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Was stealing a plane even possible? Granted, not a whole lot of the population knew how to fly one. Nevertheless, you’d think they’d lock them up or something. Could stealing one result in getting shot down? And how critical was it to have a flight plan filed?
He waved a hand in dismissal. “Once we’re airborne, we have nothing to worry about, as long as we get Alessia back safe and sound. Taking this jet allows for two things—one, her brothers can’t follow us, assuming they even knew where to look for her since this is the only one they own that has the capability of crossing the Atlantic, and two, it’ll get us there and back in the least amount of time possible.”
I stilled. “You stole an Accardi Tactical jet?” I looked at my surroundings with a whole new light.
“Not important.” Matteo was all business, his tone having an edge I hadn’t heard before. He sounded … worried. “Alessia was kidnapped last night, apparently after going out to get some ice cream. They found her car this morning when Boone grew concerned about not being able to reach her. I’d already started tracking her when she didn’t show up at my apartment this morning.” He didn’t even have the decency to look uncomfortable about that information.
“So, where are we going?” I felt like I was a broken record. “Why can’t her brothers know, and why aren’t we letting the police deal with this?”
“We’re going to Germany.” The plane took off, and, apparently feeling like he could fill me in since I couldn’t escape anymore, he started answering my questions. “Her brothers don’t have the jurisdiction or the relationships to allow for them to circumvent those legal issues, and the local police are in Albrecht’s pocket.”
“And we do?” I certainly didn’t. I didn’t have any connections in my own government, let alone a European one. I didn’t even have my passport with me, for crying out loud.
He nodded, pulling out a tablet. “Yep. And you’re in luck because your clearance came back about an hour ago.”
“Thank you?” I wasn’t sure what else to say.
He snorted. “You’ll regret those words later, I bet. I’m hoping to rope you into Alessia detail, giving me a chance to step back. I don’t have to tell you how exhausting that woman is, and it’s just a matter of time before she and her brothers go to war. With any luck, I can stay out of the middle of that mess.”
The headache from that morning came back in full force. Rubbing my eyes, I leaned forward in my seat. “I don’t know whether to be happy I’m apparently about to be read-in on whatever Alessia has been hiding or scared I’m about to be handed Pandora’s box.”
It was a little of the first and a whole lot of the second, I realized a few hours later. That woman had layers within her layers. No wonder she seemed so guarded. She was wrapped in a web of her own making, walking a figurative tightrope to keep her cover intact and live some sort of life. No wonder she hadn’t even blinked at the Oliver situation. Her file read as a mixture of an American version of James Bond and a goddess of chaos and war. Twenty-two kills. Three had resulted in governments being overthrown in the upheaval of their leaders dying—and those three had been declared natural causes despite the proof I held in my hands. There were several drug lords listed, countless human traffickers, and even the girlfriend of some Russian mobster. The file for that one was still mostly redacted, and I took a moment to wonder why, out of all of the assignments they allowed me to view, that one was blacked-out. I didn’t have much time to think before my attention was diverted by her most recent kill, which was the day before I’d met her the first time. I tried not to wince at the details of how she’d made a public statement of what the world thought of human traffickers.
We changed gears after I had some time to process, going over plans of Albrecht’s castle. Plans I had a very sneaky suspicion Alessia supplied, now that I knew what her job—her real job—entailed. Matteo and I were joining up with the team assigned for her rescue. Matteo hadn’t explained everything, like a better reason behind stealing a jet and why the two of us were flying across the world to rescue a woman with an entire team of better-qualified individuals already en route to collect her. But I wasn’t complaining, mind you. If anyone was going to pull her out of this situation, it would be me. I still owed her an apology and one big I-told-you-so about hooking Albrecht.
An hour out from our destination, an alarm on Matteo’s tablet blared, causing him to drop his glass. It crashed to the floor, ignored by us both, as he pulled up a screen with slightly shaky hands.
“What is it?”
His face had visibly paled. “Maybe nothing.” Which definitely meant something.
“What was the alarm for?” I wasn’t in the mood to play a thousand questions.
He swallowed audibly. “Alessia has a tracking implant, which is why I knew exactly where she was.”
“And?” Dread filled me, waiting for him to continue.
“It just went offline.”
“You mean like she’s underground? Or it ran out of batteries?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “The range on these things makes it unlikely. They also rely on the body for an electrical charge.”
I needed him to spell it out for me. “So?” I let the word hang in the air.
“So unless she was hit by lightning, someone either cut it out of her,” he blew out a breath, “or she’s no longer living.”
Chapter 23
Alessia
Iwokeuppissed.Not the I-see-red, burn-the-house-down kind of pissed, the ice-cold, I-will-dismember-someone-alive without so much as blinking or a single regret kind of pissed. The cold detachment cloaked me like a blanket before I even fully registered what had happened or where I was. I kept my breathing slow and regular and my eyes closed, not wanting to let anyone know I was awake until I’d fully evaluated my surroundings. I remembered being taken, the needle jamming into my flesh before being thrown in the back of a vehicle, but nothing after that.
Other than the sound of my breathing, the room was silent, though not dark. The glow from beneath my closed eyelids told me the lights were bright—either I was lying below a skylight or a fluorescent light. I was on my side, my hands tied in front of me, but I couldn’t feel the individual rope strands on my wrists, just the rough material against my face, so I could only assume they had foolishly placed fabric between my skin and the rope. I wasn’t naked, so that was something, but the restricting movement of my chest when I breathed told me I wasn’t in the same shirt and jeans I’d been in when I was kidnapped. With almost imperceptible movements, I checked to ensure I had full use of my extremities. I had feeling in everything, and none of my responses were sluggish, though my feet felt prickly still. I let out a small sigh of relief that whatever they’d drugged me with was clearing out of my system quickly.
Taking a chance, I opened one eye just enough to peek out from beneath my eyelashes. Scanning my surroundings—what I could see of them anyway—would have filled me with dread if I wasn’t a trained assassin. I was in a metal room. The floors, walls, and even the ceiling was shiny stainless steel. There was a toilet and sink on the wall close to the foot of the wrought iron bed I was currently on. The bed frame was another sign I was in trouble. From the angle of my face, I could see down my body and about half of the room. The frame was solid tube metal, black, with clips welded to it that could only be meant for restraints in various positions. I moved my gaze to my body. I was dressed in the same damn gown they had forced me to squeeze into the first day of the shoot a few days ago. The creamy-white dress with gold threading was so tight I could barely breathe in it, but it was the shoes that finally had a trickle of fear running through me. The golden stilettos on my feet had been altered as well. Instead of being too small like the dress, a single nail on each shoe had been forced through the bottom, into where my heel rested, leaving my feet above them a solid inch or more from the true bottom. If I were to take so much as a step, my body weight would shove them into my feet.This is so not good, I thought as I tried to plan what to do to get out of it.
Best guess, based on the expert team that had kidnapped me, the clothes, and accessories, was that I’d been taken by, or rather for, Karl Albrecht. He’d moved quicker than we expected, but there was good news within the bad. If that was the case, I was likely in the hidden rooms I’d been trying to discover the passage to on my last reconnaissance mission. If that was true, then I knew Matteo already knew I was missing, which meant help would come for me sooner rather than later. The flight to get me from Texas to Germany would have taken a while, which was a positive as at least that had delayed whatever was in store for me, but on the flip side, it added to the time it would take for a rescue. Still, a rescue was coming in hours or, at worst, a day or so, not weeks or months.
