Page 14 of Ruthless

“Better.”

The door slams shut as I exit. The automatic locks engage.

I walk away with extra pep in my step.

The other men, the ones who imprisoned me, who tortured me with grins on their faces…

I took my time with them.

Even so, their punishment will have nothing on the bitch who betrayed me.

Chapter 5

Sara

I awake to a pounding head, fuzzy memories, and a heavy manacle clamped around my neck. The chain is bolted to the wall at a sadistic height. Just tall enough to stop me from lying down yet too low for me to stand. Apparently, I spent the night trapped on my knees, and I have the aching bones to prove it.

With no window in my cell, I have no sense of whether it’s day or night or how much time has passed.

The part that haunts me the most is that I don’t understand how or why we got here. I fell in love with a man who saved me from some assholes hassling me on my way home one night, back when I worked as a receptionist at the teaching hospital on Staten Island. Seven months after we started seeing each other, I arrived at the apartment where Dante and I always met only for him to no-show. I waited inside for hours. Days, actually, all the while racked with guilt over leaving Jeremy alone. Sent text after text with no reply. The more time that passed without a response, the more my anxiety spiraled.

Because I knew Dante, and he would never ghost me. He loved me. We were planning a future together.

Funny how I never realized just how little I knew about his life until he disappeared. Floating in the dreamy haze of truelove, the fact that Dante never introduced me to his friends or family failed to register. When he vanished, that reality was driven home, because I had no one to contact to check on him. Even though I was aware that the apartment served as a convenient meeting spot for us rather than his actual home, he never mentioned another address.

I mean, had I been thinking clearly, that alone should have been a big red flag. But I fell completely under his spell and trusted him implicitly.

The truth of his deception began to dawn on me when I called the company he claimed to work for. They had no record of an employee named Dante Arlington, and Google provided no hits for a man matching his name and appearance. My growing doubts multiplied when my messages to him bounced.

Recipient not found.

The second-to-last blow came from the print-out of a celebrity gossip site that someone left for me inside the apartment. The article featured a photo of Dante in a tux from some charity event, dancing with his arms wrapped tightly around a beautiful raven-haired woman in a red dress.

The headline screamed, “Elusive multi-millionaire Dante Argento attends yet another gala with the ravishing Lorenzo heiress on his arm. Are wedding bells in their future?”

The date of the gala? The eve of Dante’s disappearance.

Still, I clung to my disbelief as I searched Google. The pain that tore through my chest once I ascertained the article’s authenticity and credibility felt like it would split me in two.

Even his last name was a lie.

After that, I was like the walking dead. Especially after I returned to the apartment for one last visit and found the locks changed.

The message couldn’t be clearer. Dante was done with us, and he didn’t even have the decency to tell me.

And as if all that wasn’t terrible enough, two men with guns threatened Jeremy in our apartment a day later. They insisted that “my friend” was over me, and I needed to take my brother, leave town, and stay away from Dante.

When a recruiter called with a fantastic job offer from Toledo the following morning, I jumped at the chance. The hospital would cover all my relocation expenses and even hire a moving company. They also offered a significant bonus and pay raise.

As much as I hated allowing thugs with small dick energy to scare us into fleeing, staying in New York carried the possibility of running into Dante. Or my willpower to stay off Google failing me just in time for his engagement announcement.

In Ohio, the distance and new surroundings would help me forget about him. Once and for all.

Forgetting him didn’t quite pan out the way I’d hoped, but I was at least able to keep his name out of my search bar.

Jeremy was never a fan of the move, so when he was offered his dream job here in New York, how could I say no? I figured enough time had passed for the scary men to have forgotten about us, and for us to have a chance at a fresh start. A chance to rewrite the joy this city stole from me.

Instead, my optimism only earned me an involuntary stay in a dungeon with an evil prince. Jeremy and I never should have returned to the city.