Page 106 of Reckless Woman
“Yes,” he says grimly, lifting his gun to Vi’s head again. “Now talk, before this apartment gets a crimson makeover.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” she says shakily. “I know where they might have taken him, as well.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Dante
The past has a way of catching up with you.
You can be sneaky as fuck about it, evading her for as long as possible, but she’ll always be the cool kid in the school hallways of life, sticking her leg out and laughing as you hit the ground.
I’m a man who lives without regret, save one.
I love, fuck, kill, destroy. Rinse and repeat. But since she entered my life recently, my one regret—that I hadn’t been able to save my first daughter Isabella—has been steadily morphing into something bigger.
For the past few months, I’ve felt her creeping up on me again.
She’s hiding in the shadows.
She’s the itchy trigger finger to my gun.
She’s the high walls that I’m struggling to knock down.
And now the past and her are about to collide…
And they’re planning to put a fucking bomb under me.
* * *
The truck hits the SUV,side-on, doing double the limits. The impact causes our vehicle to slice through the barriers like paper and flip us upside down as we hit the water. We’re moving so fast, the roof fleeces the dark surface like a skimming stone, before we’re rolling and sinking.
“Move!” I yell to my driver, thinking quickly. “Shoot the fucking windows out.”
Mine disintegrates on the bullet’s impact, and icy-cool air and water come rushing in. I’m out easily after that, kicking myself to the surface—guided by a voice that sounds a lot like Eve’s. She’s always in my head when I need her light the most.
My driver emerges soon after that and we reach the safety of the bank in a couple of strokes.
“What the fuck?” he moans, and then the breeze of a bullet slices my cheek, and the back of his head is exploding all over my shirt.
Shit.
That’s when I know it wasn’t a regular traffic accident.
“Get on your knees, Santiago,” snarls a voice, with that all-too-familiar, thick Russian, brogue that makes me want to kill things. “Hands above your head.”
“Igor Bukov, I presume?” I drawl, doing as he says, but taking my sweet time about it. I open my mouth to make another smart remark, when the fucker smashes the butt of his gun against the side of my head and I’m back in dark waters again.
* * *
When I wake,I’m staring up at the bars of a cage, with no knife and no gun. The lights are low, but I can make out my immediate surroundings. It’s a six-by-six, made of silver steel with a concrete base, there’s no fucking way out of it, and there’s nothing else in here except soaking wet clothes, blind rage and a nagging sense of disbelief.
The cage is in some kind of basement, with black shadows lurking in every corner. There’s a wall of TV screens a couple of meters in front of me.
Rising to my feet, ignoring the hard knot of pain on the side of my head, I rest my wrists against the bars of my new home and cluck impatiently at the darkness.
“So, you’re an inventive fuck, Bukov, I’ll give you that.”
There’s a wheezy laugh from the shadows to my left. “You must have known you’d always end up in a cage, Dante. At least this one doesn’t require the standard one hour of outside time a day.”