Captive of the Hitman: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance Novel Read online

  A sense of betrayal comes over me, fear over what my employer was intending on doing to me. If Mikhail is to be trusted—and I don’t know if he can—then he saved me from something terrible. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to wonder what a group of men would have done to a drugged and helpless young woman.

  The pain that shoots through my stomach sends tears to my eyes, and my entire body feels overheated with anxiety. When finally I’m emptied of every last bit of food, there’s still a lingering agony in my gut, but my nausea subsides.

  I’m still in my crumpled dress from the night before… was it last night? I have no idea of the time, I realize, only that it’s sunny outside. The window faces a drab building across the street, completely unremarkable and unmarked, for that matter.

  I grab some of the paper towel next to the sofa and wipe off my mouth before I stumble to the bathroom. Or try to, at least. My legs are weaker than I could’ve imagined, and I feel so dizzy. It takes me a while to make my way there. The washroom has the same kind of austere layout as the rest of the ‘safehouse.’ But it’s clean enough to eat off of, and that’s comforting enough.

  I vomit again, but it’s really more of a dry heave, since I have no more food to leave me. I notice a toothbrush and paste there, so I clean my mouth out once I’m done, trying to get the sickening tang of my own vomit out of there.

  One look in the mirror, and I’m instantly feeling awful again. I’m pale, my makeup is smudged, and I look like hell. No wonder Mikhail didn’t look the least bit interested in me. Well, that and the fact that I’m technically his captive, I suppose.

  He said he wants to keep me safe, though. Safe from what?

  I wash away the streaked eyeliner and smudged lipstick, and that gets rid of some of my disaster-case appearance.

  My hair feels awful, but at least the hairspray kept in my curls. Still, I desperately need a shower.

  I shut and lock the door, quickly stripping out of my dress and turning the shower on hot. Steam fills the small room, and it would be soothing if I didn’t feel so troubled. My stomach churns, and not just because of whatever they slipped me last night.

  It’s all just darkness, and when I step into the shower and the hot water hits me, so too does a sob. What happened last night? I want to scream at the fact that I can’t remember, that I don’t know what happened. How does someone just lose hours of their life? I’ve been drunk before, but never forgotten so much like this.

  The cascade of water does little to soothe my troubled mind, and tears mingle with the shower. I feel like screaming, like crying, like giving up. I’m terrified, and don’t know what’s happening. It didn’t even occur to me to check my phone. Maybe someone’s messaged me, given me some words of helpful comfort.

  I quickly finish the shower, feeling a little more like myself before wrapping myself in the towel and padding out towards the bedroom. I check my shoes and around the cot, but there’s nothing. No phone.

  Fuck, that must be how he found out my name! I curse myself for not having figured it out sooner. Of course he stole my phone. Why wouldn’t he, if I was being held captive?

  For my own good, he’d said. Well, I should be the one to decide that. He can’t just come into my life, kidnap me, then tell me it’s for my own good.

  I grab the clothes he set out for me and quickly pull them on. Shocker, they fit. This guy is even more of a creep than I figured! Anger starts fueling me. I’m not going to sit here like some helpless damsel. I’m going to get out.

  I go to the barred window, finding myself several stories up and without a fire escape. That’s gotta be against the law, but so is kidnapping, so whatever. I try to open it, but it seems like it’s sealed shut, and I let out a groan.

  A wave of exhaustion hits me, and I have to lean against the wall for support.

  What if he’s watching? What if there are cameras? I shake the thought away. It’s not going to do me any good to think like that. I just have to get out and find out what’s going on.

  I try the front door, but it’s locked and made of metal. There’s no budging it. Then I go to the kitchen, where I find there are no knives and one locked cupboard, but I do get a thick spoon and take it to the window. I try to push it in, see if maybe I can’t pry the window from its setting, but I’m weak and having little success.

