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“Worse.”
“Hey! Could you two stop talking about me like I’m not even here? I can hear you.”
Both men rolled their eyes, and while I knew they were trying to break the tension, nothing short of putting my eyes on Nataliya again was going to help. “What can I do from here?” I asked Drake, desperate for anything to keep my mind occupied.
“Comb through the evidence you have,” he suggested. “I’m looking at an email between Hayes and a mortgage broker; they were discussing mountain getaways. That seems the most likely to me. His main property is right in the middle of the city—not the kind of place you’d take a captive who might scream out things you don’t want the neighbors to overhear. He’s got a beach house in Florida, but that would be too far of a trip. The mountains make the most sense. It’s a long list, but if we’ve got some kind of financial record to show that he purchased property, it would give us a place to start.”
I had no idea if that would yield anything, but I was grateful to have a task. Waiting around never suited me, and it was even worse now.
Sitting down at Nataliya’s laptop, I started looking through the files. Mostly, it was what we’d already seen: uncensored emails and memos that attached Hayes’s name to war profiteering in a variety of ways. But in one of the final zipped files, one that we hadn’t swiped through, I hit paydirt: a bank statement.
“I might have gotten something,” I said, trying to read faster than I actually could. This had to be the right document. We were out of options if it wasn’t. Drake was good, but he wasn’t nearly as good as Nataliya. Zach had suggested we alert the police, but we didn’t have any evidence that Hayes was behind the kidnapping. Technically, since she was living under a false identity and had been careful not to leave a paper trail, we couldn’t prove that Nataliya was missing at all.
“There was a big purchase in the Blue Ridge Mountains about six months ago,” I said, finally able to focus on the list of expenses. “Anything in your paperwork match?”
“Hold on.” Drake sounded far away, but I assumed that was because he was reading. “Got it!” he shouted. “I’ll text you the address.”
A moment later, my phone lit up with the message. I plugged the address into a real estate website to see if I could score some pictures of the outside. The site delivered, but I wasn’t exactly happy with what it showed me. The cabin was huge, and I was sure Hayes had beefed up security since he purchased it. From the pictures, it didn’t look like there were any close neighbors. It was truly isolated, just like the old ad boasted: “a private getaway from the city.” Approaching it undetected wasn’t going to be easy—but I was up to the task. I had to be. There wasn’t any other option.
Now that we knew where she probably was, my nerves settled. I couldn’t be a jackass and rush in with guns blazing. That was how things went south, and I would cut off my own arm before I put Nataliya in even more danger.
“We don’t have the numbers for this,” I said, looking at Zach. “But we can’t wait for backup, and Gabe’s in a hospital bed for the next eighteen hours.”
Zach’s jaw clenched, but he nodded. Months ago, when he and Marissa reconnected—years after the one-night stand that left Marissa pregnant—his daughter had been taken. He knew the turmoil that was eating me alive right now. “We go in stealth mode,” he said. “Attack quiet so we don’t raise any alarms.”
Covert missions had been our bread and butter, so it wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle…we were both used to having more backup for if things popped off. “Drake, keep a line open for communication? I’ll signal if we need the police.”
“You got it.”
Zach and I took stock of the weapons we had between us, and then we loaded into Nataliya’s car. The GPS’s route was a little over two hours up into the mountains. The sun was already setting, so when it got dark, it got really dark. That might not be a good thing for some, but for us, nighttime would only help with “stealth mode,” as Zach put it.
There was a long, winding road that, according to the GPS, led to Hayes’s manor. Without a clear idea of what kind of surveillance cameras Hayes had, we needed to be cautious in our approach. We left the car a mile away and went on foot through the trees, making sure to step lightly and avoid making noise as much as possible.
The manor was a ball of light in the middle of the darkened forest. “Not great,” Zach muttered. “They’ll see us when we get close.”
“We’ll do what we can,” I said, eyeing the structure ahead of us. “Split up as we get inside. We’ll clear each floor as quietly as we can.”
Zach nodded, and we made a loop of the property. The easiest access point was a cellar door that looked like it hadn’t been maintained. I knelt, pulled out my pocketknife, and slammed it into the padlock until it opened with a click.
There wasn’t anyone in the cellar, but the wooden stairs leading to the first-floor door creaked under our weight. Zach kept cursing under his breath with every new pop of the wood. Sweat pooled in the small of my back.
Luckily, the door to the first floor wasn’t locked and wouldn’t need to be forced open, but it took finesse to open the door just enough for Zach to slide through. When he gave me the all-clear, I followed him. We ran into the first guard in the hallway, but Zach put him in a sleeper hold until he passed out, and we were able to lower him to the floor without much issue.
We turned a corner, in search of stairs to the second floor or a living space or something, and we barreled into a familiar face.
He still bore the marks of the fight we’d had in St. Francisville. His nose was crooked from where it had been broken but not reset quickly or well enough. “You?—!”
I lunged, cracking his cheekbone with my fist, rocking his head back before the sound of his yells could travel further. I had surprised him with the first punch, but he landed two in my gut before Zach was able to grab his head and brought his knee up into his nose. He howled as it rebroke.
“Maybe it’ll straighten out again,” I muttered to him before Zach and I kept moving.
We ran into more guards, and while they were skilled, they had nothing to counter way Zach and I moved together. It was obvious as they lumbered around one another that they didn’t know how to communicate. They weren’t trained to fight together. Not against targets with our kind of training.
“Stairs, Adrian,” Zach said, and we climbed to the second floor.
I was about to start screaming for Nataliya, guards be damned, when we opened a door to an office. Ian Hayes was standing inside. He had his arms around Nataliya and a knife held to her throat. “Are there more of you?” he asked.
“Just us, Hayes,” I said.
