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Someone had shot at him.
No, not someone.
Musa. It had to be.
Alek veered right and crossed into the tree line. Lyon resisted the urge to go left, to cover more ground. It was too dangerous for both of them to be in different areas of the woods with weapons, firing at anything that moved.
Alek slowed as he crossed into the shade of the trees. It was almost dark here, the sun barely making its way through the evergreens that reached for the sky all around them. A handful of oaks and elms stood like sentries between the evergreens, their bare limbs looking ghostly in the shadowed light.
It was impossible to be quiet. The snow was deeper in the woods where the sunlight hadn’t thawed it. A thin layer of ice crusted the surface, crunching every time Alek or Lyon took a step, their feet sinking two feet into the frozen snow.
Still, they moved slowly, Alek scanning the trees to the right, Lyon scanning the ones to the left. They hadn’t had time to formulate a plan, but they’d worked together for years, had covered each other’s asses countless times.
Lyon didn’t know how long they’d been working their way into the forest when Alek stopped in his tracks.
Lyon froze and Alek waved him forward.
“He was here,” Alek said, pointing to a set of footprints.
“Just one,” Lyon said, his gaze tracking the footsteps into the woods where they disappeared.
“Sniper,” Alek said.
Lyon looked up. “Listen.”
Birds chirped overhead, and squirrels scurried among the trees. The noises told Lyon all he needed to know. “He’s gone. Too much of a head start.”
Alek nodded his agreement and turned to look at Lyon. “How did you know? You hit the ground just in time.”
“Caught a flare,” Lyon said.
“Must have been the rifle scope.” Alek looked up and shook his head. “You were lucky. Sun must have hit it just right.”
“We can debate the merit of my luck later.” Lyon met Alek’s eyes, his mind turning over a more important question. “What I really want to know is how the fuck Musa knew I was here?”
Alek shook his head. “No one even knows about this place.”
“Not no one,” Lyon said.
Alek’s expression darkened. “The men. Who else?”
“No one,” Lyon said. “The men. Rurik. That’s all.”
Lyon’s name wasn’t on the house. Like the penthouse, like all the property he owned, it had been purchased through shell corporations, both to protect himself — and Kira, but he didn’t want to think about that — and to guard against asset forfeiture in the event of a RICO case.
“So… the men,” Alek said.
Neither of them had to debate Rurik as a traitor. It was impossible.
“The men,” Lyon agreed. “We have a mole.”
He ran down the short list of men in his inner circle: Stefan, Rupert, Oleg, Michael, Luka, Borya, David.
He wasn’t naive enough not to believe it could be any one of them.
But he didn’t think it was that simple.
The feeling that he was missing something had returned. It scratched at the inside of his brain like a squirrel in the attic. He heard the sound, knew it was there, but he couldn’t figure out which direction it was coming from.
