Lumberjacked (A Holiday Lumberjack Mountain Man Romance) - K.C. Crowne Page 0,72

and suspicious expression. I shouldn’t have listened to either of them when they’d said I would get home safely.

Maybe it was just hindsight talking. How could I have known?

The room I was in was bare, with concrete floors that looked like carpets had been ripped out, a ceiling with a water stain in the corner, and broken windows that let in a fiercely cold wind. The sun was setting. I didn’t want to be here overnight.

Panic threatened to choke me again.

A door at the far end of the room opened slowly. I held my breath as I waited for someone to walk through. A man limped in, using an old crutch that barely looked like it could hold his weight. He had a broken nose with bruises spreading beneath his eyes.

Behind him, Aleks followed. He looked irritated.

The third man to enter the room made my blood turn cold and my skin break out into goosebumps. He had a scar across his left cheek, running from the corner of his mouth to just below his eye. It gave him a permanent sneer that was scary as fuck. His face, though, was nothing compared to his eyes. Cold and dead, and I had no doubt that he could hurt someone – kill someone – without a second thought.

He walked with authority, and when he spoke, the other two listened. There was no guessing who was in charge.

I mumbled, trying to speak through the tape over my mouth. They ignored me as if I wasn’t there. They were speaking in Russian, and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

I stuck out my tongue, licking the tape until it wouldn’t stick anymore. I moved my jaw, sawing it side to side and licked the tape until one part of it snapped off and the tape flapped to the side.

“Hey!” I yelped, and all three of them looked at me. The leader looked bored. “What do you want from me?”

They continued their conversation as if I hadn’t said anything at all.

“Why am I here? I’ve done nothing! I know nothing. Please let me go.” My voice had been demanding but was now sobbing and pleading, so I stopped talking. Tears ran down my cheeks. I was struggling to keep it together. They didn’t care at all.

They huddled around a table I hadn’t noticed in the corner, loaded with equipment. Computers, satellite phones, radars. They were looking intently at the screens, shaking their heads, talking in muted voices.

“Please,” I tried again. “Let me go. I don’t know what you can possibly get from me that will help whatever you’re doing.”

The ugly man turned to me and smiled. His smiled was so twisted, thanks to that scar, it did the opposite of making him look kind. It was horrifying. He started walking toward me, and I fought the ropes to try to scramble away from him.

He kneeled in front of me so we were eye to eye. “Angela,” he said. His Russian accent was even thicker than Viktor’s. “Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you.”

I frowned. My head ached like a bitch. Why had I been taken, if they didn’t mean to hurt me?

“We brought you here to protect you from Viktor,” he said.

Confused, I stammered when I spoke. “W—why would you do that?”

“I see you don’t understand,” he said, as if I were a student who had disappointed a teacher. “He must have lied to you, as he lies to everyone. You see, Viktor is a very, very bad man. We used to be friends, he and I. Joined at the hip.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Maksim.”

“I don’t know you, never heard of you,” I told him.

“Viktor and I were friends, until he betrayed me,” he revealed in a voice meant to invite sympathy. “We used to work together, but he had other things in mind. Darker things, things that I would never dream of doing myself. He is a killer, Angela. An assassin. He kills people for money. People who don’t deserve to die.”

I didn’t want to believe him. He had to be wrong about Viktor. How could someone who had been so gentle with me be such a terrible person? But Maksim’s eyes were cold and hard, and something about the way he talked made me feel like maybe he wasn’t lying. I had seen the guns in Viktor’s shed, after all. He’d taught me to shoot.

The man watched my indecision and continued, honing his point. “If we didn’t bring you here, he