  I must be at it for a while, because I eventually get so exhausted I slump to my knees in that pink set of around-the-house wear. What is it he’s gotten me, anyhow? Yoga pants, socks and a shirt. It’s deranged, I feel like a girl in my father’s home again, and the helplessness makes me want to sob.

  “The window is sealed shut,” comes his dark voice, standing behind the sofa, and I cry out, startled. I didn’t hear him come in at all! And it’s not like my trying to pry open the window was a noisy affair!

  I scramble backwards, away from his towering form. The daze must have parted, though, because earlier I thought he was cute, but now...

  I’m being held captive by an Adonis. He’s all muscle and smoldering glare.

  Just what I need.

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on a girl! What if I’d been changing?”

  “You would change in the living room when I gave you a bedroom all your own?” he asks in that thickly accented voice, which I’m starting to realize sounds vaguely eastern European. But he’s got his brow raised to me in challenge as he stands there, looming, larger than life, waiting for my response as he holds a small cloth bag.

  “Well, maybe,” I say defiantly, though even I can tell I sound more like a petulant child than a grown woman. I glance down at the bag, my arms folded beneath my chest. “What’s that?”

  He gives the bag a toss onto the sofa.

  “It’s medicine for nausea. It will help you keep your food down,” he explains to me, the towering brute looking exactly as I’d seen him last, except he must have shaved away the stubble in the interim. But it’s quickly regrowing. “Plus some magazines for entertainment,” he adds, as if this is the 1990s and people still read magazines.

  “And my cellphone?”

  “I had to destroy it,” he says casually.

  “What?” That was pretty much the last thing I expected him to say, and I take a step towards him angrily. “But it has all my contacts!”

  “It could also be used to track you down. Is a phone worth your life?” he asks me pointedly, and I’m starting to hate his chiseled face and eerie calm. He radiates confidence and power, like some smug son of a bitch who’s never been knocked down a peg in his life.

  I’m aghast. I can’t believe it. My phone. The newest model that I had to shell out a ridiculous sum for after waiting in line…destroyed. By this thug.

  “How could you?!” I demand, rising up onto my knees and glaring at him. “Do you have any idea what that thing meant to me?”

  He takes his time, undaunted, those dusky eyes looking me over as if I’m a strange, even repulsive creature. “More than your life, it seems,” he says simply before turning to leave.

  But I can’t let him leave, and I lunge over the back of the sofa to grab his arm at the wrist.

  “No, wait!” I insist, but even I realize that it’s only by choice that he stops. That thick arm beneath my hands is a thickly corded knot of muscle, and he could yank me over the back of that sofa with ease.

  “What?” he asks dryly, looking back and down at me. And though he acts so calm, I get the impression I am pushing his patience to the limit.

  Even though I’m pissed, I don’t want to be alone again. I’m terrified, and having him near me is safer, somehow, even if he is my captor. I hate the waiting, because when he’s gone, my head goes back to what might have happened last night.

  What really happened.

  And I know now that he’s definitely got me locked up in here good, and by the looks of things, he’s keeping me a while.

  I let go of his thick wrist and take in a deep breath.

  “How long are you going to keep me
locked up?”

  That question seems to take him by surprise, because he doesn’t answer me right away. He takes a moment. And that more than anything else about my capture worries me.

  “I don’t know yet,” he says in that gruff voice of his. “I have to see how long the search for you persists. If I let you go too soon, then it’s just as well I didn’t haul you out at all. I should just as well have put a bullet in your head then and there that night.”

  His ominous words make me tremble, all the more because I see the handle of his gun sticking out from behind his back as he faces me, side-on.

  There’s some part of me, some part I’m not ready to reconcile with, that knows that what happened that night wasn’t just a nightmare. Waking up and wondering if I was dead was natural, because I remember a pistol pointed at my head.

  I almost died.

  This man almost killed me.

  It makes me almost throw up, my stomach churning in disgust and terror, but I swallow it all down. I can’t blow this. I can’t give him a reason to kill me. I ignore the burning behind my eyeballs, the frightened tears that want to spill but I won’t allow.

