Stolen from the Hitman: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance Read online

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. They won’t mess with us, I’m sure,” I tell her quickly. But I pull my legs in close just in case, trying to minimize the space I take up. I just wish we could see something, anything at all. But it’s so dark.

  Even with my eyes trying to adjust to the lack of light, I still can’t even make out shapes in the darkness. As cold and smelly as it is here, my mind starts going crazy trying to figure out where we could be. Maybe we’re underground? The atmosphere and total lack of light seems impossible for a house or building above ground. We’ve got to be subterranean.

  “What is this place?” Maggie whimpers. I can feel her tears dampening my arms.

  “I —I think we might be underground or something,” I answer. She shivers, her shoulders shaking with sobs. “Listen, we’re gonna figure this out, okay? I promise everything is gonna be alright. Do you have your phone or anything, or did they take it? I think they took mine.”

  She shakes her head. “No, no, they have everything. I’ve just been lying here in the dark. I didn’t even know you were down here until you made a sound. I thought I was alone.”

  “Well, let’s be grateful they didn’t separate us.”

  “Yet,” she adds ominously.

  “Hey, don’t talk like that. Let’s see, what do you remember about how we got here? About last night?” I press, trying to take a more proactive stance.

  I can feel Maggie shrug. “Not much. I remember… being in the cab and getting to that bar in the eleventh arrondissement. With the graffiti.”

  “Zero Zero, yeah,” I agree, the memories trickling back to us both.

  “Oh god, Liv. This is all my fault. I’m the one who made us go there. You just wanted to go back to the flat like a good girl and I — I got us into this mess. I’m so stupid,” she cries, sitting up by herself. I can feel her withdrawing into a tight ball, rocking back and forth slightly.

  “No, I could have stopped us. I wanted to go, too,” I lie, trying to assuage her guilt. It’s true that I didn’t really want to go to the bar. I’d had my suspicions before we even arrived on Rue Amelot last night, but I ignored the warning bells in my head and went along anyway. And besides, I’m the one who was gullible enough to get involved with a guy like Will. So the guilt is equally shared between Maggie and me. We’re both to blame.

  “I’m so sorry, Liv,” she weeps. “What if they kill us?”

  “Stop! Don’t say things like that. You don’t know what they’re doing or what they’re planning, but you can’t just keep assuming the worst. You’ll fall apart if you give in to that kind of thinking, Maggie,” I protest, reaching out to pat her shoulder. She flinches at my touch.

  “My parents were right. I can’t handle the real world on my own. My first time striking out by myself and this happens,” she whimpers, clearly too distraught to heed my advice.

  “Well, what about me? My parents trusted me enough to let me go off to another country on my own and I allow something awful to happen! But it’s not our fault, okay? These guys… they clearly know what they’re doing. I don’t think this is their first rodeo. In fact,” I continue, realizing the truth of my words with a painful jolt as they come out of my mouth, “I bet that Will started hunting me the second I walked onto that plane. How was I to know he was a bad guy? And how were you to know a get-together at a public bar would end up this way?”

  “My parents always told me there were bad people in the world,” Maggie goes on, heedless of my words. “They always warned me to stay within the lines and follow the rules. Don’t do anything stupid. And here I am! God, if I ever get out of this, I’ll never disobey my parents again.”

  I want to reassure her, remind her that even though we might have screwed up this time, her parents aren’t totally faultless, either. I know that if they hadn’t kept such a tight, restrictive leash on Maggie her whole life, she probably wouldn’t have felt the need to rebel in the first place. I saw it all the time with sheltered kids: the more closed-off and limited their upbringing was, the more outrageous their rebellion was. It was like pulling back a slingshot. The farther you try to reel it back, the farther the stone will fly once it’s released.

  I know I’m a victim, too. It wasn’t until arriving in France that I realized just how bored and starved for new experiences I was after a lifetime in rural North Carolina. As soon as I set foot on that plane, I was itching for an adventure. And by god, I got it.

