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Striding down the cabin, I head for the sofas that we normally use when we fly, and lay the girl down on the smaller one, her petite frame barely filing it. Reaching around her, I awkwardly fasten her belt diagonally across her waist, then take a seat on the sofa opposite.
“I take it everything went as planned?” I ask once Lev sits down beside me and Vik takes one of the recliners on the opposite side of the plane, rotating it until it’s facing us.
“No problems my end. I never spotted anyone following us, and the license plate tracker never identified a vehicle with the same plate more than twice,” Lev reports.
“Same for me. I think we’re in the clear. No one knows that she’s here, or that we’ve taken her,” Vik agrees.
“Do you think there’ll be any issues with anyone she works with? That guy she’s always talking to?” I ask.
“Raul.” Lev nods. “I’ve sent him an email, letting him know that she got a job in San Francisco and that she’s sorry she never got a chance to say goodbye. Then I closed her email account. Her cell number has been disconnected since I got it back from that fucker Frankie.”
“Did you kill him?” I ask.
“No. I did,” Vik snarls.
“Good.” I nod, my eyes on the girl again.
“Gentleman, welcome aboard, the captain is just preparing for takeoff. Our flight time is approximately thirteen hours. Can I get you anything to eat or drink?” a blonde stewardess asks, her eyes darting to Alena, then quickly away.
“Bring a bottle of Macallan, three glasses, and a blanket for our guest,” I order, dismissing her with a flick of my hand. She returns a few moments later with the bottle and glasses on a tray, and a soft fleece blanket tucked under her arm.
Placing the tray on the table, she falters, glancing at Alena, then me.
“Give it to me,” Vik growls, shoving his hand out. Passing it to him, she scurries away as the sounds of the engine whir to life.
The plane starts to move, but I don’t bother to watch as we taxi toward the runway, focused completely on watching Vik carefully drape the blanket over Alena’s sleeping form, tucking the edges around her, so she’s completely covered from her toes to her chin.
When he’s happy she’s warm and cocooned, he sits back down in his seat and re-fastens his seat belt. By the time the front wheels lift off the ground, we each have a glass of whiskey in our hands and our prize by our side.
CHAPTER 5
lev
When the plane levels out, I watch as Dimi exhales and some of the tension in his shoulders melts, giving me a glimpse of the boy I grew up with beneath the hardened man he’s been forced to become.
My eyes move once again to the girl asleep on the sofa. I can’t see her chest rising and falling because of the blanket, but her face is peaceful and she just looks asleep. I’ve been dreading this moment, almost since we found her, but now that it’s here; now that we’ve taken her, I feel a sense of relief that it’s over.
Not that I disliked watching her. Quite the opposite in fact, watching Alabama was fascinating. She’s young, but she doesn’t act like she’s barely twenty. She works a lot, but I’ve never seen her go to a bar or a club that she wasn’t working at.
In a year, she’s never had a boyfriend, or even a hook-up, she made no friends, apart from Raul the line cook, but that never strayed outside of work. They never called or text each other, even though they had one another’s numbers. But on the days that they worked together, he always made her a meal of some sort, which she ate like she was worried someone would take it from her in the staff break room behind the bar. Honestly, apart from working and sleeping, she doesn’t do anything for fun, or spend any money that isn’t an absolute necessity.
We might have been watching her for a year, but we’ve known about her for almost three. The first time I saw her, she was seventeen, almost eighteen. Fresh faced and nowhere near as wary as she is now. She was living with her aunt, in a tiny backwater town about four hours from where we found her living in Columbus. We’d planned to take her then, but one day she just disappeared. We hadn’t watched her then, like we do now, and she’d slipped away from one day to the next and none of us saw her again, until she started working at Home Run, using the social security number we created for her.
I don’t know where she was in the time that we lost track of her, although if I had to guess, I’d say she was living in hostels or on the streets. Now she has that look that says even if she’s okay, she’s preparing to lose everything in the blink of an eye.
Part of me wants to erase that look from her. To pamper her and indulge her until she never wants for anything. But the other part of me wants to nurture that fear, to hone it and develop it until she becomes a force to be reckoned with.
“Where’s the kit?” Vik asks, his voice pulling me from my inner thoughts.
“It’s in the vanity in the bathroom,” Dimi says.
Unfastening his seat belt, Vik pushes upright and moves through the cabin, to the bedroom at the back. I know what he’s fetching, and another annoying pinprick of guilt hits me again. This has to be done, I even understand why, but even though I’ve never spoken to her, I know this is only going to make her hate us more.
“Where are you putting them?” Dimi asks, when Vik returns carrying a small black plastic case.
“Back of the neck, side of the shoulder blade and base of the spine.”
“Three?” I ask.