  Swallowing back the bile and the lump in my throat, I return my eyes to his.

  “Mikhail,” I say, trying to build a bit of a repertoire with him. That’s what they always say on TV, right? Make your kidnapper get to know you. But he already knows me, at least in part... It’s still worth a shot. “I’m scared.”

  His eyes narrow as he stares at me, into me. And he’s studying me. I worry that my attempt to sway him failed, but then it happens: he softens. Those broad shoulders lower a little, his sweater hugging those thick muscles showing the tension melt a little throughout him. He might be a scary boogeyman of death, but he’s still susceptible to a girl’s charms.

  “You have no need to be scared while you are here, Allie. It is what’s on the other side of that window,” he says, jabbing a finger at it pointedly, “that you must fear. And if you keep that in mind, you will be fine.”

  He says it all so seriously I could almost be convinced, if it weren’t for the fact I am fairly certain this man is a murderer.

  But I give him a small nod, like I’m on his side. As if we both want the same thing. And, if he does want me to be safe, then we definitely want the same thing.

  “I get that, but Mikhail, people are going to be looking for me. And my mom, she’s... I mean, a few years ago, she had a fall, and it affected her mind. Dad passed years ago, and she really needs me to help take care of her.”

  His brow furrows just a bit, and he’s silent again. I know I have him considering my words. He takes his time and wets his lips, and I feel like I have him.

  “If you die, your mother would be very put out then, nyet?” he says, that strange words on the end completely foreign to my ears.

  “She needs me, so I can’t die,” I say, trying to choose my words carefully, even though I’m panicking that he’s going to leave and I’m going to be stuck. He can’t leave! “But she has pills. Medication she has to take, and I have to make sure she takes it and gets to all of her appointments. I don’t even know what day it is...”

  He pauses a moment, but then reaches into his back pocket, pulling out a small pad of paper and a pencil the length of my thumb. He puts it down right in front of me.

  “Write out the details of your mother’s care,” he instructs me very pointedly, his gaze narrowing. I feel like I’m under a heat lamp as a detective scrutinizes me.

  My shoulders slump, and I sit down on the couch, pencil in hand as I try to remember everything that was in my phone. It’s pretty sad that I can barely remember, considering how routine it is.

  I scribble down as I remember.

  Every third Tuesday, appointment with Dr. Nevaro.

  Twice daily reminders to take her pills. Blue in the morning, yellow and white at night before bed.

  Once a month, hospital for treatment for osteoporosis.

  I hand it back to him.

  “I don’t know how to spell all the drug names, but she has real problems with me not being around. I really need to check on her, Mikhail. You have a mom, right? And she means a lot to you?”

  He takes the paper from me and sizes it up before folding it and slipping it into his pocket.

  “My mother is long dead,” he says grimly as he turns and walks away. My heart sinks.

  But as he reaches the door he pulls it open and stops, looking back me.

  “I will see yours doesn’t yet meet the same end,” he states simply, then swiftly vanishes out the door, leaving me to the simple furnishings, all by myself.

  “Fuck!” I cry out into my humble cage. I can’t stay here. I don’t care how safe he thinks it is, I can take care of myself, and being held captive by a man I don’t know—a man who openly carries a gun on his hip—is not going to work for me.

  He said the window was sealed shut, but there’s gotta be a way out.

  Then I remember my stilettos. Maybe I could use those to bust open the glass! Or hammer the door.

  No matter what, I’m getting out of this safehouse-turned-prison.

  3

  Mikhail

  Every meeting with that girl is a struggle.

  If she’s not taunting me with her natural good looks, she’s tugging at heartstrings I didn’t even know I had. It’s a fucking nuisance.

  I pull on my leather jacket, make the phone call I have to, then head right out. But now I’m here, back at this dark, dingy bar. Where low life mobsters come to get work. I hate this place and almost never come. The work finds me at this point in my career, after all.

