“Oh, I should, should I?” I could see him trying to hold back laughter. “What makes you so confident they will track you down? You don't even know where we are, and it has already been ten days since you went missing. The trail, as they say, has gone very cold.”
“You underestimate my friends,” I informed him. “They are some of the best undercover agents in the world, so I have no doubt they'll find me sooner or later.” What the hell?! Why did I just tell him that? Kit, shut the hell up! “And it can't have been ten days since I was taken; I would have already died from dehydration. Not to mention the fact that drugs don't work anywhere near as well on me as they do normal people, so it would have been impossible to keep me unconscious unless they were repeatedly chloroforming me.” At this point I forcefully clapped a hand over my mouth to stop the flow of word vomit before I gave away any more secrets. What is going on? This guy is so far on the wrong side of the law it is laughable, and here I am just spilling my guts to him like we are besties! Maybe the drugs from the auction were still affecting my brain somehow.
“Well, isn't that interesting,” Dragomir purred, a sexy smirk on his lush, kissable lips.
Woah, what? No! Not sexy or kissable! Dangerous and sociopathic!
“I'll help you out with some answers,” he offered. “The transport company that handles all the new acquisitions for Onyx Auction would have kept you on an IV drip of fluids and sedatives. It's pretty common practice in human trafficking. Now tell me about these secret agent friends of yours. Are you romantically involved with one of them? Is that why you are so sure they will come to rescue you?”
Why was he so interested in the guys? He’d just told me that I had been gone for ten days! Ten days! Why weren't we focusing on that part? My mouth moved to form words, but my thoughts were conflicting and all that came out was a strangled squeak as I tried to change the subject back to how he knew so much about the ins and outs of slave trading. My head began pounding, and I rubbed my temple with a heavy hand.
“Just answer the question, Kit, and your head will feel better.” His velvet voice soothed me, and I lost my train of thought, so I frowned at him and tilted my head in question.
“Your friends. I asked if you were romantically involved,” he reminded me, and I smiled, thinking of my romantic involvement with the boys.
“With all of them?” I clarified, and he looked a little startled. “No, not all of them. Not with Wesley or Austin. Except for that one makeout session with Austin at the paintball park, but that was when I thought he was Caleb and he was just using me to win the game.” My mind wandered back to that makeout, and my body tingled at the memory of Austin's lips against mine, his strong hands cupping my thighs while he ground against my core with his rock hard…
“And what about this 'Caleb'? Are you involved with him?” Dragomir interrupted my reminiscing, and I was snapped back to the present.
“Hmm? Oh, uh, I guess? We haven't really done anything, though, so maybe I am just imagining our chemistry. Not like with River and Cole. I am definitely not imagining that.” I was rambling, badly, and I couldn't seem to shut it off. I picked up the glass of water on my tray table and took a long drink to try and regain my wits, but as I gulped I glanced up and caught a triumphant look on my companion's face.
“Why do you care, Dragomir?” I asked him back then giggled, “Hah, that rhymed.”
He cringed. “Don't call me that. My name is Vali.”
“Huh?” I asked, with all the intelligence of a drunk monkey. Why was my brain so foggy again?
“Long story. But please, just call me Vali.” He sighed with an angry twist to his mouth. “But this is about you, Kit. Tell me about why you don't consider yourself a 'normal' person and why drugs don't affect you the same way. Is there something more to you?”
I blinked several times, tightening my mouth in an effort not to reply. Even through my babbling word vomit, I knew I couldn't answer his question.
“Did you drug me?” I asked instead, finally putting two and two together, and he barked out a loud laugh. That absolute bastard!
“Why yes, I did. And you're absolutely right; it's not affecting you anywhere near as quickly as it should be. By my calculations, you should have been out cold a full five minutes ago, and yet here you are, still telling me all sorts of juicy secrets. It's a fun side effect of this particular drug. It works like a bit of a truth serum until you pass out.” His grin was full of smug self-satisfaction, and yet it didn't seem to prevent my mouth’s running away from me.
“You're really attractive,” I blurted. What. The. Hell.
“So I have been told.” The arrogant asshole. Who says shit like that? “Tell me more about why these drugs aren't affecting you, Kit.”
I clamped my jaw shut hard. I have kept my abilities secret for years; it would take more than a little dose of fuck-knows-what to make me spill my guts on that one. Folding my lead-like arms across my cashmere covered chest, I sat back and glared hard at my captor. Vali. I liked it; it suited him better than Dragomir or Romanul.
He met my glare with his own thoughtful look, and we stayed locked like that for several moments before my vision started to blur and my eyelids felt like they were carrying extra weight with every blink.
“Wait.” A thought occurred to me. “I never told you my name. How do you know my name?”
Just my luck, whatever I had been drugged with was finally doing its job and I was sinking fast into unconsciousness. No response came from Vali except a deep chuckle and rustling of fabric before my chair was reclined flat underneath me.
“Sweet dreams, drag?,” he snickered, as though I had any choice about going to sleep. Bastard.
9
COLE
A sharp sting of pain lanced up my arm. My knuckle had just split open where it had connected with solid bone again. It didn’t seem to matter how often that same knuckle split open, it still stung like a bitch every time. Right in that moment though, I welcomed the pain. It helped focus my thoughts so I wasn’t being distracted by the groans of pain coming from the Ukrainian tied to the chair in front of me.
“Cole, mate, I don’t think he knows anything else,” my team leader murmured quietly in my ear when I stepped back to shake out my wrist. I clenched my jaw hard, not willing to accept that he may be right, and swung another solid punch into Sergei’s fat-thickened gut, knocking the air out of him and silencing his whining for a minute.
“He has to,” I muttered, dangerously quiet. My eyes took stock of the damage I had already done to the sack of filth in the chair, and I ran a quick mental list of the damage I could yet inflict before actually killing him. I wanted him to hurt, so much.