Good luck with that.
She reasoned it would be hard for him to rape her battered body if she kicked his dick off first.
Lunging forward, Volkov tried to wrap his arms around her. She made him pay for his playfulness and connected with an uppercut and, turning, threw an elbow into his solar plexus. He coughed, doubling over and clutching his stomach, trying to pull back. She grabbed a handful of his hair and tried to ram his face into her knee. He twisted so the blow glanced off the side of his head and backhanded her as he spun away. Catriona’s head snapped with the blow and she tasted bitter iron in her mouth.
She turned to refocus and found him behind her, hand raised to strike. With nowhere to circle, she scurried through the only doorway left unexplored. As she stumbled into the room the lights turned on, triggered by a motion sensor. Her foot knocked into something unstable and she twisted, searching for solid ground.
Catriona fell to her knees, finding herself hovering precariously over a pit in the floor of the chamber, now half-covered with a piece of plywood. A horrific stench rose from the uncovered portion. Catriona gagged and covered her mouth and nose with her hand.
Lights above her head beamed down into the pit as she peeked over the edge.
Six feet below, the blotchy face of a girl stared up at her, the eyes white and glazed, yellow eyeshadow still smeared beneath her eyebrows. A still, pale hand jut from the murky depths beside her, standing like a white rose in a murky field of black.
An oubliette. That’s where he threw the girls’ bodies. There they lay, heaped together, cursed to spend eternity in his dungeon after the horror and humiliation of their deaths.
“Get out of there. It isn’t your time…yet,” teased Volkov from the fighting room.
She looked around the space. There was nowhere to run. The hole in the floor was the only additional area, and down wasn’t an option.
She moved to the edge of the doorway.
“Step back so I can come out.”
“I have. I’m in the center of the room. See?”
She poked out her head and saw him standing there, bouncing on his toes, waiting.
“Were they dead when they went in there?” she asked. The words sounded pathetic leaving her lips. She hadn’t been able to stop herself from asking.
He shrugged. “Mostly.”
“Most? Or Mostly?”
“Both.”
She stepped out and he motioned to her.
“Take your spot. We begin again.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dez put her hand on Broch’s arm.
“There’s something else I should probably tell you about Volkov.”
They’d been sitting in Dez’s car, parked down the block from Volkov’s safe house, for half an hour, watching. The situation seemed calm there. A man sat on the porch, smoking one cigarette after the other. Inside, another man moved by the window from time to time. There was no sign of Volkov. No sign that Catriona and Mo might be inside.
Broch was frustrated and full of nervous energy, his knee still finding room to bounce in the cramped space of Dez’s car. He didn’t want to wait. Dez had begged him for a half hour of surveillance before they went charging in.
His mind was elsewhere when she touched him.
“Whit?”
Something about the expression on Dez’s face made his chest tighten with fear for Catriona.
Dez took a deep breath and exhaled. “I wasn’t going to tell you because, well, because I figured you wouldn’t want to hear, but it hit me if we go in there—”
“Juist tell me whit it is.”
She nodded. “Right. Sorry.”
Another deep breath, and she began. “Volkov is a loner. The Russian mob doesn’t want anything to do with him because, I don’t know. He’s messed up in the head.”
“How?”
“I don’t know the details. But I do know one thing about him. He likes to hurt women.”
Broch swallowed. “Ah’ve prepared myself that Catriona micht be hurt.”
“I don’t mean just hurt. Women go missing around him. Permanently. A lot.”
“Howfur dae ye ken this?”
“How do I ken it?”
“Know.”
“Oh.” Dez sniffed. “I had a friend who went missing after going with him. She was a stripper. No one even realized she was gone for a couple days. Then I heard she was in the hospital. She didn’t make it.”
“Volkov murdered her?”
“More than killed her. I went to see her. Her injuries...” Dez shook her head as if she wanted to break loose the memory and fling it away. “After, I asked around and heard Volkov was famous for this sort of thing. He’s a bit of a legend around the strip clubs. Sort of a boogey man.”
Broch didn’t know what a boogey man was, but it didn’t sound good. He looked at the house. The glow of the porch man’s cigarette bobbed in the darkness.
“We need tae gae in.”
“I’d like to watch a bit more. It doesn’t look like he’s in there.”
“Bit whit if he is?”
The thought that Catriona might be inside, suffering, while he sat outside—
Broch put his hand on the door handle. “We need tae gae.”
“Okay. Wait. We need a plan. They’re going to spot you a mile away. You and your skirt.”
“It’s nae a skirt.”
“Whatever.”
“And they willnae see me.”
“Fine. But let’s be smart. The guy on the porch won’t know me. You go around the houses and come over the side of the porch behind him. I’ll distract him.”
Broch nodded. Any plan that got him out of the car and closer to Catriona worked for him. He had his door open before Dez could finish her sentence.
Crossing the street, he cut between two residences several lots down from Volkov’s safe house. The first house didn’t have a