  “Maggie, listen to me. We’re gonna get out of this, somehow —” I start, but my sentence is interrupted by the sudden deep, low creak of door hinges somewhere out in the darkness. Maggie squeals and falls into me again, grasping for my hands in terror.

  We both blink uncomfortably in the dim pillar of light widening before us as a door swings slowly open to reveal the massive, hulking silhouette of a man.

  8

  Max

  I pull up to the student living quarters and head up the stairs. There are a few residents hovering around, and I get a few peculiar looks as I make my way towards the room Liv and Maggie were assigned.

  I have to admit, the student housing is pretty nice, as far as student housing can go. The area is somewhat secluded by Parisian standards, mostly in hopes of giving the students and athletes the chance to lead a somewhat adult lifestyle rather than tossing them to the wolves, so to speak. The gardens of the park nearby are well-maintained, and the sidewalks leading around the buildings are spotless. More interestingly, there’s nothing around indicative of a wild party last night.

  The girls have a place on the sixth floor, and I march up the staircase, my eyes flitting out to the city skyline, the sun lighting the whole sea of buildings up like a glittering sea of color. I try to put myself into the perspective of a foreigner experiencing this place for the first time, but I’ve been here far too long to relive such things.

  Reaching the door, I raise a fist and pound on it several times. I say nothing as to not reveal myself on the off-chance they truly are dodging class, but as I turn my head to listen, I hear nothing — no shuffling, no hushed whispers, and no groggy moans of a hangover. Strange.

  My fist pounds on the door again, but the whole floor is silent. All of this particular building’s residents are back at the class I left in the care of my associate. I realize it’s possible the two of them could be out enjoying the city in the morning, but to alienate themselves from everyone else in their class so early?

  Something sits very ill with me, and I run a hand through my short, dark hair and down to my stubble-ridden face as I check the stairs to make sure nobody is coming. What’s running through my mind could get me fired easily. But I have a gut feeling, and it isn’t a pleasant one I can easily ignore.

  I feel around in my pocket, and my fingers brush against a large paperclip I kept from some papers I’d been working on earlier this morning. Drawing it out and keeping it low, I use my fingers to subtly pry it open into a shape I can work with. I quickly draw my jingling keys out of my other pocket to make it look like I have a legitimate means of accessing the door before stepping forward and moving both to the lock, slipping the paperclip into the keyhole and carefully twisting it and turning it before I hear the lock click in short order, and I pop the door open, slipping inside before swiftly shutting it behind me.

  A quick survey of the room tells me that my suspicions were correct — the apartment is empty. Americans are notorious for finding European living quarters cramped, the walls thin, and someone inside would have been stirred by my knocking and entry.

  But it strikes me how little the apartment looks lived in. The place is virtually spotless, something I never would have expected from the equivalent of college freshmen in their first time away from home. The only sign I see of someone having moved in at all is a Kindle plugged into a charger by the wall outlet, a little current converter awkwardly bulging from the end. By now, I’d expect to see clothes strewn about haphazardly, boxes of leftovers about the tables, and maybe a few wine bottles in the ga
rbage, but the place looks impeccably tidy.

  I take a few more strides around the room, inspecting the place for any signs of what might have happened. It’s clear that they’ve at least entered the apartment, but for such tidy people to have abandoned the first day of class makes me even more suspicious as to what might have happened. With no further hesitation, I take a few steps into the girls’ shared room.

  Here, it’s almost as bare as the living room, but there are more signs of life. The beds are newly made, and the suitcases are hardly unpacked. I glance between the two beds and raise an eyebrow with a soft smile. One of the beds surrounded with suitcases, each one laden with clothes to the point of bursting, and I can spot designer outfits in the open suitcase, along with a number of other personal affects that betray wealth. The other bed bears a lone suitcase with a few store-brand outfits stuffed neatly inside. Having recruited the girls personally, it’s plain as day as to which belonged to whom.

