The Woman at the Docks - Jessica Gadziala Page 0,13

move to reach for me. I guess he was the sort to leave his dirty work to his men.

"It's ninety-six degrees. Think we'd all rather have this conversation somewhere with air conditioning."

"Nope. I'd prefer to have it here," I told him, pivoting out of his reach again. I didn't like to watch a lot of true crime content, but I knew enough to know that once they took you to a secondary location, you were dead. I couldn't die. Not yet at least.

"Alright, enough," the man said, lunging forward, grabbing my hips, yanking me backward.

All my life, I told myself I would one day take self-defense classes, would learn how to take care of myself, make it so that if something bad should happen to me, if someone should grab me, I wouldn't be stuck flailing in the air with no defense.

I never got around to that, of course.

So what was I doing?

I was flailing.

"No!" I shrieked, body jerking, making the man hiss as he tried to hold onto me. "I'm not a threat to you," I insisted, hearing hysteria slip into my voice. "You don't have to do this!" I pleaded, eyes on Luca Grassi.

If I wasn't mistaken, there was a flash of regret there before he banked it down, replacing it with a cold resignation.

"I'm afraid I do, Romy," he said, turning and walking away, leaving his man to wrangle me all the way back through the maze.

I fought every step of the way. Even when another man showed up to grab my legs while the first one grabbed me under my arms, carting me around between them as I kicked and flailed and twisted as much as the compromising position would allow.

I fought.

I screamed.

Even though I knew where we were.

Even though the legitimate businessmen had cleared out.

Even though not a single soul around here would come and save me.

When my instinct toward flight was taken from me, it seemed I was willing to fight. As weak as that fight might have been.

"Baby, for fuck's sake," the first man growled when my feet were put down so they could try to shove me into a back seat of a blacked-out window SUV.

I didn't even think about it, I curled them up off the ground, slammed them into the side of the vehicle, and propelled myself—and therefore this guy—backward, sending us slamming to the ground.

Unfortunately, his grip only managed to tighten after the fall, anchoring me to him until two of the other men reached down, grabbed me, and tossed me into the backseat beside the man who'd been with Luca Grassi the night before.

"You alright, Lucky?" the guy next to me asked of the man in black as he brushed off his suit, then reached up to wipe some blood from his ear.

"Fine," he said, climbing in to flank my other side, boxing me in.

Luca Grassi climbed into the passenger seat as the driver turned the SUV over.

I huffed for air as the cold blast of the air vent above me sent a chill across my overheated skin.

My best bet would have been to simply sit there and shut up, look for any opportunity to get away.

But did I do that?

No, no of course, I didn't.

Because I always had a temper, sometimes struggling to keep a hold on it when it got triggered.

"Just an FYI," I said to the man named Lucky. "You don't call someone 'baby' when you are kidnapping them," I told him, voice as authoritative as it could be given the situation.

"You're probably right about that," he agreed, shrugging, leaning back in his seat. Like this was no big deal. Like kidnapping women was a daily occurrence for him.

Hell, maybe it was.

What did I know?

"Keep it up and we are going to have to cuff you," Lucky warned when I raised a fist, one that he caught in mid-air before it could make contact.

If there was one thing I didn't want, it was to make this situation any worse for myself.

When it was released, I clasped my hands together in my lap, staring out the windshield, trying to convince myself it wasn't a completely terrible sign that they weren't hooding me, blindfolding me, keeping me from seeing where they were taking me.

It wasn't a long drive, but it was long enough for my stomach to twist into a million tight knots.

We pulled down a long tree-lined drive in the middle of nowhere, ripping away any hopes I might have been clinging to of someone else