Page 149 of Ruthless Rustanovs

“Wait, wait, wait! You’re heading to a town in Idaho with only one road? And that one road will close tonight for the entire winter? Seriously?!” Anitra asked incredulously on the other side of the line. “And I thought West Virginia was backwards…”

“I know, right?” Sola replied into the small microphone attached to her earbuds. “And I’ve only got, like, a few hours to get Brian out of there or we’ll both be stuck in that place until spring!”

“Wasn’t there a movie kind of like that? What was it called…?”

“I have no idea, “ Sola answered, nervously eyeing the increasingly mountainous scenery outside the shuttle windows.

Any other day, she would have found the snow-capped mountains, so different from the retrofitted desert she called home, awe-inspiring and beautiful.

But now, as the sun began to descend behind the jagged peaks, they just seemed ominous.

It had been a hard scramble to get to Idaho.

First, she’d had to find a non-stop flight to Boise.

Then drive all the way to LAX to catch it.

And apparently the debit card gods hadn’t felt like she’d bled nearly enough money, because now she was trapped in an airport shuttle with a driver who kept asking her, “Wolfson Point? You sure that’s where you want to go?

You know the road out of there’s closing in a few hours, right? ”

Finally, in a last ditch attempt to get out of reassuring the driver yet again that yes, Wolfson Point was exactly where she wanted to go, she called her best friend. However, less than a minute into her conversation with Anitra, Sola’s stomach began to knot up tightly with dread.

“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers!”

“What?”

“That’s the name of the movie. It’s about these seven brothers—six really, because the oldest is already married to some woman he met in town.

Anyway, this dude and his six younger brothers—they’re all like these wild mountain men who can sing and dance really well…

cause, you know, that happens—come up with this plan to kidnap a bunch of women, and then they cause an avalanche over the mountain pass so they can keep the girls there until spring. ”

“And what happens?” Sola asked, interested despite herself. “Do the women get rescued?”

“No! They end up staying there until spring. Then they marry the brothers.” Anitra sucked on her teeth as if she were just now seriously thinking about the film’s storyline for the first time ever. “Really, that movie should have been called Stockholm Syndrome for Seven Sisters.”

Sola looked at her phone, wondering—not for the first time—whether she should consider finding a best friend who didn’t live on the other side of the country, and perhaps more importantly, didn’t tell her about movies featuring young women being successfully kidnapped by wild mountain men.

“Anitra, why would you even tell me that story right now?”

“I’m just saying if you bump into this Russian guy and he’s got six brothers—run.”