by Tonya Plank
The last thing I wanted to do was leave Rory alone. But I knew my uncle knew she wasn’t important to him now, Cheryl could no longer sabotage us, and Valentin was still looking out for us. He was there, watching everything. He’d keep an eye out for Rory—I thought. There was no time to text him. I had no access to my phone in the tent. And someone was going to abduct my sister if I didn’t get to her first. I had to go after Tatiana. She was alive and well. At least for now.
“Tanya,” I called out and sprinted after her. She’d gotten a head start but the crowd was so dense she didn’t get very far. I clearly saw her run out the back door that led to the maze of practice rooms. I arrived at the door the same time as my uncle. He was too squat to gain any distance on me. I shoved him as hard as I could away from the door.
“Be careful, you don’t want to do that. I am not the enemy,” he said, turning to eye a younger man dressed all in black with long blond hair, running behind us, pushing his way through the crowd, quickly gaining ground.
I wanted to ask who he was but there was no time. I ran through the door, calling out Tatiana’s name. I saw her at the end of the long hall, opening the door that led to the stairs, which in turn led outside. Her hair was long, loose and wild as she fled.
“Tatiana, please wait,” I called out. She turned to look at me, right as I heard the door behind me open. She fled through the door. I ran as fast as I could after her. I ran all the way up two flights of stairs. Damn, she was fast. I could see her hair trailing. I heard footsteps behind me. I didn’t bother calling out to her again. She was scared of the guy following me, whoever he was. I knew she wouldn’t stop.
I felt a gush of wind as she opened the door to the outside. It took me a few seconds more until I was outside as well. Where was she? I looked all around.
“Tanya,” I called out, running down the street to the back of the building.
“Tatiana, Tatiana!” I heard my uncle behind us.
Then I heard the door slam shut again. Now voices. “Where is she? Where did they go?” These were American-accented voices. This was followed by more Russian—my uncle and cousin.
What the fuck? Had they hired Americans to help them kidnap her?
“Over there!” one of the Americans said. They took off running in the other direction. I began to run after them. But then I heard her.
“Sasha,” she whispered.
I looked all around. It was Tatiana’s voice. A voice I hadn’t heard in so long. I recognized it. But it was so soft. Was it a ghost? Was this all a dream? I looked around and around, calling out her name. Then I saw it. A white arm reaching out from behind a large trash bin. I ran toward her, grabbed the arm, held her soft, cold hand.
“Come out,” I said.
She carefully emerged. Her face was full of fear. Her eyes grew wider and she screamed as I felt an arm on my shoulder. I turned around and swiped full force with my fist, connecting with my cousin. I’d delivered a punch right to Pasha’s chin.
“Fuck, Sasha, fuck,” he yelled.
“Stay the fuck away from her. I told you that! I warned you!”
“Shut up. Shut up,” my uncle said, running up to us, huffing and puffing, his large body nearly giving out. “There’s no time for family fights right now. They’ve got Rory.”
My heart nearly fell out of my body. Of course, Rory had run after me. All the way outside. Oh my God, I’d gained one and lost the other.
“Who? Who has Rory?” I yelled at the top of my lungs, throwing my cousin aside and stomping toward my uncle.
“I will explain in the car,” he said, pulling me along. Fuck. I pulled out of his embrace and returned to Tatiana, whom my cousin was now pulling along behind me.
“Get your hands off her,” I said. He did as I said and stepped away from her, with his hands up in surrender.
“Sasha?” Uncle Oleg called out. I turned back. He had his arm extended toward a black van waiting to the side. For a second I wondered if this was all a ruse to get me to release Tatiana to them. But who were the Americans, then? My uncle’s face actually looked sincere. “Now we have something they want and they have something we want.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Tatiana’s husband,” he said.
Chapter Fourteen
Tatiana nodded. They weren’t lying about that part, anyway.
“Stay away from her,” I warned Pasha again. “No one is to touch her except me.” I held my hand to Tatiana. She looked at him, and my uncle, then took my hand. I pulled her to me, hugged her.
