The Woman in the Wrong Place (Grassi Framily)

I needed to figure out how to save myself.

Or, at least, buy myself some time.

I suddenly wished I’d been the kind of woman who consumed a ton of true crime content. I heard someone say once that women didn’t watch it because they were actually interested in serial killers or rapists, but rather watched to know how to survive murderers and rapists.

Maybe one of those true crime women would have known what to do in this situation, how to get out of the zip ties, how to get out of the trunk safely.

But I didn’t.

I had nothing to go on but vague memories of movies and TV shows. Just little flashes of information that might not have even been factually correct in the first place, so I didn’t know how much faith to rest in the ideas.

At that moment, it wasn’t some badass movie chick who crossed my mind.

No.

It was Detective Hart with a little guest appearance from Detective Carver.

What would they tell this “hypothetical woman trapped in a trunk” to do?

They wouldn’t tell me to fight.

I would surely be outnumbered, out skilled, and outgunned. Especially since, you know, I had none. And the driver had at least one.

Fighting would be futile.

It might even get me hurt worse.

No.

The detectives would tell a woman in this situation to use her brain, not her braun. They would tell her to find power in a powerless situation, like they’d told me to do with Matteo.

What was my power here?

What could I offer them that they didn’t have?

It took all of five seconds to come up with that answer.

Information on the Grassi Family.

That was what they wanted, right? That was why they’d been in Matteo’s office. They wanted to know more about them, so they could—I imagine—kill them all and take their business from them.

That was how criminals operated, right?

When they wanted something, they took it by force.

I had the perk of being an insider, of sorts.

I could offer them information in exchange for my freedom.

I mean it was entirely possible that they would just say no and extract the information from me via torture, but I was going to go ahead and let myself be hopeful that if I took initiative right away, and I lied just well enough, that they might take me up on it.

It was the only plan I had anyway, so it was worth a shot.

If that didn’t work, then I had to start looking for ways to stall or find exits I could possibly escape from.

Decision made, I braced my arms and legs against the trunk to keep from rolling, and focused on my breath until I could think clearly enough through my fear.

Then I started creating a script in my head, even repeating it back to myself over and over until I got all of the “ahs” and “umms” out, until my tone came out calm and collected, maybe even a little bit cold.

It was the same version of myself that I’d adopted when I’d walked into Matteo’s office to blackmail him.

God, that felt like forever ago.

So much had happened in the time since.

Most of it for the better.

Hell, even the attack.

It sucked. It hurt. I was still aching from it.

But it made me realize I was a lot tougher than I thought. It brought me into Matteo’s house which not only got me close with him, but his entire family.

It was such a short span of time, but I felt like there had been a lot of personal growth in it for me.

And part of that growth was a strange sort of secondhand confidence I’d picked up from being around Adrian and Sofia, as well as the men. I swear I hadn’t met a single member of the Grassi family that didn’t carry themselves with a sort of laidback self-assurance that I’d been envious of for a while until I realized it was starting to rub off on me.

Thank God for that because I was going to need it if I was facing some criminals of unknown origins.

The car slowed as, I imagined, it pulled off the parkway and onto main drags, something that was confirmed by the starting and stopping at lights and stop signs. I guess if you were kidnapping someone, you really had to be mindful of traffic signals and speed limits.

But then, before I could really decide if I should stick with my original plan, or maybe try to open the trunk and make a jump for it when the car slowed, it was parking, the engine was cutting off, and I could hear men’s voices.

The glow-in-the-dark release hatch taunted me above my head, just out of reach, even if I could maneuver myself up onto my knees and arch my back up to try to reach for it.

So I did all I could.