Page 26 of Kidnapped By the Boss

Chapter Nine: Vincent

Technically, I cheated and took one day from Katya and one morning. We didn’t rush to get up at all, which was exactly the reason I asked Annika to stay for two days instead of one, and then after we woke up, I had breakfast waiting for us by the poolside. We were supposed to be in Barbados for close to two weeks, so it felt like I was allowed to take alittlemore than the one day I’d requested. Katya didn’t complain, so we took just a few more hours to ourselves to enjoy a nice, final meal of our minimoon before throwing ourselves back into the real world.

Once breakfast was over, we enjoyed a shower quickie and then finally decided it was time for us to get back to our friends, family and work. We walked hand in hand from the pool house to the main house, filled with the bliss of the time that we’d just spent together, but we were very quickly dragged down from cloud nine to the surface with a slam when we got into the main house and immediately heard a rather loud commotion going on inside.

“Back to reality, huh?” Katya said.

I frowned, as I was kind of hoping we could have a relaxing afternoon with Sascha before getting back to work. “Seems like it.”

“Mom?” Katya called out as we walked from the back towards the front where we were hearing all the talking coming from.

“Katya?” Mario’s voice called back. We rounded the corner into the living room and saw Devrick, Mario, Annie, and Taylor sitting around talking vigorously. As soon as they laid eyes on us, Mario stood up and looked at us with fury in his eyes. “Where the hell have the two of you been, honestly?! You think I like harassing some poor old woman for your location?”

“Old woman?” Katya said. “My mother?!”

I took an ominous step forward towards Mario. “Did you harass my mother-in-law?”

Devrick stood up and positioned himself defensively between us and his husband. “You’ll have to excuse him, he’s an idiot. He didn’t harass Annika. We did ask her a few times over the course of the past day where you were, but she refused to say, and neither of you was answering your phone. We thought you snuck away for a honeymoon after all or something.”

“Kind of,” Katya said. “We just spent the day together in the pool house yesterday. Since we knew that we couldn’t go to Barbados right now, we wanted to take at least one day to ourselves. Why, what’s wrong?”

“The Wreckers attacked again,” Mario said. “But this attack was way worse. It seems they thought that you left town as well.”

I furrowed my brow. Katya and I didn’t even leave our home. How would they ever have known that we were off the grid for a day? “What did they do?”

“They targeted all of our one-stop-shops at once,” Taylor explained. “Managed to lock us out of every single one of them, killed all the business owners, and left their bodies just inside the front doors.”

“Every single one of them had a crown on,” Annie picked up.

“A crown?” I asked. “Like a king?”

“No,” Annie replied, then she looked at Katya with concern deep behind her eyes. “Like a queen.”

Katya took in a shaky breath before looking at me. “Just like what Antonio said. He asked me to be his queen.”

“Wait, what?” Mario said. “What happened?”

“Not here,” I said. “All of you, get to my office now. Katya and I need to check in with her mother and Sascha and then we’ll be over. Five minutes.”

“Vincent,” Devrick said. “This requires immediate att—”

“What did I just say?” I said, giving him a serious look. “Five minutes.”

He held up his hands in defense. “Five minutes.”

Devrick turned around and walked towards the front door, and Mario, Taylor, and Annie all followed. Once they were gone, Katya set her hand to her head and sunk down onto the couch. “All those deaths are on me.”

“No they’re not,” Vincent said. “What else could you have done? You obviously weren’t going to agree to be his queen.”

“No, but I should have suspected that when he just walked away and let me go that there was something else up his sleeve. Ididthink that, and I just ignored it.” She took a deep breath. I’d never seen her look so anguished before. Katya had been embroiled in this world her entire life. She’d witnessed dozens of murders and was even responsible for her own father’s death. “All you said was that it gave you a bad feeling. How could you have ever anticipated that he would go and kill those people because he can’t take rejection?”

Finally, Katya just stood up from her chair and shook her head. “I need to hold my son. Mom?” She walked up to the staircase that led up to the top level. “Mom?” Suddenly, Katya froze and looked back at me. “My mom always responds when I call her.” Then she looked up the stairs again. “Mom?!”

“Annika?” I shouted out.

“Mom!” Katya had nothing but panic in her tone now as she went running up the stairs. “Mom? Do you hear me?!”

She began shouting in Russian and I started to run around the floor I was on. “Annika? Are you here? Can you hear me? Annika?”