  I can’t help but feel a little sympathy for Liv. Her frugal belongings remind me of my own upbringing back in Russia. It was harsh, harsher than anything I’d ever wish on the likes of any of the girls here, and far more frugal. I was never given the kind of opportunity I’m able to give the girls now. But for people like Liv, I can only imagine how overwhelming and inspiring this kind of chance must be. I almost chuckle to think back on the harsh winters of my homeland, my one good friend and I getting an offer to be whisked away from the frigid and desolate Siberian tundras to the city of lights and magic that is Paris — to get a university education, of all things. We probably would have turned it down, knowing us. We were too concerned with scrounging for food and not freezing to death each week to bother thinking about the kinds of luxuries France enjoys.

  I can’t help but see something of myself in Liv. Her little American hometown with probably fewer citizens than this university has gymnastics students didn’t know wealth of any sort. It might not have been the crushing poverty I knew, but it was not a life of ease by any measure. I want to see her succeed. And I know talent when I see it.

  And that makes me all the more sure something is amiss here.

  I spot a laptop open on Liv’s bed, and I turn it towards me, brushing my fingers over the touchpad to wake it up. The screen lights up, and I narrow my eyes to look at the email notification in the corner, pulling up the newest one that’s already been read.

  It takes me a moment to realize what I’m looking at, but realization dawns shortly, and my eyes widen.

  “A party,” I mutter out loud, my brow furrowing. The email I read doesn’t sit well with me in the least. So the girls did indeed go out for a night on the town last night. Ordinarily, that would simply mean that they might be sleeping off a hangover this morning, and that they’d stumble into the gym later on, but as I straighten up and look around the apartment once more, the events piece together.

  The girls get to the apartment, they set their things down, start to unpack, and then this email comes in around the time they’d be getting settled. A couple of young foreigners might be easily enticed by the idea of a party with some Parisians...but who’s this inviting her? What kind of man digs up a young woman’s email address from a roster like that?

  Then again, I think to myself, what kind of man breaks into his students’ apartment on a hunch? But my motives have some purpose behind them. She doesn’t seem to know the sender of the email well, though.

  I start to run a hand through my hair, thinking twice about my actions. Perhaps I truly am overreacting. It’s perfectly natural and fairly frequent for young people, particularly these college types, to flirt and hook up with one another right off the plane, as it were. Liv probably met this man and decided to really start enjoying herself for her first night in Paris. Can I really blame her for that?

  Of course not, but some things simply don’t fit here. Suppose Liv really is waking up beside her new French lover in his cramped apartment — why is her roommate not around either? They must have been watching each other, so why would they have not helped each other home? And the email I see before me suggests that Will was the one making the advances when they met, and he was apologizing. He stepped over the boundaries and Olivia seemed to have rejected his advances. So unless something changed at the bar, what are the odds that she’d have gone home with him after turning down his kiss?

  But all I have to go by is this email address and the name of the bar, I realize as I curse under my breath. There’s nothing definitive here. But the evidence is deeply concerning: however I rationalize it, two young American girls went to a party their first night in Paris and did not come back home. I think back to my past, to everything I saw back in Russia. Even what I saw when I headed west. I grimace. Even in the best cases, that doesn’t look good.

  Then my heart sinks. I feel a burning drive to dig deeper into this matter, but as I glance back at the little email address on Liv’s computer, I realize that I don’t have the expertise to follow the rabbit hole further. On my own, the trail stops here, my lack of technical know-how finally catching up to me.

  Anger swells within me. Two young women go missing, and what can I do? Sit in their apartment and strut around furiously while the trail gets colder because I don’t know how to maneuver the backdoors of internet and computer systems. I’ve never taken kindly to my rustic background holding me back, an icy chain digging into my flesh no matter how hard I fight against it.

