I began to scream.

Alexei

I stood in the center of our hotel suite and stared. Somewhere,
somewhere,
there must be a clue.

I’d come back upstairs on instinct—my first thought had been to grab my guns. But now that I had them, I realized how useless they were. This wasn’t a problem I could solve with violence. She was gone and I had to use my head if I wanted to get her back.

Think! There has to be some clue!

Except there didn’t have to be. Whoever had taken her—and my guess was Seventeen, given how slick the whole thing had been—knew better than to leave clues. What was I expecting, a fucking matchbook with an address on it? I wouldn’t make a mistake like that and neither would he.

Gabriella could be anywhere in a thirty mile radius, by now, and that circle was expanding with every second.

Think!
What did I see? What
didn’t
I see?

Her purse. Her purse was gone. And her phone, that thin lozenge of metal she was so proud of—

Wait. Her phone.
I can track it down, if it’s stolen,
she’d said.

And her laptop was right there.

I clawed open the screen and watched as it lit up. Immediately, I groaned. She had about fifty different windows open—web browsers and conversations and pages of what I assumed were computer code. I might as well have been trying to operate a nuclear reactor.

She’s going to die. She’s going to die unless I can figure this out.

I took a deep breath and put my finger on the touchpad. The thing felt like a child’s toy under my big, cumbersome hands. I started to search through menus and icons, looking for anything to do with phones. Eventually, I got the idea to just Google for it and laboriously typed in
Find my phone.