“Hurry up and get in or they’ll get away,” my uncle snapped.
I directed Tatiana to get in first, and I sat next to her. My cousin got in on the far side, so that Tatiana’s skin touched only mine. Those bastards were getting nowhere near her. My uncle got in on the passenger side. A man I didn’t know was in the driver’s seat.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Anton, a friend of mine,” Uncle Oleg said, answering for him.
The man eyed me in the rearview mirror. Big black eyes, pockmarked face, skin yellowed from smoking. He definitely wasn’t American. He was Russian through and through.
“How do you know they have Rory?” I said, my heart sinking just at the words.
“Because they just texted me. ‘I have someone you want, you have someone I want.’ And they gave me an address for where we can do the exchange.”
“Give me that,” I demanded, reaching for his cell. He handed it over. He wasn’t lying, at least about what the text said. “Who is this? Who the fuck is this?” I yelled when no one answered me immediately.
You hurt her and you will die, I texted.
Tatiana placed her soft, delicate hand over mine. “He won’t hurt her. I’ve never known him to hurt anyone.” She spoke in Russian, which sounded soft and sweet to me for once.
“Who is this motherfucker? Is it someone from the agency you worked for? That sham agency?”
She shook her head and looked away, outside the opposite window.
“Tanya, please. They have someone I love very much. Rory is very dear to me. I need her back.” I took a deep breath. My voice had started to break. As much as I loved my sister and was elated she was alive and unharmed, I needed Rory to come back to me. I didn’t know how I’d live without her.
“He’s my husband,” she said, her face still turned away from mine.
“Yes, I know, but how did you end up with him? Who is he? You actually married this guy?”
“Please. I don’t want to talk about it, Sasha,” she said.
“Tatiana, this is my wife. My wife-to-be, anyway.” I was yelling.
“Sasha, calm down,” my cousin said. “We will get her back. We found Tatiana. We will find Rory. We will get her.”
Anton was driving like he meant it, tires squealing, horn honking, flying over bumps in the road.
“Okay, can you just tell me how well you know this man, what he’s capable of?” I asked, lowering my voice.
She shook her head, still not looking at me. “I met him at the club I worked for after I left the agency. He was a nice guy, an American. He gave me huge tips. He told me he wanted to take me out of there and take me away from it all. I told him what I owed the agency, that I couldn’t leave till I paid them back. He said he’d pay them. He said he owned a big farm in north California. I was so sick of Tokyo. But I didn’t want to go back home. California seemed like a good idea. And he seemed like a nice guy. And California was where you were.” She turned her head in my direction now, though still not looking into my eyes.
“So what happened, Tanya?” I whispered, brushing my fingertips lightly over hers. I was trying to be gentle. I loved her dearly, but I needed to know who had Rory. I had to keep pressing and I knew she’d talk if I was kind and gentle.
“We got to California. He was nice. His farm is huge. It was boring, Sasha. I couldn’t stay there forever. I wanted you. I wanted your life. I expected…excitement.” She t
urned her head more toward me, still refusing to make eye contact.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No, never,” she said.
“So this is a new behavior for him, then? Coming after you and committing a kidnapping?”
She said nothing. She apparently didn’t know this bastard very well.
“Well, how did he get you there, to the U.S.? Didn’t you have to get a visa?”
She laughed and finally looked me straight on. “He’s rich, and American, Sasha.”
“So he got you fake documents?”
She shrugged. “He did whatever he needed to do to get me there. I didn’t really ask questions.”
“How did you get to England?”
“Same way,” she said.
“He brought you? To see me dance?”
“No, I used his credit card and the documents he gave me to go to the U.S. He found out and followed me.”
Her story didn’t completely make sense. If he was such a nice guy, how had he violently kidnapped someone? He’d committed a crime bringing Tatiana into and out of the U.S. I of all people knew all the red tape hell you had to go through for that. There was something she wasn’t telling me. But before I could ask anything more, Anton screeched to a halt.
