Page 39 of Ruthless Sinner
But when I turned around, prepared for a verbal ass-kicking from my girl… she wasn’t there.
I looked around. She wasn’t anywhere.
“Kennedy?” I called out quietly, trying not to shout and draw attention to myself again.
Marla’s eyebrows shot up. “She didn’t strike me as the type to cut and run.”
“She’s not.” I walked over to Vincent. “Did you see where Kennedy went? She’s gone.”
Vincent, to my surprise and gratitude, didn’t make a retort. Instead he nodded at the ever-present Toby, who spoke quietly into an earpiece. After a moment, Toby shook his head. “Nobody in security’s got eyes on her.”
“She can’t just have disappeared into thin air,” I snapped. Something told me this was wrong. This was off. I was a soldier, I was in the battlefields every day, and I’d honed my instincts into a sharp, fine weapon. I had to listen to them and trust them or I would’ve been dead ten times over by now.
And right now, those instincts told me this wasbad.
“Someone had to have seen something,” Toby said. He didn’t sound upset, but then, Toby never sounded upset. We could be in the middle of a nuclear apocalypse and Toby would sound perfectly fucking calm.
“We’re all keeping a lookout,” Vincent agreed. “Someone would’ve—”
I saw the light come on in his eyes right as I had the same exact thought. We looked at each other.
Someone would’ve seen something—unless they were all distracted by a fight.
Shit.
CHAPTER16
Kennedy
Ahand was clamped over my mouth the moment that Marco hit the guy.
I had to admit, it was a bold plan but an effective one. Something that they’d taught us in the academy was that it was better to move with confidence out in the open than to try and be sneaky about it. People could sense when you were nervous, or trying to slip something past them. The best thing to do was to act like you were given permission for whatever you were doing.
That was how con artists got into places all the time. Just stride up to a place with a clipboard and nobody asked questions. Pick up a headset, look like you were late to something, and no one would look twice.
And whoever had planned this knew what they were doing. The guy who’d been flirting with me… I wasn’t sure what his name was or if he’d ever even given it to me… he had been just the right amount of annoying and flirty without taking it too far and settingmeoff before Marco got to him.
I’d seriously been weighing how much it would cost me if I told him to fuck off, though. I didn’t want to make trouble for Marco and I was sure that whatever outburst I made would, somehow, be blamed on him by his father. So I’d tried to just politely get the guy to shove off.
Then he put his damn hand on my arm, squeezing slightly, and I’d seen Marla’s eyebrows shoot up as she waited to see if I’d smack him. Actually I’d been planning to grab his wrist and dig my thumb into his pressure point, twisting his wrist and sending him to his knees—much more elegant and less attention-grabbing than a slap—but before I could do anything, Marco was there.
And then I was being grabbed.
I knew self-defense, of course, but the hand over my mouth wasn’t bare. There was a small cloth held between the fingers, and the moment the smell hit me, I knew it was chloroform. Chloroform has a signature sickly sweet smell—and gave a wicked headache when you woke up.
Great. Just great.
The large garden where the reception was being held swam in front of me, and even though I tried not to breathe it in, it was too late—everything went fuzzy, tilted sideways, and was dark.
When I woke up, I had a moment of confusion—where the hell was I, and why did my head hurt so much—followed by a moment of inner panic.
Had Vincent or Mr. Russo himself found me out? Had I been dragged away so that they could interrogate me about what I had told to my superiors, and then they could dispose of me?
Slowly, inch by inch, I became more aware of my body. First my head, which was pounding. Then my wrists and ankles, which also hurt, and then the rest of my arms, my legs, slowly meeting in the middle until I could feel my torso, my neck, all of me.
I blinked and focused on breathing in and out. My neck had a crick in it and rested on something—something that allowed me to stare up at a high nondescript ceiling.
A chair. The back of a chair, that’s what my neck rested on.
