Page 15 of Captive Promise

We cross the bridge and the city’s glow peels away behind us, then there’s nothing to do but watch the window and listen to my own head, which has apparently been waiting all night for exactly this much quiet to really get going.

Who takes a child to get to a doctor?

Trees blur past, their color muted due to the gray skies.

The streetlights thin then quit entirely.

We pass by brick buildings and a dilapidated diner, but I’m too much in my head to pay attention to my surroundings.

God, my cousins would have a coronary right about that.

What do I have? What could I possibly have that’s worth kidnapping Leo and Emma Santoro’s child?

I put my forehead on the cold glass. My reflection stares back, washed out by the dash light, eyes too big.

He knew how to get into Maksim’s house. He knew that the Santoros and Brennans would be at Maksim and Aria’s. He has eyes inside Maksim’s house, which means he probably has eyes inside mine⁠—

I startle and my forehead bangs on the glass.

My skin smarts, but I ignore the pain as iciness washes over me and it feels like there’s a hand clamped around my heart.

How long has he been watching me?

I don’t allow myself to fall down that path. I do what I do in the OR when a thought tips toward panic instead of information and shove it deep away in the recesses of my brain.

I can’t panic. Panicking will get me nowhere and I have no doubt that if I tried to escape, I would be forcibly taken anyway.

Taking a deep breath to quell the rising panic, I try counting mile markers.

I give up within a few minutes.

Forty minutes. An hour.

The back of the driver’s head never moves, his hands stay loose and easy on the wheel the whole way.

Somewhere past the ninety-minute mark, I start to wonder if Nikolai was right.

If this is the kind of mistake you only get to make once.

No. I made this choice with my whole chest. I am not going to sit here and unmake it one mile marker at a time.

I must have dozed off, because I’m suddenly jerked awake by the sound of gravel under the tires.

I look around and see that we’ve reached some type of iron gate.

There’s a camera above, swiveling with quiet little mechanical patience to find the car. To find me.

The gate swings open silently, which surprises me.

Usually, these types of old gates creak which would have added to the creepy factor of all of this.

We drive through and it takes everything in me for my jaw to not drop at what I see next.

The grounds are stupidly and unfairly beautiful in the afternoon sunlight.

The drive winds between old trees, the branches reaching together overhead until it feels like driving through a tunnel.

The lawns go on forever, mowed into something too perfect to be real.