Princess (American Princess #1)(28)
Author: Courtney Cole

She could kick the windows out… no, wait.  That was what you were supposed to do if you were trapped in a trunk- kick out the tail-lights.  But that was of no help to her now, because there was no way she could kick through the laminated safety windows. 

Her mind sped through her options until she bleakly realized that she didn’t have any.  Not a one.  Her hands were bound, her mouth was taped.  The only thing she could do was wait until the van stopped and maybe she could kick the guy when he opened the doors again.

She didn’t have to wait for long.  Twenty seconds later the van abruptly came to a halt.

“What the hell?!”

It was the first time the man had spoken and he wasn’t happy. His thick voice curled around the last word, emphasizing his impatience with something that Sydney couldn’t see.

He threw his door open, jumped out and slammed the door behind him.  Sydney could hear muffled voices- too muffled.  In a normal vehicle, she would have been able to discern words.  But she couldn’t, which meant that this van must have sound proof walls and glass.

Her stomach sank.  But before she could panic too much, the back doors were wrenched opened again, the large man’s shape loomed menacingly over her while he tossed in another victim.

She quickly registered the familiar face of the little boy next door.  Her heart sped up and her chest started heaving as she tried to breathe.

What the hell was a good way to put it.  Why was this kid here?  His face was pale and terrified as their assailant slapped tape on him as well and then closed the doors again.  Five seconds later, they were flying down the street.  Away from her house, away from the safety of Stephen.

She looked at the little boy again.  He was staring at her with wide eyes, unable to say anything to her.  But his expression spoke a million words.  And there was no way she could reassure him because she was in the same situation.

She leaned her head back against the cold metal of the van.  The sky flying past the small tinted back windows didn’t reveal any kind of clue whatsoever about where they were going.  Once they turned left at the end of her street, she lost her sense of direction.  Not being able to see anything but sky was incredibly disorienting.

As they waited in the dark, she tried to imagine what Stephen was doing.  Had he heard the noise?  Had he realized that she had been taken?  Or was he still asleep- thinking that she was safely lying right next to him?  A lump formed in her throat as she thought of him and she fought hard to swallow it.

The ride seemed to take forever but at the same time, she didn’t want it to end.  She was pretty sure she knew what was going to happen next.  Her life was going to end. She wondered if it would be painful. Would she be brave?  She gulped hard.  Any hint of moisture in her mouth had evaporated from fear.

The van slowed and she tried to see out the window.  The boy across from her looked at her in desperation, but there wasn’t anything she could do.  Didn’t he see that?  She was sure that due to his age, he was still under the impression that adults could fix anything.  She was sorry that he had to learn this way that it wasn’t always true.

She heard muffled footsteps outside the doors and then suddenly they opened. As their assailant leaned in to reach for her, she kicked out at him with all the strength she could muster.  Her heel caught him squarely on the chin, spinning his head to the side from the impact.  She looked at the boy, motioning for him to jump out and run, but neither of them had the opportunity.  The man yanked them both out, one in each hand, and pulled her up next to his face.

“If you ever try that again,” he rasped, “I will kill the boy.  Do you want that on your shoulders?”

She assumed it was a rhetorical question, but he shook her hard.

“Do you?” he demanded.

She quickly shook her head no and he nodded in apparent satisfaction.

“Good then.  We have an understanding.  Behave yourself.”

He turned his attention to the blonde boy.

“Bet you wish you hadn’t tried to play the hero, huh?”

He yanked both of him along with him to a small white house.  The house looked perfectly normal with the only thing of note about it being the fact that it was so small.  And that it was apparently in the middle of nowhere.

Sydney looked around her as best she could and couldn’t see any other signs of life.  They were in the country somewhere.  But she couldn’t imagine where.  There were only in the van for an hour at the most.  An hour would have gotten them to Gary, but she didn’t smell the sulfurous smell that surrounded that town.  She had no clue where they were. And she guessed that was probably the intention.

He dragged both of them with him into the house which smelled like wet, old carpet.  She could tell that it hadn’t been opened in a while. The air was so stale that it lingered in her nose like moldy cheese.  She briefly wondered if this little house was actually a holding cell for their kidnapper’s victims.  She was certain by now that he did this fairly often. He had the mark of a professional.

He pushed them through the door of a small bedroom.  She knew it was a bedroom only because of the small bed in the middle of the farthest wall.  The room was utterly devoid of anything else and the one window was boarded off and nailed shut.

The man shoved both of them roughly to their knees as he stood behind them.  Sydney squeezed her eyes tightly together.  This was it.  He was going to shoot them both.  She could feel it.  She wished there was something that she could do, but there was nothing.  She couldn’t even fight for her own life.  Having her hands restrained was completely debilitating.

Suddenly he yanked the tape off of her mouth, resulting in pain a thousand times worse than yanking off a bandaid.  A good-sized chunk of her hair came out with the tape and her cheek was left stinging sharply.  She spun around so that she could look at him again, just in time to see him raise his arm in the air above his head.

The blow to her head was shocking in its intensity, but it happened so quickly that she didn’t even feel it.  She simply fell limply forward onto the floor, lying in a crumpled little heap.

The man didn’t waste a second, quickly cold-cocking the little boy, as well, and leaving both of them unconscious on the floor as he closed and locked the door behind him.

CHAPTER SEVEN