“This is it,” my uncle said. “Be quiet when you get out.”
Anton quietly opened the door. When he did so, he pulled out a gun. My uncle did the same. I looked at Tatiana. She was unfazed. Like she was used to this. What the fuck? My cousin opened the back door and stepped out, pulling out a weapon as well.
“Stay here,” Pasha said to us.
Like fuck, I thought. I went to open my side and struggled with the lock before realizing the van’s doors only opened on one side.
“You stay here,” I said to Tatiana, as I crawled out over her.
“Sasha, no! You can’t go. You’re not trained for this!” She grabbed my arm.
“This is my wife,” I said, pulling myself out of her grip. “I have to go.”
“Sasha,” she called out as I began to run behind my cousin.
But then I realized what I was doing, leaving my sister behind once again. What if there was someone out here ready to snatch her? What the fuck was I doing? I was so focused on getting Rory back I wasn’t thinking at all. Just as I turned around to go back to Tatiana, I saw her jumping out of the van. She ran toward me.
“Come on,” I said, holding her tightly in my arms. So tightly she nearly disintegrated, she was so thin. We ran toward the warehouse the other three were standing in front of, weapons drawn.
“She’s in the back,” I heard a man say from inside, in English.
“Bring her out now,” Uncle Oleg said to him.
Then I realized there was a man standing in front of the door. I hadn’t seen him there in all the darkness. Tatiana spotted him at the same time I did. I felt panic flutter through her body. I held her more tightly. “I won’t let you go,” I said.
“I just want my wife,” the man said, now pointing at Tatiana.
“No one will get hurt. We will do the exchange fair and square and no one gets hurt.” This came from another man, another American-accented voice. I couldn’t see him, and wondered how many were inside, whether they had weapons as well.
“Bring her out now,” my uncle repeated.
I then saw another man standing off to the side. I recognized him as the young guy with long blond hair I’d seen earlier running outside the Winter Gardens. He was pointing a gun at my uncle. So I guess the answer to my question was yes. Tatiana shivered again.
Seeing the man point at Tatiana, my cousin turned around. Huffing, he backed up toward us, holding his gun firmly aimed at the man with the gun. “I told you to stay in the fucking van with her,” he said.
“Bring her out,” the man who’d pointed at Tatiana said, turning to look inside the room, where there was apparently yet another person.
As the door opened, there was more light. I got a good look at the man who was apparently Tatiana’s husband. He looked more like a businessman than a thug. He was dressed in an almost preppy manner, in khaki pants and a blue pressed linen button-down shirt under a brown corduroy jacket. He had a forlorn expression on his face. He was clean-shaven and had a head of thick but short brown hair, graying at the sides. He could have been in his sixties or even older but he clearly kept himself up. He had a sad face. He certainly didn’t look like a thug. I could see how Tatiana had trusted him. But of course looks could be very deceptive.
Then I saw her. My Rory. A man who looked exactly the opposite of this man had his grimy hands on her shoulders. That man was big and muscular with a pockmarked face, and angry eyes that said he would easily break her neck if asked to. I looked more closely at the hand that held her left shoulder. It too was holding a gun.
Rory was still wearing her skimpy Latin toga. Her wrists and ankles were tied together and she couldn’t walk but for the man pushing her along. She was shivering. It was freezing out here. She looked terrified. Our eyes connected. Panic surged down my spine. And then I saw her glance down at her hand, then foot, ever so quickly. I followed her gaze. She moved her feet very nonchalantly into a perfect third position. When she did so, she showed me that whatever they’d tied her with—it actually looked like heavy duty tape—she’d broken through. She wiggled her fingers too, subtly indicating she had full use of her hands as well, though she was pretending not to. I looked back at Tatiana’s husband. He was far too focused on my sister to care about Rory. Seeing Rory scheming, my brain cleared, and I was able to think.
I suddenly realized my cousin was no longer at my side. I heard movement coming from behind me.
