Wrath's Storm: A Masters' Admiralty Novel by Mari Carr (desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

women often started out naked. But he wouldn’t have any respect for those women, so some part of him was rejecting the idea of stripping her naked and making her like those women he didn’t respect. Women he would never have called cerebral.

On the other hand, lingerie companies regularly posted billboards in public spaces of women in bras. Branding and advertising where women wore bras were common and familiar.

Right now he was probably uncomfortable with the idea of her naked, and so he’d left her in her underwear because it was a more familiar visual.

But whatever he might be feeling, it ultimately wouldn’t stop him, only delay him.

And once he did strip her naked, he might begin to feel the contempt toward her that he most likely felt for women in pornography.

The beeping got louder, and she looked up to see that he’d opened a cupboard. Inside there was an open laptop, which continued to sound an alarm.

He tapped the keyboard, then hissed in anger.

Annalise froze, scared to hope, but sure that anything he didn’t like was good for her. She craned her neck so she could see the screen—a grainy security camera feed of the clearing. The camera must have been somewhere on the caravan and showed everything, including the car he’d brought her in parked on the far side, near the slight break in the trees.

He peered at the screen, intent. There was nothing there.

Maybe the alarm was some kind of motion sensor or early alert system that someone was approaching. Maybe that was very wishful thinking on her part.

A car shot out from between the trees, going far too fast. The driver swerved to avoid hitting the parked car and then rocked to a stop.

The doors opened. The driver was someone she didn’t know, but the two men who climbed out on the passenger side…

“Jakob,” she breathed. “Walt.”

Her stalker spun to her, his eyes wide and enraged. He took two quick steps and slapped her. Annalise saw it coming and ducked, his hand just clipping the top of her head.

Then she balled up her fist and punched him in the dick.

At least that was her intention, but she was using her non-dominant arm, which still throbbed from the wine-bottle blow—a huge bruise was already forming.

She hit him hard enough to make him yelp and step back, but not hard enough to drop him.

Her stalker snarled and grabbed her by the hair, hauling her over to the cabinet, forcing her to look at the laptop. “I want you to watch this.”

“Watch what?” she gasped, one arm outstretched to accommodate the chain, the other desperately gripping his wrist as if that would lessen his hold on her hair.

“After this, we’ll be leaving. Don’t worry, there’s another way out, so we won’t have to deal with the debris.”

“Debris?” Annalise stared at the grainy footage. Her men were so close. Less than fifty meters from the camper. Jakob had gone to check the stalker’s car, while the man she didn’t recognize kept his attention on the camper, standing in the space between the car he’d been driving and the one she’d been kidnapped in.

Debris.

The phone. The old, simple phone he’d used when they first arrived.

A bomb. There was a bomb in the car.

Annalise screamed as loud as she could. Hoping to warn them.

“It’s soundproof.” Her stalker laughed, then propped the phone up by the laptop. He tapped the green send button.

A fifteen-second countdown window appeared on the screen. Fourteen, no, thirteen seconds and then Walt and Jakob were going to be blown to bits. She screamed again.

Her stalker turned her, forcing her against the wall once more, but this meant she had a perfect view of the laptop.

He drew the knife from his pocket and placed the tip at the waistband of her pants.

Annalise had no more room for fear. Her horror at what was about to happen filled her until there wasn’t space for anything else.

There was nothing in the car. No sign of Annalise, but the plates matched the partial plate they’d seen on the video.

“If she’s not in the car, is she in there?” Walt asked.

Vadisk, looking at the caravan on the other side of the clearing, didn’t immediately respond.

Every muscle in Jakob’s body was tense with the surety that she was in the caravan. That she was trapped in there with a man who would hurt her.

Not might hurt her. Would.

He probably already had.

“Maybe,” Vadisk said. “But it is too obvious.”

“No.” Jakob looked from the car to the caravan and back again. “It’s too easy.”

“Trap?” Vadisk asked.

“He’s smart enough to evade me for years. He left no clues. He’s organized enough to plan this kidnapping on the fly in a city he isn’t familiar with.” Jakob’s words were several seconds behind his thoughts. By the time the last word left his lips, he was already moving away from the cars.

“Run,” Jakob snarled. “Into the trees.”

Neither Vadisk nor Walt questioned him. They turned and sprinted toward the trees.

A second later, the world flashed bright white, then a wrecking ball slammed into his back an eighth of a second before a deafening noise wiped out all other sound.

The explosion rocked the camper slightly. The camera feed whirled drunkenly, then stilled, now pointed at the sky, only the tops of the trees visible—it must have been knocked to the side by the blast.

Annalise forced herself to exhale when her lungs started to hurt. She’d been right. There had been a bomb in the car.

A bomb that would have killed Jakob, Walt, and the stranger if they hadn’t moved.

She’d seen them start to run, just before the timer hit zero.

Had they gotten far enough away?

Annalise stared mutely at the screen, until her stalker dragged her down to the floor, forcing her onto her back. Her pants were gone, and when he forced her legs apart, the G-string didn’t feel like much protection.

She should be horrified or scared. Should be angry enough that she’d started fighting.

Instead, she craned her head, trying to