We both laugh.
“Where is my precious little fucker?”
“Hang on,” Lidia says, stepping away from the camera for a few seconds, returning with my boy, plopping him down on her lap. “Say hi to daddy.”
I wave at my little buddy. “Hey, baby. I miss you.”
Brandon babbles something incoherent at the screen and my grin makes my cheeks ache. Anya is the only other person I’ve loved as much as I love Brandon.
Lidia’s face turns serious. “How long before you land in Oslo?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“And how long before you reach the warehouse…the factory…whatever they call it?”
“It’s a warehouse, but they call it a factory. It’ll be at least another hour before we get there, but it’ll be longer than that before we have her. If she’s actually there.”
“She has to be there. I know it, Ezra. She’s my sister. I know she’s not dead, I would feel it.”
I nod a little. “I know. I promise you, the moment we know more, I’ll call you.”
The rogues have been watching Murphy O’Shea’s movements for months. They noticed him spending a lot more time away from his factories and a lot more time at home with his wife. He’s closed two factories over the course of the year. But they expected to have seen bodies moving—dead or alive—and being shipped to other factories. They hadn’t seen any such movement. It was like the girls they kidnapped and kept just disappeared.
I think Stella had something to do with it all. I think Murphy fell hard for her, and because she’s such a force to be reckoned with, something in him changed and shifted his perspective. I can only hope that’s why. Falling in love with a good woman can take a weak man and make him stronger…can take a worse man and make him better.
Whatever the case, the agents spotted a girl who matched Anya’s description living in the Oslo factory for the last six months or so, with no other signs of life there.
And we’re on our way there now.
“Ezra, let’s brief,” one of the group members calls to me from the back of the private jet.
“I’ve gotta go,” I tell Lidia.
“Call us the moment she’s safe. Make sure she’s safe, Ezra.”
I smile and nod, too terrified to get my hopes up that it might be Anya living in that warehouse, too terrified to let Lidia down and remind her not to hold her breath.
I wave goodbye to my son and close the laptop, pushing to stand, buttoning my navy jacket, and brushing the wrinkles down from my lapels. I step out from my seat and straighten my tie as I move toward the back of the plane where the group of almost twenty men gather around a table with maps and plans.
“We’ve got five SUVs waiting for us at the airport in Oslo,” the leader of the crew says. “The moment we land, we’re piling in and heading out.” He holds up a picture of my blue-eyed girl—she was younger in the photo, before she was stolen by Nikolai, but it looks like her all the same. “This is Anya Mikhailov. She is our lead mission today. She is a victim who needs to be recovered. Prioritize finding her. Take out any man who is armed. We don’t really know what to expect at this factory. Others we’ve raided have been used as a prison for the women they kidnap. They keep these victims here while they break them, preparing them to sell off, sometimes by the hundreds. Any victims found, we will recover and transport via plane to Stockholm for treatment. Local authorities in Oslo cannot be trusted. The four families pay them for their silence.”
“How do we transport them by the hundreds?” one of the men asks.
The leader clears his throat. “We’ve never actually recovered any of their human assets in the factories we’ve raided. Somehow, they always seem to get a tip and have them cleared out before we arrive. But our intel has shown us the deplorable conditions inside.” He lays out a few photos on the table showing women packed in a row of prison-like cells. I shouldn’t say women, because some of them are teenagers, children.
“What happens to these girls when the families clear out a factory on a tip?”
“They decommission them—their word, not ours. Normal people would call it murder. But that’s why this mission is crucial. The four families are anything but normal.” He holds up the picture of my girl again. “Anya Mikhailov is essential to our cause to end the four families once and for all. She has information that we need, and she needs to be recovered and protected. I want everyone clear-headed and focused on the mission. We land in fifteen, and I want silence on this flight until then. Take that time to focus, do what you need to do to switch from human to soldier, because that’s all you are once we land. Understood?”
There’s a murmur of agreement and the men disperse. I head back to my seat, drop my head, and press my eyes shut, wringing my sweaty palms together in front of me with my elbows on my knees. Behind my eyelids, there’s a flash of sapphire blue and Anya’s face comes brilliantly to the forefront of my mind.
I focus intently on her as my pulse kicks up and a steady rhythm of hope punches through my veins with each beat of my heart.
Hope. Hope. Hope.
If there is a God and he has any mercy at all, we’ll find her, alive and well, and I’ll have her safely in my arms before the sun sets on this day.
Chapter 26
Anya
January…new year, new me.
It’s been one year since I was left behind in the dark forest—one year since I danced across the line of death and somehow found my way back to the side of life.
It’s taken me nearly the full year to get back to the level of health I maintained as Nikolai’s slave while he owned me. Going through a pregnancy after the way Vigo ruined my body and my health had taken a toll on me.
By all accounts, I should be dead.
But there was one simple thing that kept me alive. It was the same thing that had kept me alive on three separate occasions since Ezra joined my captivity.
Hope.
Hope was something I’d long before lost, but Ezra brought it back to me. He brought hope back into my world and I fought for him because of it, fought for us.
Murphy and Stella had been the ones to find me that night in the forest with Kostya—unconscious, bleeding out, knocking on death’s door. But instead of letting me die or taking us back to the four families, they had rescued us both.
They saved us.
They snuck us away into the night and flew us back to the four families’ private airstrip via helicopter. Murphy pulled a cover-up for our escape out of thin air. He told the four families that we’d gotten away, that he and Stella were hunting us down, so they could carry on with business. He took off in one plane and headed straight for his Oslo factory that night. Stella and Kostya boarded a separate plane with me and took me to a local hospital in Moscow. I had a concussion, needed a blood transfusion, stitches where the baby tore me and for a gash in my side from the car accident.