“Keep quiet,” Pasha said in Russian, indicating he had some sort of plan.
“Tatiana, please,” said her husband. His voice was thick and cracking, as if he was about to cry. “I’m so sorry. Please come back. Please come back home. I promise you…I promise you I will give you what you want. Whatever you want, sweetheart.”
“She is not going to go anywhere with you,” I said, pronouncing every word, every syllable to its fullest, in perfect fucking English.
He stood still for a moment as if in shock. Then he shook his head in disbelief and laughed. “Well then, sonny boy, you are never going to see your girlfriend here again.”
Sonny boy? Who was this guy? Certainly not from New York or L.A.
“Sasha,” Tatiana said, now brushing my arm and stepping around me.
What? “No,” I said, softly but sternly. “You are not going back to him. We can do this. Rory can move.” I said all of this in Russian, and whispered the last part so only she and Pasha could hear. But she eyed Rory’s supposedly bound hands and feet for too long, and her husband followed her gaze, realization slowly dawning in his eyes.
Just then, a burst of gunfire rang out from behind me and I saw the man standing on the other side of Tatiana’s husband jump back as if he’d been shot and Tatiana’s husband jump to the side. I saw a flash of movement coming from my side and realized it was my cousin.
My only thought was to protect Rory, but I didn’t know how to do that without leaving my sister. But then I saw her—Rory—slicing her legs through the air in a brilliant lightning-fast grand battement kick, aiming her stiletto directly at the face of the man who held her. The heel lodged in his nose and he flew backward, grabbing at his face. The gun went flying.
The man who’d been shot hadn’t been taken out, but only wounded, because he took off running straight toward Rory. She made a hasty attempt to scramble around the man she’d just kicked, now stepping on his cheek. He was still lying on the ground.
“You bitch!” he said, grabbing her leg.
No. That was not going to happen. He was not going to get her.
“Go to the van. Hurry up and run,” I ordered Tatiana as I ran as fast as I could toward the wounded man with the gun. I flew toward him with all my speed, and when I got close enough, I jumped, slicing my front leg through th
e air, in a massive grand jeté.
He hadn’t seen me coming, and I kicked him good and hard in the chest, slamming him into the brick wall. Rory scurried out of the first man’s hold and reached for the gun, grabbing for it just as I got to her, and whisked her up, one-armed, into the air, carrying her back to the van. I heard bullets going off like crazy behind us. Oh my God.
“Keep down!” I said to her, holding her folded over my arm, covering her head and torso with my body as I ran.
Just as I got to the van, the doors slid open and we flew inside. Anton gunned the motor.
“Tatiana!” I yelled.
“She’s next to you, on the floor,” my uncle said from the front seat. We screeched out onto the open road, the van swerving. I heard bullets still sounding behind us. I heard a loud clank at the back of the van. Followed by another very loud clank, like metal hitting metal. Or metal hitting the ground. Then there was a loud crash and glass went flying everywhere.
Fuck. “Keep down,” I yelled, pushing Rory to the floor next to my sister, covering her head. I felt both of them now, held one hand over each little warm, blonde delicate crown. I could feel Rory’s pulse beating straight through her skull.
“I think we lost them,” my cousin said in the far back seat. He was facing the back of the van, gun raised and pointed.
I felt Rory breathing deeply, which slowly began to stop her heart from racing so.
After a while, the van slowed and proceeded at a normal pace. Rory peeked up at me.
“Can I get up now?” she asked.
I looked around. There was nothing but black night and silence. I nodded. She sat up on the seat next to me. I wrapped my arm around her. Tatiana got up and sat on my other side. Rory looked forward, out the front window. She turned around and, meeting the eyes of my cousin, jumped and gasped.
“It’s okay,” I said, realizing this was the man who’d kidnapped her, whom she’d seen chasing Tatiana in the ballroom. A man she hated, and rightly so. I caressed her arm and kissed her cheek and her chin. “I am so, so, so sorry you were pulled into this. So sorry, my love.”