Free Hunted by Jaycee Clark Page B

fought them every time. And every time ended the same, with a needle in my arm. He’d still give me a Mikhail Cocktail.” The narcotics were still plunged into her bloodstream, heating along until her body began to crave it, even if she fought it, even as it terrified her.
    “A what?”
    She took a deep breath and blinked. “A Mikhail Cocktail. I have no idea what was in it other than ketamine. He never actually said.” The nightscape blurred by, the headlights glistening off the frozen ground. “I’d have done anything not to have that needle in my arm. Especially after that first trip, and he knew it.” She shuddered, the terror still clawing up the back of her throat.
    “What happened?”
    She shook her head, images bloody and real shadowed with nightmares. Simon. Screams. Blood, so much blood. The hands.
    She swallowed, and ignored his question.
    Silence stretched between them until he said quietly, “At least you didn’t become an addict.”
    “Oh, no, that would have been a problem and Mikhail wanted me to know and remember everything he did to me.” She shuddered. “It was June when I went in. The city was alive and bustling, evening plays in the squares, painters along the bridge walks. Peddlers and their wares.”
    “What happened?”
    “Wrong guy, too blind to see how stupidly naïve I was.” If only she’d listened to her brothers. “He then got into the wrong crowd, owed lots of money and couldn’t touch any more of mine. They came looking for him and . . . ” She trailed off, remembering that night. Even Simon, asshole that he was, hadn’t deserved what they’d done to him.
    “And?” he prompted.
    She shivered.
    “I know it’s hard.” His quiet words soothed, even if the man himself made her nervous. But mini arsenal or not, he got her out.
    What happened to the hell-bent girl she used to be?
    “They killed him,” she simplified. No need to go into the gory details of the warehouse. The blood, and her pity for a man she’d learned to hate almost as much as Mikhail.
    “Did he pay them back?”
    She tilted her head toward him and stole a glance. Those black eyes of his weren’t so bad. Kind of like learning one could pet a wolf, but wolves still bit.
    “What do you think? If he’d had the money, they wouldn’t have killed him, would they?”
    “So Jezek took you. He usually steers clear of Western women.”
    “Really?”
    He nodded. “Too much trouble. Kidnapping a woman from a war-torn country that needs the money and getting her in the program is much easier than having influential families and politicians bringing on the heat.”
    There was logic in that and she’d seen the proof with her own eyes. She’d been the only American for months.
    “Well, I must have been a tasty treat too good to pass up because Simon had already destroyed all my identification months before so I couldn’t leave him. Who was going to miss me?”
    “There’s someone missing you.”
    Maybe.
    Instead she continued, wanting to end it as quickly as possible now that she’d started on this story. “In September Mikhail asked me to be his first lady, like he was some sort of ambassador or president or something.” She remembered the romantic dinner, the brochures of the Caribbean. He wanted to sail on his yacht. “I told him no. What difference did it make if it was a pretty house with silk and fine things or a whorehouse.” She laughed, wanting to cry when the last word cracked. “He doesn’t like to be turned down. I don’t remember them taking me to the brothel. It was mid-September by that time, I think. I kept putting him off, but I’d finally told him no and he . . . ” She remembered the rage in those blue eyes, turning them the color of flat blue stones. Cold, merciless. He was always so relaxed, so calm, so indifferent. But it had been as if someone flipped a switch.
    “He what?” Reyer—Ashbourne asked her. She couldn’t think of him as John. She’d never be able to think