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Call whoever you want. I’d gut him where he stands,Jake said. Jake, my cautious and serious twin, ready to spill blood on the flagstones with no questions asked.
Easy bro,I replied.Wake her up, see what she wants to do.
I’m going in the cabin now to fill her in on what you saw,Jake answered.
Keeping eyes on Chris, I glanced up from my phone and moved to the activities desk. The woman at the desk offered to help me, so I asked for a list of their excursions for the evening. Anything to look busy and have something to do while I observed him. She offered me a tablet so I could flip through the descriptions and the bespoke add-on experiences. As I leaned on the counter to survey the options, I watched the target—God help me, but the military terms came back to me on instinct. He was the target to us as surely as if he’d had crosshairs tattooed on his forehead.
It would be so easy, the devil on my shoulder seemed to whisper.Just approach him, introduce yourself as a resort employee, offer him a free perk and take him for a ride. Take him down one of the winding mountain roads, set him up for a selfie with an impressive view and if he isn’t stupid enough to lean back too far—which he probably was—it’s as simple as a giving him a shove and over he’d go like so many idiot tourists met their death. It would be over and done in fifteen minutes and you could drive off, hands clean and problems over.
While I shook off the urge to commit capital murder, my phone buzzed. Not with the expected text from the group chat, but a call from my twin.
24
JAKE
She was gone.
Impossible.
Two military men in the private cabin with her, and someone managed to take her anyway. Wasn’t Eli supposed to have his eyes on this asshole? There was zero chance this dipshit was a tenth as smart as Eli, and even less possibility that he could take her from under our noses. So she had to be here someplace. It wasn’t a big cabin.
They were searching for her, Drew systematic and ice-cold, Ty with murder in his eyes. He grabbed my arm when I entered.
“She is not in the bath. I thought if she wasn’t still sleeping that’s where she had to be. Drew checked everywhere even in the closets.”
“What about the sauna?” I asked.
“I’ll check again,” Ty said as I dialed her phone.
It rang from the bedside table. I rushed in hoping against hope that she was somewhere in the cabin, but the evidence was right there. It was unlike her to leave it behind, and she wouldn’t have done so voluntarily.
Scenarios raced through my mind. Ty came charging back, still frantic.
“She’s not in the sauna,” he said.
Drew stood on the deck beside the hot tub, phone to his ear. The bark of his tone told me that he was ripping up someone at local law enforcement for failing to respond adequately to this emergency. All that did was confirm what I already knew.
Jasmine was gone. It would be up to us to find her and bring her back home. Even if we were the kind of men who stood by and let the cops fumble the ball, we would’ve charged in at a time like this. As it stood now, we had to move fast and in a coordinated fashion. It was the most sudden and crucial mission of our lives.
I set to work on Jasmine’s phone, bypassing her security code and checking her messages, voicemails, the metadata on photos and screenshots to see what she’d been thinking or responding to when she disappeared. According to the information on the phone there were no obvious catalysts for her sudden departure. No calls or messages from the estranged mom and little sister, no threats from the ex, nothing to lure her out of the cabin. The last thing in her browser history was ‘Swiss gourmet treats’.
“Her purse,” Ty called to me from the bathroom, “it’s gone. Left the phone took the purse.”
“She has her wallet. And I’m willing to bet her keys are in her purse even though we’re away from home. Did she bring her fob and stuff with her?” I said.
“I wasn’t exactly searching her bags,” Ty said wryly.
“I have an Air Tag on her keyring. I can track her,” I said, pulling up the app. The Air Tag location was back in Virginia. I wanted to slam my phone to the floor, stomp the screen and then ram my hand through some drywall if I couldn’t jam it in her ex’s face instead.
I couldn’t use my tech safety net to find Jasmine. Panic scalded every nerve ending, but I forced it down. I shut my eyes for an instant, then called Eli.
I had to tell him Jas was missing, and I needed his stuck-up wannabe European ass to tell me where to find fancy Swiss shit in this resort. Because that would help us find her if she’d headed out alone.
25
JASMINE
Trying to surprise a team of ex-military security professionals wasn’t easy.
