If I’d announced I was going to the restroom, I was sure I’d get a bunch of women accompanying me. Women traveled in packs, after all, and then there was the whole fact that I was the target of a murderous crime boss.
But I figured that said murderous crime boss wasn’t about to kill me in the bar, especially since he didn’t even know I was here yet. The “plan” would apparently commence tomorrow.
They’d somehow leak I was here, they’d lure Kitsch somewhere and then...you know. I definitely should’ve known the exact details since I was an accomplice to murder, but whatever.
All of these thoughts happened in the bathroom, of course, where tipsy women have long since realized just how drunk they were at the same time as having all sorts of deep thoughts.
So I spent a hot minute crying in the stall over Duke. Crying over a man while drunk in a bathroom was a rite of passage I’d never experienced. I figured it was about time.
But I only gave myself a minute. Since I still didn’t have a phone, I counted very carefully. When my minute was up, I wiped my eyes, exited the stall and washed my hands, taking great care so that was all I was thinking of. I fixed my makeup. Then I walked out of the bathroom.
And, to be totally freaking cliché, it all went black.
I’d expected to be dead.
That’s what generally happened when you were kidnapped by the goons of the man you were about to put away for murder and had just plotted to kill with a motorcycle club.
I knew that movies got almost everything wrong, especially these parts where the heroine is kidnapped but somehow kept alive long enough for the muscled man to come and save her.
In reality, criminals intent on murdering someone didn’t fuck around unless they were into torture. I really hoped that was not the case here. I’d survived a lot in my time but I didn’t think I’d be able to withstand torture.
I was tied to a chair. My mouth was dry and my wrists ached with the tightness of the handcuffs. I tried to move and that only served to break open my skin with the metal of the cuffs. My blood was warm.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
My feet were bound too, and I was not going to MacGyver out of this. Instead, I took in my surroundings. Surprisingly, I was in a very nice-looking living room, really fucking nice. I was facing floor-to-ceiling windows that boasted views of the ocean. Everything in the room was in neutral tones—white sofa, tan vintage rug, bookcases covering the wall to my left, seriously expensive artwork arranged tastefully on the walls.
Murdering people in luxury seemed to be this guy’s style.
I tried to think how long it had been since he’d taken me. It was still light outside. Barely, the sun was just beginning to set on the horizon, but that gave me hope. Unless I’d been out for a full twenty-four hours, it was the same night, which meant I couldn’t have been gone for longer than an hour. Was that good?
Surely one of the women would’ve raised the alarm within a few minutes of me not coming back.
I’d heard the CliffsNotes version of each of their stories and had I not met them all and trusted them, I would’ve said they were full of shit. It didn’t sound real. The kidnappings, the bombings, the drive-by shootings.
But it was.
They wore the scars in their eyes.
I fucking hated that these women who smiled easily and laughed even easier had that. But the second a cloth settled over my mouth and I was roughly yanked back into a stranger’s body, I was hopeful that their past might help me ensure I had a future.
A door opened and closed, and I stiffened.
I didn’t crane my head to see who it was, though everything inside me ached to do that. Maybe I wouldn’t see them at all. Maybe I’d feel cold steel at the back of my head and then I’d feel nothing else.
But I couldn’t change that by looking death in the face, and it felt oddly weak to try to crane around to see whoever had entered the room. If they wanted to make eye contact with me, they were doing all the work.
I saw his shoes first. Gucci. Snakeskin. The tacky style that rich guys thought made them look rich but just made them even slimier than they were.
The suit was slightly better. Charcoal. Custom. Tailored to perfection, crisp shirt underneath, no collar. Neck was smooth, tanned, attractive. Then there was the face. What I’d been avoiding. I was trying to prolong this, my survival.
His eyes were cold, familiar, full of interest, the same interest a spider might have over a fly caught in its web.
“Ms. Edwards. You’ve proven yourself difficult to locate,” Kitsch said. His voice was pleasant, the same as it had been that night at the charity function. There was a calmness to him that scared the shit out of me.
He was a psychopath. It shouldn’t be surprising, really, with all that data saying that a good percentage of successful men were psychopaths.
Most of them weren’t driven to murder. They just ruined people’s lives without thought of what might happen beyond them adding to a fortune.
“Well, you’ve got me now, haven’t you?” I replied, forcing myself to stay calm. “I will say, you’re meant to be smart but kidnapping one of the world’s most famous actresses right before she’s going to testify against you isn’t really going to clear your name.”
He smiled, moving over to a bar cart tucked in the corner of the room. He leisurely grabbed two glasses and poured from a whisky decanter.
“I’ll apologize for not giving you use of your hands,” he said, glancing up to someone behind me.
A large figure moved to grab the glass from Kitsch and move in front of me.
The man was well over six feet tall, all muscle, close cropped hair, no neck, and wearing all black.
Private security was being paid far too much to feel anything about the fact he was attempting to feed whisky to a woman chained to a chair.
As much as the hot burn of whisky would be welcome right now, I wouldn’t let some goon fucking feed it to me. I wouldn’t let the last thing to pass my lips be something forced on me.
The cold glass stayed pressed against my lips until Kitsch made some kind of signal. Goon stepped back to put the whisky on the coffee table. But he stayed right in front of me.
“I wish you’d accept my hospitality,” Kitsch said, nodding to the glass. “It’s a great bottle, very rare. Makes everything that much...softer.” He sipped from his own tumbler.
I wasn’t about to play along with this. He probably had a vision in his mind of how this would go. He was going to get to play the gentlemanly villain who shows his victim hospitality before he kills her. At best. I didn’t miss the way his eyes lingered on my thighs, with my skirt riding up almost to my waist.
“He here to do your dirty work?” I asked, nodding to the goon, trying to banish thoughts of getting raped before he murdered me. “You want to kill me. Need to kill me if you want your freedom. But you also want to make whatever fucking speech you’ve built up in your mind because the only way a woman would really listen to you is if you kidnapped her and tied her to a chair?” I snapped.
Something moved in Kitsch’s eyes, he clenched his hands around the tumbler. I’d got to him. Men who thought they were smart, powerful were usually the easiest to unravel.
“Mommy didn’t love you, huh?” I continued. “So you decide that you’ll hate women for the rest of your life, punish them when you can? Newsflash, buddy. In my eyes, you’re always gonna be the pathetic, scared little boy who only wants his mother to love him.”