The world seems to swim and shimmer in front of me, in a haze of terror.

The man before me is not who I expected.

He’s the worst of all possibilities. He’s an outcome I hadn’t even considered.

It’s Feodyr, who used to be Sergei’s right-hand man, until he betrayed Sergei.

Feodyr looks even worse than the last time I saw him – the night Sergei pounded his face in.

His hair, once clipped close to his skull, is growing out, stringy and greasy. His nose is skewed to the right, and the left side of his face sags a little, forcing his lip into a permanent sneer. Nerve damage from the beating, I’d imagine. And I can actually see a dent in his skull; that’s how hard Sergei punches.

When I was being held prisoner in Sergei’s mansion by the sea, Feodyr was clean and immaculately dressed. He did seem to drink a lot, but he handled it just fine. Not anymore. From the looks of him, and the smell, he’s been drinking non-stop since he evaded his police guard and fled the hospital a couple of months ago. That and sleeping rough. He moves in a sour fog of body odor, whiskey fumes, and reeking breath, his T-shirt and jeans are stained, and his face is puffy.

And he’s carrying a newspaper…which is wrapped around the pistol that he’s pointing at my stomach.

People are streaming around us on the sidewalk, talking on their phones, talking to each other. They brush by him; they’re inches away from a tightly coiled bundle of rage shaped like a human. Nobody but me notices the gun.

“What are you doing here?” I ask him.

The right half his mouth twitches up a hideous mockery of a grin. “Sergei sent me. He wants me to rape, torture and murder you. Personally, I couldn’t get it up for an ugly whore like you, Willow, so you’ll have to settle for just the torture and murder part. I hope you aren’t too disappointed.”

“No he didn’t,” I say, keeping my voice and my expression calm. “First of all, if he wanted that done, he’d do it himself. And more importantly, there’s no way you’re still working for him. Looking like that? Smelling like that? He’s a professional. He only hires professionals. You look like you should be in line at a soup kitchen.”

Rage twists his bloated face. “You little cunt!”

He storms towards me. I quickly back up, into an iron railing. He moves so he’s standing two feet away from me. I force myself not to look down at the gun that’s ready to punch holes in my flesh.

“We’re surrounded by people, in the middle of the day,” I point out to him. “You think I’m just going to let you kidnap me?”

“Yes, I do, actually.” He glances at a playground across the street, where mothers are pushing toddlers on swings. My heart stutters in my chest. Is he threatening to do what I think he is?

His furious gaze lights on me again. “You’re right that Sergei won’t let me work for him anymore. He’d kill me if he saw me. Because of you.” He chokes on a sob. Sergei was everything to him. Sergei and his gang of fanatical followers, and the campaign of revenge against my family. It was all Feodyr lived for. “You ruined him. I tried to save him from you, but he was too far gone.”

He thought Sergei was falling for me, to the point where he might falter in their mission. He thought wrong. But he was so afraid of Sergei developing any chink in his armor that he tried to “save” Sergei by getting rid of me. He kidnapped me and took me to a party where a gang of mobster scum were molesting women who were victims of human trafficking.

When Sergei and his men came to rescue me, they killed every last one of the mobsters and freed the women. I knew how close Sergei had been to Feodyr, so I stopped him from beating the bastard to death with his bare hands. I told him to leave Feodyr to the cops, to let him rot in prison. That was a mistake.

A mistake that will cost me my life. I probably have only hours to live, and those hours will be a nightmare.

And he’s going to kill me for nothing. I didn’t affect Sergei in the slightest. If I had, he wouldn’t have refused me when I begged to go back.

I meet Feodyr’s crazed, bloodshot gaze. “You’re wrong. Sergei never cared about me. He’d have to be capable of normal human emotion to do that, and he’s not. He’s a psychopath. He’s just better at being a psychopath than you are.”

Rage twists Feodyr’s features. “Shut the hell up, you…” He rattles off a stream of Russian words that I assume are an exceptionally colorful way to tell me I’m a whore. My Russian is decent, but not great, and I only know the basic swear-words.

It’s ironic. Feodyr can’t stand me saying a single bad thing about Sergei, even though Sergei tried to kill him.

Feodyr’s face is flushing an ugly red. Sweat beads on his forehead and runs down the sides of his face. Can I reason with him? Is there any hope for me?

“I asked him if I could go back to him, and he said no!” There’s an edge of pleading to my voice. “He doesn’t care if I live or die! If you hurt me, he won’t blink an eye. I’m nothing to him.”

“You going to go down on your knees and beg?” Feodyr sneers. “Offer to suck my cock if I just let you live?”

Never.

“If you shoot me, you will be hunted down by the police and killed,” I say. My heart is beating a mile a minute.

He barks out a hideous sound that I think might be a laugh. “You think I fucking care about that? About anything? This is the end for me. Today.”

My heart sinks, and tears of panic prick my eyes. He’s here on a suicide mission. There’s no reasoning, no begging, no hope. He’s staggered far, far away from the land of the sane and the rational. He’s in a place where reality can’t reach him.

He’s swaying, and a few people glance at him because he’s raised his voice, but nobody stops to help me. I can’t say I blame them; Feodyr is big and scary-looking, and menace rolls off him like a stinking toxic fog.

He glances at the playground again. Then his gaze returns to me. He shakes the gun, and the newspaper rattles. “You can come with me right now, or I will shoot the children in the playground, and then shoot you in the gut. Either way you’ll die in agony, but if you stay here, you’ll be taking a bunch of innocent children with you.” He grimaces. I think he’s trying to sneer at me.

I want to scream with frustration. Because I was born into the wrong family, my only life choices are to pick a horrible nightmare scenario, or an even worse nightmare scenario.

