Page 58 of Keeping My Enemies Closer: Pt. 1

Chapter 28

Zoya~

I walked into my house, letting out a deep breath as I shut the door behind me.This was my last night of living here, and with all my stuff packed and ready to go, it was going to be nothing to move the few boxes that I had to Kasimir’s.

I felt exhausted.

So damn exhausted.

The only good thing about tonight was that I hadn’t had to work with Marcelle.Once upon a time, I would have called to check on her when she’d called in sick, but that time was over.After yesterday, it was clear that we were no longer any kind of cordial, and while it sucked, after everything that Kasimir had told me, maybe it was for the best.

Ready to take a shower, I made my way towards my bedroom, but two steps into the living room, I noticed that the kitchen light was on, and if my mother was still up this late, then that couldn’t be good.Though she’d been avoiding me since our last fight, I’d told her that I would be out by tomorrow, so I could see her waiting up to try to talk me out of it.After all, there was no way that she hadn’t done the math yet.

“Mom, are you still up?”I called as I walked towards the kitchen, but when I made it around the partition, white stars danced behind my eyes as something cracked the left side of my skull, knocking me to the ground.

My purse went flying across the kitchen floor, spilling the contents everywhere, but the pain radiating down the back of my head had me thinking of nothing but throwing up everywhere.Desperately, I sat up, then scrambled my way towards the refrigerator, my back pressed up against the cool surface.When I finally looked up to see what in the hell was going on, I saw my mother tied to a chair, duct tape across her mouth, and her eyes looked wild, the puffiness and redness flooded with tears.

Once I got past my mother strapped to the chair, I saw one man standing behind her, and he was dressed completely in black, a matching ski mask over his head.On the other side of the table, there was a second man, dressed exactly the same, a ski mask covering his face as well.

Pain still radiated across my skull, but I knew that I needed to pull it together.If this was a burglary, they couldn’t have picked a more wrong house.My mother and I had nothing, and anyone with a pair of working eyes could see that.Not to mention that this neighborhood was barely middle-class, there were no secret fortunes hidden in any of the houses on this street.

“What...what do you want?”I asked when I could finally speak without the threat of vomiting.

The guy who hit me walked over to me, then dropped on his haunches.“What do you think?”he asked.“There’s only one reason to break into someone’s house.”

“We don’t have...have any money,” I rushed out.“I mean, just look around...you can see that we don’t have anything worth taking.”

“Ah, but that’s not true, is it?”he sing-songed.

“What...what are you talking about?We...we don’t have any money,” I repeated.

The backhand to my face was hard enough to knock me over, and it was a good thing that I hadn’t been standing up.Pain shot across my left eye, and I could hear my mother’s muffled screams somewhere in the background, but I needed to stay focused on what I could control right now.

I let out a yelp as he grabbed my hair, then yanked me back up into a sitting position, but he made sure to slam my head against the refrigerator door before letting go.If he was trying to prove that he was serious, he didn’t have to; I believed him.

“I’m not here for jewels or paintings, darling,” he said.“I’m here for the three-hundred-thousand dollars that you have hidden somewhere, because I know that it wasn’t deposited into your bank account like a good law-abiding citizen.”

Oh, God.

While everyone at the auction knew how much Kasimir had paid for me, they’d all known me as Montana Hughes, not Zoya Kuzmin.Besides Kasimir, Marcelle had been the only person to know who I really was that night, and as much as it turned my stomach to accept, these two guys could only know who I was and where I lived from her.I hadn’t told anyone else about the auction, and I certainly hadn’t told my mother anything.It also didn’t take a genius to figure it out after our argument yesterday.Marcelle had been upset, and my mistake had been in not taking her greed seriously enough.I had dismissed her, and now I was paying the price for it.

“I...I don’t have the money,” I said again, trying to get through the pain.

“You’re lying!”he yelled in my face before backhanding me again.

“I’m not!”I yelled back.“I...I haven’t got paid yet!”

Grabbing me by my hair again, he yanked me to my feet, but the blow to my stomach sent me back down to the floor, and I found myself gasping for air as the pain seized my entire torso.Having never been in a fight before, every assault on my body was something new to me, and the pain was more than I would have ever expected.

A kick to my ribs was next as he said, “I know for a fact that everyone got paid that night.”