  Smoking laws forbid it, but the law has no consequence in this place, so smoke lingers in the air as a bunch of guys, young and old, try and put on airs of being tough. But every single one of them is shaken by my entry.

  Every one of them knows who I am, by reputation or rumor.

  I could rule them. I could be boss of this whole stretch of the city if I wanted to.

  But I turned that down long ago. I’m happiest doing what I do.

  “Mikhail,” says Nikita behind the bar, the surprise on her face mixed with pleasure. She’s a good girl, the only good part about this dive. “Didn’t expect you here!” she says as she pulls out a glass and starts to make me a drink without even asking. She knows what I like, even now.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” I say with a shrug of my shoulders, leaning in over the bar and shooting the young punk nearest me a look.

  He scurries off, taking his drink further down the bar and giving me the space I want.

  “Well, I’m just happy to see you,” Nikita says, pouring me up a vodka and cranberry, even adding a little slice of lime. That’s new. “Not many pleasant faces around here,” she adds, and I know it. These men have no concern for women like her—they’re just cargo or commerce, to be used up until worthless.

  I try the drink, and to my surprise I like it, that lime adding a touch of something I didn’t know I was missing.

  “Truth be told, Nikki,” I say, leaning in, speaking to her in confidence, “I am curious as to the word on my latest job.”

  She arches a brow at me, looking truly surprised.

  “That’s not like you, Mikhail,” she says, putting the vodka bottle back. And I note it’s even the kind I like. Russian Standard, straight from home. Nothing’s quite as smooth as it. She’s so damned considerate of me, like a little sister I never had.

  “This is a… special case,” I say simply. “A very big job. Wondering what the word on it around town is.”

  “You always get the big ones,” she says, leaning in closer herself, talking quietly. “Not much is being said. More hush-hush than usual. So it must’ve been very important,” she says, searching my eyes for an answer, but I give none. No flicker in my face to betray an ounce of info.

  “So nothing, then?” I ask to confirm, but she licks her lips and peers down, thoughtfully.

  “I overheard some o
f the guys talking earlier,” she says softly to me. “Word from a crooked cop was that security cameras showed a witness to a big hit was unaccounted for. They are looking for her.”

  Fuck.

  “How recent was this?” I ask, trying not to betray my urgency. But she can pick up on it, I think.

  “Just about forty minutes ago,” she says, and she reaches beneath the bar, taking out the vodka again and pouring me a straight shot. “Very fresh news, they’re putting out the word now.”

  “There a description of the girl?” I ask, then down the vodka she poured me in one smooth motion.

  “Vasili,” she says, pointing her chin towards the weasley man. “He has some info on her, I believe. They’re looking into things now.”

  “Thanks, Nikki,” I say, sliding a hundred dollar bill across the bar to her. Her eyes widen and she looks to me.

  “If I hear anything more, I’ll let you know,” she says, and I nod.

  “I know you will. Stay safe, little one,” and she rolls her eyes at me, being far from little. She is 5’8” and a grown woman, after all. But I still saw her as the famished, undernourished girl they hauled out of the dockyards.

  I turn to leave, but then in through the front doors comes the boss. The Avtoritet.

  He’s escorted on both sides by two young brutes he trusts, and while the sneer he holds makes it look like he’s ready to make every occupant of the bar feel like shit, his gaze settles on me. And I steal some of the thunder from his entry.

  “Volkov,” he says, using my last name, and I know he’s struggling on how to handle my presence. I never come around, which makes things easier for him. Seeing as I was the guy who passed up his position. The guy who had every right to be over him, but was only technically under his authority.

  It’s an awkward situation for him, I admit.

  “Gregorovich,” I say with a simple nod in return, which is more than the vile shit deserves from me. I loathe this man, not just for what he’s done, but for how he gives me so few things to insult him about. He’s not fat, he’s not ugly; he’s just a manipulative bastard who plays things cautiously all the time. Too cautious. Cautious to the point of paranoia.