It would be my fault if Feodyr murdered a bunch of preschoolers? It was my fault that Sergei held me as collateral for my uncle’s five-million-dollar debt, and treated me like a slave because of crimes that my family committed against him?

But trying to point that out to him would be a waste of breath – and I know I don’t have many breaths left.

“Fine,” I spit. “I’ll go with you.”

“Drop your cell phone on the ground.”

I obey him, pulling the cell phone from my pocket and dropping it.

It’s okay. Anastasia and the kids are safe. That’s all that matters.

But I don’t want to die. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.

I let him lead me around a corner, down an alleyway, and to a parking lot. He drags me over to a car. The parking lot attendant is sitting in the booth, ignoring us so hard that I know that Feodyr paid him off. He glances around, then pops open the trunk.

My breakfast rises in my throat. Tears blur my vision. This is the end. If I run and scream, he’ll kill other people, then kill me anyway.

The last decent thing I can do with my life is save a bunch of strangers who will never know what I did for them.

I can’t help myself. I let out a single, hiccupping sob. I hate myself for it, because I hear Feodyr snicker in response.

Helenka. Yuri. Anastasia. I am sorry. I am so, so sorry to leave you.

He spins me around, quickly binds my hand behind me with a zip tie, and scoops me up in his arms. I try not to retch at his stinking body. He drops me into the trunk with a rough thud.

“Make any noise, try to draw any attention to yourself, and I’ll shoot you,” he says. He slams the trunk shut, and instantly I’m swallowed up in suffocating darkness. A sense of claustrophobia strangles me, and I struggle not to scream as the car starts moving.

It’s hot, and sweat beads on my forehead as the car jolts and races down the road. I think of my family. I think of Lukas, the little boy Sergei is caring for. Lukas is being raised by an elderly couple, and he is so sad, so lonely for his mother, that he took one look at me and decided that I was her. He thought I was his mother, come back for him, and he latched on to me like a barnacle.

That child loved me. I’ve thought about him every single day since the day I left. I had planned on trying to find a way to contact him, to let him know that I didn’t want to leave him. Unless I can get out of this trunk, he’ll grow up and grow old and die thinking I abandoned him.

I try to pay attention to where we’re going. I think we’re moving away from downtown.

Questions race through my mind.

How the hell did he find me? I’m using fake ID, a fake social security number. I don’t look anything like I used to. I haven’t gotten in touch with anyone back home. Not only that, but he has to have been living life on the run. He can’t have just strolled into an internet café or a library with Wi-Fi and found me by searching online.

Sergei has endless resources. Feodyr no longer has any access to them.

If I survive this, I will need to figure out what mistake I made that exposed me like this.

But right now, I have to move fast.

I’ve been preparing for something like this for the last two months. Being kidnapped and thrown into the trunk of a car is terrifying, but it is also on the list of scenarios I’ve prepared for. If he’d been smart, he’d have pulled my shoes off.

But he didn’t. And now I’m going to find out if all my practice has paid off. It was so easy when I did it in our apartment, again and again. Now my hands are shaking and sweaty, and I’m so crazed with fear that I can barely think straight.

I curl my legs up behind me and dig the small blade out of the inside of my shoe, where I taped it. Awkwardly, I rub it against the zip tie and strain until the tie snaps.

Yes! A tiny victory!

Then I scrabble around in the trunk for the release latch, and fumble with it until I get the lid open. I don’t let it open all the way, though; I don’t want Feodyr to glance in the rearview mirror and see that the trunk is open until the time is right. Falling out into traffic and dying under the wheels of a speeding car isn’t my goal.

I wait until I feel the car slow to a stop, idling. I think we’re at a stop sign. I know we’re further away from downtown now. Less chance of collateral damage.

I pop the trunk wide open and roll out into the street. I’ve calculated correctly; we’re idling next to a park. I run for my life.

I hear Feodyr’s howls of rage tearing through the air, and then the pop pop pop of gunfire as I dodge behind a tree and bend low to run behind a row of hedges.

Seek cover. Be a moving target. Harder to hit.

And miracle of miracles, two police officers are on bicycle patrol in the park, and they spot him.

Feodyr starts shooting at them. People scream and scatter, dropping briefcases and lunch boxes and paper cups of coffee.

The police fire back at him.

I run and run, and a cramp burns my side, and I stagger but make my legs keep moving. When the gunfire stops, I pause to glance back. Feodyr is prone on the ground, curled up on his side. Both cops are alive. People are crouching behind trees, behind garbage cans, hugging each other, crying.

Almost weeping with relief, I jog away, heading down a side street.

Feodyr was too sloppy to search me. I have a second phone, and a thousand dollars cash, hidden in a bag strapped to my thigh.

I start walking towards a small, no-name motel twenty blocks from the park. I’ve scouted out dozens of them over the last couple of months.

Anastasia and the kids will be headed out of town right now. I don’t know where they’re going; we arranged that on purpose, in case someone tries to torture the information out of me.

I really want to go back to the apartment to get my laptop and pack some clothing, but I don’t dare. What if Feodyr was more organized than he seemed, and has someone waiting for me?

So instead I book a room at the motel. I even manage to get the clerk to give me a room without giving them ID; it costs me an extra hundred bucks.

I lock the door, sit down on the bed, and cry, rubbing my wrists where the zip ties cut into them.

Then I call Anastasia.

“It was Feodyr,” I tell her. “He’s dead now. But we’re still leaving town. Follow the plan. I’ll check in with you at six a.m. tomorrow. If you don’t hear from me, you go on your own.”

I hang up on her desperate protests.