Julie Miller - The Duke's Covert Mission

He cursed and her small victory thrilled her, giving her a rush of adrenaline and the strength to pry herself from his grasp. Ellie landed hard on her knees on the concrete. But as the pain jolted through her bones all the way to her skull, she pulled the gag from her mouth and screamed.

“Stop her!”

Ellie tried to crawl, and her legs and petticoats tangled with the giant’s feet and he tripped. He crashed to the ground and she dodged to the side.

She didn’t get far. Her head was swimming. It was too dark. It was happening too fast.

Raw with fear, Ellie slapped at the hands that lifted her. The words were vile, the touches rough. A third man got out of the car and opened the trunk.

Ellie twisted, fought, struggled for air and begged for her life before they dumped her in. She landed beside a bundle of black laundry. She clawed at it to right herself, but succeeded only in rolling the bundle over and revealing a cold, colorless face with blank, staring eyes.

Ellie screamed.

But Paulo Giovanni, the Carradignes’ chauffeur, never heard her.

“Shut her up!”

She didn’t understand. Crazy observations floated through her blurring vision. Ski masks in June. Big man. Little man. Dead man.

Something sharp pricked her shoulder, and she yelped between sobs. A numbing sensation turned her limbs to jelly and her brain to mush.

By the time the trunk lid closed above her and she slumped into the inescapable darkness, she could think of only one thing.

She’d never gotten her dance.

The cold woke her.

Ellie stirred on her hard bed and pushed her eyes open to a squint. But her eyelids felt like leaded curtains clinging to her dried-out contacts. She rolled onto her side, and something gritty scratched her cheek.

She turned away from the discomfort and shivered. Her head throbbed at that slightest of movement, and a carpet of goose bumps prickled the skin on her bare arms. Instinctively she wrapped her arms around herself, huddling for warmth in the dank, musty air. Her fingertips rasped against the nubby cloth she was wrapped in.

Her red dress. Cinderella. Three men in masks.

Paulo’s dead eyes.

Each image blipped into her clouded brain and brought her to a new level of awareness.

“Oh, God.”

She’d been kidnapped.

A silent scream rasped through her lungs.

She placed her palms on the cold, concrete floor beneath her and shoved herself up to a sitting position. She shut her eyes against the pinball effect of marbles bouncing off the inside of her skull. Once the marbles stopped rolling and the pain eased into the dull throb of a mere headache, she opened her eyes and scanned her surroundings.

She was in a basement. A rusted furnace sat in the far corner, a flight of open-backed wooden stairs disappeared into the exposed ceiling joists above her, and a pair of small windows were set high on the cinder-block walls that entombed her.

She’d figured out the where and the what. What she didn’t understand was the why.

Ellie Standish didn’t get kidnapped.

She followed the rules and minded her manners and took care of other people. She didn’t make enemies.

Why?

She was a plain, unremarkable woman.

Woman.

For one hideous, horrible second she thought… She ran her hands down her body. She’d been unconscious. Had they…?

She brought a hand to her chest and forced herself to exhale.

Bruised and sore. Scared out of her mind. But not violated.

Ellie sat where she was and simply breathed for several minutes, muting the urge to panic.

When she could think halfway rationally again, her shy-woman’s mind took over. It had always been her way to take stock of a situation before speaking or acting. If she had a plan, if she knew her way around a place or people, she was less likely to freeze up, more likely to act on her natural human instincts.

So much for her night on the town. Morning had come, or maybe it was afternoon, she couldn’t pinpoint an exact time from the sunlight filtering through the greasy windowpanes.

Her Cinderella dress had been transformed into rags during the night. The skirt was torn at the waist seam, and a palm-size smudge dirtied one hip. A two-foot length of lace trim dangled like a tail from her petticoats. One of the shoulder straps had been ripped from the bodice, leaving it up to the gown’s stiff boning and tight fit to keep her decently covered. She tugged at the dipping neckline and let her arm rest there, in a gesture of self-defense rather than an attempt to find any real warmth. As her fingers drifted up to her neck, she clutched at the bare skin there.

The ruby choker.

Gone.

She touched her bare earlobes. The diamond drop earrings.

Gone.

She plowed her fingers into the messy upsweep of her hair. Lucia’s tiara.

Gone.

Along with the beaded purse in which she’d carried her own silver watch in.

“Oh, no.” Ellie rubbed her hands up and down her arms, oblivious to the ache of bruises that dotted her skin.

They’d robbed her. They’d stolen Lucia’s self-designed jewelry and Ellie’s own, less-valuable trinkets.

She blinked back the tears stinging her eyes. It didn’t make sense. Yes, she’d worn diamonds and rubies—works of art. But there would have been hundreds of other guests at the ball with far more expensive jewelry and purses and wallets to steal.

Something more than a simple theft was going on here. This felt personal.

Drugging her. Murdering Paulo. Abandoning her here—wherever here was—didn’t make sense.

Abandonment.

That was when the silence registered.

That was when the panic gathered strength.

“Hello?” Her voice echoed off the walls and got swallowed up by the damp air. “Hello?”

New York City was a constant hum of traffic and people, machinery and music.

The silence here pounded in her ears, mocked her attempt at bravery.

This wasn’t New York City.

She scrambled to her feet. “Hello!”

She’d been abandoned in the middle of nowhere. Abandoned! Her teeth chattered from fear as much as from cold. Left behind. Unnoticed. Forgotten. Never missed. Alone.

“Help me!” Her native European accent thickened as an age-old fear seized the opportunity to resurrect itself.

She dashed for the stairs but was jerked to a sudden halt that toppled her off her feet. The hard landing jarred her hands and triggered a jolting reminder of her battered knees. But the pain didn’t frighten her half as much as the ominous clank of metal scraping against metal behind her. Ellie rolled over onto her bottom and yanked up the hem of her skirt.

“No.” She tapped her fingers at her temple, nervously pushing at her nonexistent glasses. “No!”

A steel band had been cuffed around her left ankle. And a shiny new chain of stainless steel had been padlocked to the cuff. She traced the path of interlocking links, each the size of a golf ball, to a steel O-bolt anchored into the center of the concrete floor.

Chained to the floor like one of the elephants she’d seen at the Korosol Royal Circus last year.

Ellie climbed to her feet and, like that sorry animal, paced as far as the chain allowed.

Whoever had put her here had measured the trap carefully. Even at its fullest length, with her leg stretched out behind and her body tilted forward as far as she could go, she was still a good two feet from the bottom of the stairs. The windows hovered above the reach of her outstretched hand. The only thing within her grasp was the broken-down furnace and a knee-high wooden stool.

“All the comforts of home,” she whispered. If one was a condemned prisoner on death row.

Ellie sank down onto the stool and hugged herself, refusing to surrender to futile tears.