Snow Falls in Prague; I Won't Wait for a Heartless Man novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Tram Crossing

The hand over my mouth smelled of cigarettes and wet leather.

I bit it.

The man swore and clamped harder, and the second one caught my arms and threw me into the van.

I hit the floor on my side, and the first thing I did was fold my arms over my stomach.

The door slid shut.

We were moving.

"Quiet," said the man with the scar through his eyebrow.

He was the one who had come to the pension desk with my photo.

He knelt on the floor beside me and pulled a strip of tape off a roll.

"You're pregnant," he said. "Nobody wants to hurt that. Sit still and nothing happens to it."

"Your boss wants it to happen."

"My boss wants a talk."

"Then why the tape?"

He did not answer, and he pressed the tape over my mouth.

I looked at the other man.

He was driving, with his eyes on the mirror, and he would not look back at me.

My phone lay on the floor under the seat where it had fallen.

Its screen was lit.

Jakub's name was on it, with a running timer.

I had pressed the call button when the hand came over my face.

It had been going for nearly two minutes.

I kicked the phone with my heel, toward the seat, and the scarred man caught it and looked at the screen.

I made a sound behind the tape.

He glanced at the timer, then at me, and laughed.

"Tram mechanic," he said into the phone, loudly, in English. "She's fine. Miss Quarles has her. Tell your grandmother to put the kettle on."

He dropped it into his coat.

My stomach went cold.

Then I heard it, through the van wall.

A bell.

Not a car horn.

A tram bell, huge and flat, being rung over and over by someone who did not intend to stop.

The driver said something sharp in Czech.

"What?"

"There's a tram on the crossing."

"So wait."

"It's not waiting. It's coming out of the depot."

The van braked.

I rolled forward into the seat leg, and through the windshield I saw a gray work tram with its lights off and its sandbox hatches open sliding across the road in front of us, slow and enormous.

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