Liam kills the engine of the SUV as we pull up in the side street opposite Alexei Ivanov’s mansion in Connecticut. From the outside, it looks like a fortress. But thanks to Shane’s contacts in the State department, we’ve managed to get our hands on a copy of the original blueprints of the property. Blueprints that reveal the hidden passageways that were made when the house was first built back in the 1920s.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t just blow the gates off and fight our way through there?” Mikey asks as he peers out of the window into the darkness.
“No,” Shane replies with a look of warning at our younger brother. “We need to do this with as minimum fuss and disruption as possible.”
“But, you don’t where she is. Or if she’s even in there?” Mikey sighs. He’s annoyed that he has to wait in the car and can’t get in on the action.
“Which is exactly why we don’t need to be drawing any attention to ourselves,” Shane snaps. “If she’s not there…” he doesn’t finish the sentence and I know it’s because he can’t bear to. He is as desperate to get Jessie back as we are, and although I imagine some of his motives are the same as ours, I recognize that he also wants revenge. He has a murderous look in his eyes that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“So, we wait here while you two break in, find Jessie, knock her out and bring her back to the car through one of the secret passageways?” Liam asks, doing what he does best and trying to diffuse the growing tension in the car.
“Do we really have to knock her out?” I groan.
“Yes!” Shane snarls. “How else are we going to get her out of there quietly? She went there willingly, remember? I doubt she’s going to be thrilled to see us. It’s not like we’re putting her in a chokehold. A quick scratch and she’ll fall asleep in your arms,” he says with a roll of his eyes.
“If we hear shots fired, we’re coming in there,” Mikey grumbles.
“Fair enough,” Shane nods his agreement.
“Let’s fucking do this then,” I say as I open the door of the car. Despite everything, I am eager to get in there. I want to see her face. I want to bring our girl home, whether she wants to come with us or not.
Shane climbs out behind me and hands me a gun with a silencer on the end, and I tuck it into the back of my jeans. We don’t plan on using shooters, but it’s better to be prepared, because we have no idea what we’ll be facing once we get inside.
As we pull up the hoods of our black sweatshirts, we take a quick glance around us before jogging across the road to the small side gate that seems to double as the service entrance. It’s always manned by two armed guards. Shane and I approach from the East, hoping to appear like two guys out for an evening jog. The guards are talking quietly and smoking cigarettes, but they straighten up as we approach.
We jog right on up, as though we’re going to breeze past, and catch them both by surprise. I grab the bigger one, placing my hands around his neck and snapping it with ease. Shane does the same to his counterpart, and the two men fall to the floor within a few seconds of each other. I hoist one of them up, and rest his right thumb against the electronic keypad, and the metal gate clicks open. It’s lazy security to use the thumb of your dominant hand on a fingerprint keypad system. It’s the one that people always assume you’ll use, and most people do.
“Let’s get these two off the street,” Shane says, and we drag their lifeless bodies through the entrance, dumping them just inside the walls as we close the gate behind us. I reach into my pocket and take out my knife. Reaching down, I cut off the thumb of the guy who just kindly opened the gate for us. It’s a surgeon’s blade, and it slices easily through the bone and cartilage. I wipe the blood on my sweatshirt and pop his thumb into the pocket before handing the knife to Shane. “You may as well take his, too. In case we get split up?” I nod to the other dead man a few feet away.
“He was right-handed, wasn’t he?” Shane asks as he holds the blade against the dead man’s hand.
I nod and watch as my brother slices through his thumb and pockets it before we make our way towards the house. Another guard is patrolling just a few meters in front of us. Shane gives a low whistle, making him look in his direction and temporarily distracting him while I sneak up behind him and snap his neck, gently lowering him to the floor before pulling him into the nearby bushes. Snapping necks is my favorite way to kill someone. It’s so quick and clean. It’s a skill I learned at a very young age and one that I have continued to perfect ever since.
Once we’re inside the house, we make our way upstairs and walk along the dim hallway, past the bedrooms, sure that Jessie must be in one of them. But there are at least six doors on this floor.