  Perhaps that’s overly dramatic; in truth, I really don’t want to reach out to the one man who I know could open those encrypted doors for me.

  I pull out my phone as I walk back into the living room, grimacing at the screen as I flick through my contacts to the name I have on my mind. A few times, I think again, putting the phone away and going back to the laptop myself, trying to trace it through a few simple searches and going through the university’s database. Nothing.

  A low groan escapes me, and I want to punch a wall as I draw the phone out yet again, staring at the contact on the screen before taking a deep breath.

  One push of a button later, I put the phone to my ear and listen to it ring.

  9

  Liv

  We cling together in the darkness, barely daring to breathe. I can feel Maggie’s fingernails digging into my arms, her thin body trembling with fear. A lump forms in my throat but I can’t bear to even swallow, I feel so frozen with terror. A beam of sickly light floods through the open doorway, blocked in part by the hulking mass of a man. He looks like a shadow creature, some kind of monstrous Minotaur come to feast on us, the unwilling sacrifices. My mind runs wild with horrifying scenarios of what he might do to us.

  He’s too big and bulky to be Will, and I don’t remember anyone from the party at the bar looking like this guy. In fact, once he takes a few steps closer and turns his face slightly to one side, I have to stifle a gasp of horror.

  His face is deformed, or perhaps just badly scarred. He looks like he might be a burn victim — and a bad one at that. Maggie whimpers, shaking in my arms. The man turns back to face us, and even in the darkness I can feel his eyes boring into me. I tighten my hold on Maggie, pulling her closer, as the scarred man begins his slow walk toward us in the dark. His footsteps are heavy and lumbering, slightly uneven as to indicate a limp. I wonder what could have happened to him to make him look this way. Who hurt him?

  And is he going to hurt us?

  I almost wish he would say something, anything at all, to break the cold silence over the room. In the faint light trickling in from the doorway, I can finally make out where we are, to some extent. Through the open door I can see a set of steep, moldy-looking stairs leading up, hinting that we are underground here, as I suspected. The room we’re in is fairly large, but it’s partitioned off into several sections with floor-to-ceiling chain link fencing. The floor is made of filthy concrete, and my stomach churns at the sight of more than a few large stains that look like they might just be made of blood. What happened here? What’s going t
o happen to us?

  The scarred man stops short in front of the fence separating our particular enclosure, his two meaty hands coming up to rattle the metal links, causing a horrible racket. Maggie yelps and begins to sob as the man’s disfigured face cracks into a wide, malicious grin. He reaches up. There’s a clicking sound as he pulls a string hanging from the ceiling and a single lightbulb illuminates the room. Maggie closes her eyes tightly and burrows into my arms.

  I immediately survey the whole room, blinking in the sudden painful light. Yes, I conclude darkly, those stains across the floor are a blackish-red in hue. Definitely blood. And the man in front of us looks even more terrifying in the light, with his rippled, cracked skin, black eyes, and devilish grin. He had to have walked through fire to land a face like that. Some part of me wonders if he encountered that fire in hell.

  Flameface walks along the length of the fence, shaking it violently, sometimes punching it, all the while smirking at us with his crooked, yellowed teeth. Then he stops suddenly, staring at us, standing totally still. He waits a long moment, and then reels back and slams his fist into the fence, making the whole enclosure shake and rattle. Maggie lets out a startled shriek and Flameface bursts into cruel laughter, cackling like a madman.

  “Ooh, didn’t mean to scare you,” he growls in a heavy accent. “Ozornoy devushki! Are you ready for your nakazaniye?”

  “P-please leave us alone,” I stammer, struggling to make my voice sound clear and strong in spite of my overwhelming fear. I don’t want him to see how frightened I am. I don’t want to let him win so easily. If I’m going to die here, I’m going to die with dignity.

  He chuckles and tilts his head to the side. “Oh, she speaks! How are you feeling, malyutka? Did you sleep well? We gave you our best milk and honey to help you rest.”