My cold surroundings weren’t the only thing that was different from my usual. The material that I was lying on was also not normal. It was stiff and scratchy, a far cry from the chiffon swathes of fabric and fuzzy soft blankets that made up my nest.
I felt groggy as I tried to parse through the details of my surroundings. Even as I was awake, I could feel the heaviness of sleep trying to pull me back under like a hand pressing my head back into the pillow.
The pillow that smelled almost anesthetic, like the detergent that hospitals used and claimed was scentless.
That was what finally brought me awake enough to realize I wasn’t home anymore.
With a jerk, I forced myself to sit up and open my eyes. The dim room around me spun causing me to nearly flop back down into the cot I was sitting on. But what I saw as I glanced around me made me shake off the feeling as the terrifying reality of where I was began to settle in.
It looked like I was in some kind of plastic room with holes popped into the wall for what I assumed was so that air could get in. Like I was some kind of hamster.
The wall behind me was at least brick and I pressed a hand into it, letting the coolness help me wake up more.
There was a metal toilet to the left of my little cot and a matching sink just past that, but it was what I saw beyond both of those that scared me the most.
My little plastic cubicle wasn’t the only one. There were at least five others, some dark and some with dim blue lights turned on illuminating prone forms curled up on cots just like mine.
“Where the hell am I?” I asked out loud, my voice rough like I’d been screaming for hours instead of just having woken up.
I still couldn’t figure out how I’d even gotten here in the first place. The last thing I remembered was feeling Edison and Rhodes slip out of the nest, talking quietly before urging me to go back to sleep and then the sound of my phone ringing.
Was that right? Something must have been given to me that was making it hard for me to remember.
The sound of knocking next to my ear nearly made me just clear out of my skin and I whirled around to find a familiar face staring back at me.
I knew that face. I’d seen it on the day of my wedding—my first one that is.
Tired blue eyes stared back at me with deep purple bags underneath them.
“Luscinia?” I managed to rasp, turning my body so that I was facing her completely.
She looked far worse for wear than the last time I’d seen her. Before she’d been impeccably dressed, not a pale blonde curl out of place as she’d argued with Elio Ricci before I walked down the aisle.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, surprised to be face-to-face with the woman who’d looked like she’d wanted to tear my throat out with her teeth.
Luscinia began signing something, her bruised hands going so fast that I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep up even if I did know sign language.
I waved a hand to stop her. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying. Can you read lips?”
Luscinia paused before nodding, her thin shoulders lifting in a sigh.
“Where are we?” I looked to the front of the plastic prison cell, finding a number on the door and a thin brick hallway that led off into the darkness.
Luscinia leaned forward and breathed on the plastic, causing it to fog up thanks to how cold it was, and began to write with a shaky finger.
‘Russians,’ she wrote before erasing and breathing again. ‘Took 2 days ago.’
“Two days?” I gasped, thinking about how Edison and Rhodes must be losing their minds. “Have I been here two days?”
Luscinia shook her head before writing: ‘Hours.’
“Why did they take us? What’s their plan?” As I spoke, flashes of memory started to peek through what I now knew was probably some kind of drug they’d given me.
My phone had rung after Edison and Rhodes left. Romey had called me, panicked, telling me that he needed my help and that he was outside.
I’d nearly hung up and gone back to sleep, still angry about him cornering me at that party and trying to get me to leave with him, but there was so much panic in my little brother’s voice that I agreed.
I took Connor, one of the guards stationed outside of the tower with me and hurried to meet him by the pool where he was supposed to be waiting.
But he wasn’t alone. He had one of Edison’s men—I was pretty sure his name was Rory—who looked beat and bruised and an entire group of men I didn’t recognize.
“I’m sorry, Perr, they’ve got Kailey,” he’d said before something sharp was jabbed into my neck and everything went black.
Romey had completely sold me out, I realized with an angry huff.
I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts that I nearly missed what Luscinia had written on the wall before it faded.
‘War,’ she’d written and I felt myself go even colder than I already was.
The Russians were trying to start another war and they were using us to do it.
Edison had only ever told me very vaguely about what was going on between the five families over the past couple of months. But I knew enough to understand that everything that had been happening had been driving my alpha up the wall trying to avoid another bloodbath like the one that had happened before he was born.
And now I’d been kidnapped. The same way his mother had been.
The night I’d gone to the college party, I’d caught a glimpse of Edison when he thought I had been kidnapped but was actually safe. He’d been practically feral with fear.
What was he like now? I couldn’t feel him at all, it was like his end of the bond was stretched far out away from me, telling me that we weren’t even close to wherever he was.