“You start at this end, and I’ll start at the other,” Shane whispers, and I nod my agreement. He walks to the other end of the hallway while I try the first door. The handle turns quietly, and I peer inside the dark room. It’s a bedroom, but it doesn’t appear to be occupied. I look up as Shane does the same at the opposite end of the corridor before looking at me and shaking his head.
Two down. Four to go.
I move along to the next room and grab hold of the handle, and I’m just about to turn it when it moves in my hand.
Shit!
I step back into the shadows as the door swings open, ready to go for my gun if I need to. Then she walks out of the bedroom and I swear my heart stops beating in my chest. She looks like Jessie, but not like her. Like maybe she’s sleepwalking or something. Her beautiful red hair is tied up in a messy ponytail and she wears a nightdress which has a food stain on the front.
I step towards her and her eyes dart to the shadows where I’m standing. “Jessie,” I whisper, unable to stop myself from reaching out to her. I’m vaguely aware of Shane making his way towards us. At first, she seems to stare right through me. But then I see the flicker of recognition in her eyes and her face suddenly becomes more animated.
“Con-” she starts to say my name before she falls backwards into Shane’s arms and I realize he’s injected the sedative into her neck.
“Let’s get her out of here before someone notices us,” Shane hisses.
I stand frozen to the spot as I stare at her, unconscious in his arms. There was something definitely not right about her.
“Conor!” Shane hisses through clenched teeth, snapping me from my momentary trance.
“We need to make sure there’s no-one in that room waiting for her to come back in,” I warn him.
He closes his eyes, as though the thought of someone being in there, in her bed with her soft warm body pressed up against them, pains him. I know that it fucking hurts me. I realize that if I look inside that room and see anyone in there, I will shoot him in the head. I don’t give a fuck if we’re supposed to be keeping this low key.
“Go on,” he eventually replies with a flick of his head towards the door.
I walk closer to the room she has just walked out of. My heart is hammering in my chest now and the blood pounds against my eardrums. I open the door wider. Reaching inside, I flick on the light switch. The bed is empty. Rumpled covers confirm she was sleeping there, but she was alone. I sigh deeply and lean my forehead against the door frame. “It’s clear. Let’s go,” I whisper as I turn around. “You want me to take her?” I offer.
“No, she hardly weighs anything,” Shane replies as he hoists her up into his arms. I lift her arm and drape it around his neck, letting my hand linger on the skin of her wrist just a little longer than necessary. She’s cold to the touch, despite this house being warm. Something in my gut tells me there is something definitely not right here. That woman I just saw was definitely Jessie, but not the Jessie I’ve come to know.
Despite the security in Alexei’s fortress, Shane and I manage to make it out through one of the tunnels leading from the cellar without any further interference. We run over to the SUV as Mikey climbs out and opens the door to the back seat.
“She okay?” he asks as we approach.
“She’s fine,” Shane replies.
I jump in first, and Shane places Jessie on the seat beside me. I pull her against me until he climbs in and Mikey runs back around to the front of the car. I lay Jessie’s head on my lap as Shane pulls her feet onto his.
“Let’s get moving,” he barks to Liam, who puts the car into gear and pulls away from the curbside.
As I look at her, my heart feels like it constricts in my chest. I brush the hair back from her face. She looks so fucking peaceful lying here, but I know that when she wakes up, there will be no peace for her. Not for a while.
Whatever reason she had for leaving us, I doubt it’s drastically changed in the space of four days. Shane is determined to make her talk, and I have no idea how he intends to do that, but I do know that he’s had the dingy cell in the basement prepared for her. It’s as small as a prison cell, but less comfortable. No natural light. A tiny metal bed screwed to the floor with a thin, bare mattress and a tiny stainless steel toilet in the corner.
We’ve kept plenty of people prisoner there before, but none that have ever got under our skin like this pint-sized little redhead lying on my lap.
So many emotions flood my senses that I don’t know what I’m feeling. Relief at having her back with me. Fear of what she might tell us, or of what lengths we might go to make her talk. Anger that she left us. Jealousy that she might be in love with that man she left with, or that she might be loyal to him in a way that she never was to us. And hope that somehow, she has a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything, that will piece my shattered heart back together.
I curl my fingers around her hair. Damn, Jessie! How the hell are we all going to get out of this in one piece?
