Chapter 128: Check if she’s awake

It took Sienna a long moment to place herself in the cramped darkness, the low growl of the engine beneath her, the dull throb pounding behind her eyes.

Memory returned in fragments: the crash, the sickening lurch of the car, the world going sideways and then black before she’d ever gotten a clear look at the faces of the men who’d pulled her out.

Her head spun violently the moment she tried to sit up, dizziness rolling through her in thick, disorienting waves.

She forced herself to breathe through it, reaching instinctively for the small kit she always kept tucked inside her jacket a habit born from years of needing to fix herself when no one else could be trusted to.

Her fingers found the narrow box of acupuncture needles, and despite the jolting, uneven motion of the car, she worked with careful precision, guiding first one thin needle and then another into the points along her wrist and the base of her skull, forcing her blood flow to settle, coaxing the worst of the dizziness back into something manageable.

It took several tries against the rocking of the trunk to seat them correctly, but slowly, mercifully, the spinning in her head began to still.

She sat back carefully once it was done, and that was when she saw it.

A body bag, resting on the other side of the cramped space, close enough that she didn’t need a clear look to know exactly what or who was inside it.

The sight sent a cold, familiar dread crawling up her spine, memory folding back over the present until she could almost taste the same bloodied night at the library all over again.

She didn’t have time to sit with the horror of it. Carefully, methodically, she pulled the needles back out one by one, tucking them away, feeling steadily more clear-headed with each passing second.

Whatever they’d drugged her with, the acupuncture had bought her enough clarity to think and now, thinking was all she had.

She reached for her phone next, along with a small tracking gadget she kept sewn into the lining of her jacket, and worked quickly to triangulate their position.

It took a few tense minutes of squinting at faint, shifting signals in the dark, but eventually she confirmed what her gut had already suspected they were nearing the borders of Philadelphia, closing in on wherever Fabio intended to take her next.

Without letting herself think too hard about what she was risking, she typed out their coordinates and sent them straight to Viktor’s phone.

A voice cut through the muffled quiet just beyond the trunk. "Check if she’s awake."

"Don’t worry, boss," came the reply, closer now, footsteps crunching against gravel. "The medicine we gave her will keep her drowsy until we reach home. You have nothing to worry about."

Sienna killed the screen instantly, shoving the phone and gadget back beneath the lining of her jacket, forcing her body still and her breathing slow and shallow, playing every part of the unconscious woman they believed her to be.

The car rolled to a stop.

A moment later the trunk latch released, and she felt it immediately a wave of something acrid and chemical washing over her, thick enough to make her lungs want to seize even through her carefully controlled stillness.

She held herself rigid, praying whatever signal her phone had managed to send off had gone through before it lost connection entirely.

Then the trunk shut again, sealing her back into darkness.

She lay there, heart hammering silently beneath her still expression, and allowed herself one single, desperate hope that Viktor had gotten her message before they’d cut the signal.

If this had been an electronic vehicle, she might have found a way to hack directly into its systems, disable the locks, buy herself a window to run.

But it wasn’t. It was an old, stubborn manual truck, built with nothing for her to reach into and bend to her will.

Damn it.

—---

Viktor was halfway through burning everything he could reach warehouses, safehouses, a small fleet of Fabio’s supply trucks and had already turned his attention toward Don Capri’s remaining holdings, certain now that the old man had been working with Fabio all along, feeding him information, buying him time.

The fires were still climbing behind him when the message came through.

He read it once. Then again, slower, making certain his eyes weren’t playing tricks born of exhaustion and rage.

Coordinates. Philadelphia.

"Move," Viktor said, voice suddenly sharp and clipped, all of the wild fury from the jet folding itself back down into something colder, more precise.

"Get the jet ready." He was already striding toward the cars, phone pressed hard against his ear, barking orders to the men still fanning out across Don Capri’s burning compound behind him.

"I want men on every road. Call the police, the border patrol, the army if you have to I don’t care whose favor you have to spend. Fabio cannot leave this country. You hear me?"

His men fell into motion instantly, peeling off toward vehicles, phones already lighting up with calls to contacts across a dozen different agencies, favors Viktor had spent years quietly building suddenly all being cashed in at once.

He paused only for a moment at the edge of the wreckage, staring out at the horizon, something almost gentle bleeding briefly through the hard set of his jaw.

"Wait a little longer, little librarian," he murmured, low enough that only he could hear it.

Then he was moving again, and there was no softness left in him by the time he reached the jet.

It was nearly daybreak by the time Viktor’s plane touched down outside Philadelphia, and he switched immediately to a car waiting on the tarmac, unmarked, unremarkable. Fabio could not know he was coming.

That was the only advantage the time difference had given him, a narrow window bought by geography and urgency, and he intended to spend every second of it wisely.

Less than twenty minutes later, they reached the coordinates Sienna had sent.