As she sat here, dry-eyed, wondering what options they had to escape, she realized that, even if she got the opportunity to jump off the ship and to swim to the river’s edge, and she certainly was capable of doing that, however, she couldn’t because her mother was not so able. After all they’d been through, Gizella wouldn’t leave her mother to deal with whatever consequences the kidnappers would dish out, if Gizella were to escape. Her father wasn’t in any better health now either.
It had taken Gizella much longer than her mother to forgive him for his infidelity, and, even now, Gizella wasn’t sure that she had forgiven him. As long as her mother had, and her parents were back together again, it was something Gizella was willing to work on. But it was just so damn hard sometimes.
When she saw her dad, she got so angry, wondering if he hadn’t brought on her mother’s breast cancer from the stress and the horrible sense of his betrayal. She knew all kinds of experts out there would say breast cancer had nothing to do with it. But, with the timing, it just seemed like something happened, and her mom couldn’t handle it anymore. The fact that her father was there for her treatments and that he seemed abjectly sorry for everything he’d done had also helped. She and her father had never spoken about his affairs directly, and she’d never accused him to his face about his behavior. It had been enough that they were both focused on making her mother’s days as doable as possible for her. Watching somebody go through cancer treatments was so devastating, and Gizella had felt so helpless.
And now here they were, stuck in a boat, with some assholes who had kidnapped them. And for what? They hadn’t asked for a ransom, so she didn’t even know if they’d been targeted or if they were just a side effect of something else. And, if that were true, then what? Would money get them out of this? But, if so, it should have worked already because her father had blatantly tried to buy their freedom as soon as the kidnappers had appeared on the yacht.
Now she stood somberly over her parents, one unconscious, the other barely beginning to stir. Gizella surmised they were across the world from Seattle, and yet she had no recollection of how that happened. She remembered trying to argue with the gunmen but had been knocked out and never did see how they’d gotten off their yacht and then boarded this ship to wherever they were now. That must have been a long, long time ago.
We were drugged.
Looking out the small porthole to the world beyond, she wondered if there would be any life after this. Since her father was a governor, she was sure some political motive was behind it all. She just hoped they survived it. She was a nobody in the political venue. She couldn’t imagine what their kidnappers would do with her when, very soon, they would find out she had no value.
Whether she liked it or not, she was the one who was the most disposable of the three, so she would have to work hard at finding a reason for them to keep her alive. And she knew enough about herself to realize that, in this situation right now, the more she talked, the more she’d get in trouble, and the worse it would get.
Chapter 2
Gizella woke from a doze and sat upright to see one of the gunmen grinning down at her, but that sexual edge to his leer made her blood run cold. Avoiding his gaze, she looked over at her sleeping mother. She softly stroked the hair off her brow to see if she was really in a deep sleep or if she was still unconscious. Her mother shuffled under her gentle hand, getting more comfortable. Gizella looked at her father and half smiled because he was curled up like a portly Santa Claus. But he appeared to be in a deep sleep too.
She tried to ignore the sleazy gunman, yet kept tabs on what he was doing from the corner of her eye. Then she settled back down and closed her eyes, hoping he’d go away. After a few minutes she opened her eyes again to see him retreating. Just the thought of him making any kind of sexual advances made her want to throw up, as that would be her biggest nightmare. No, maybe not, because if they did something to her parents, that would be much worse.
But she couldn’t imagine the consequences of them attacking her. God, she couldn’t even bear thinking about how horrible things could get, and she could only hope that, by now, her father’s people had raised some kind of alarm that he was missing.
But then she thought about how the gunmen had slammed the yacht into the tanker and realized that would make it sink, so any rescuers would probably assume that the whole family had been lost at sea. She wondered at the time why it had happened, but it made too much sense now.
Hell, she had no idea where they were. She looked out the porthole only to find it pitch-black outside. She noted lights on the shore but nowhere else. Had they been flown here, then placed on board another ship? But why would they do something like that? She imagined a helicopter off the tanker could have taken them to land and onto a private jet maybe.
She didn’t know how long they’d been out, but her throat was dry, and her stomach was still upset, as if she’d been given a potent drug. When she had realized the tanker was Russian, she’d been terribly worried
