Once again, Lorie jumped up, grabbing her chest and breathing deeply. “I need to go home. I can’t handle this.”
“Did you enter the address?” I asked.
Lorie nodded and handed my phone back to me. “Yes.”
“Did she say anything abouthowI would get to her?” I asked.
“She’s going to escape,” Lorie said, and I didn’t like the sound of that. That seemed dangerous and risky. “There’s a wooded area behind their home and she’s going to run in there. Eventually, the woods lead to an interstate, she’s going to try and make it to that interstate and meet you there.”
I looked down at the pin on my phone where the brothers’ estate was, and the interstate seemed a little far from it. Was she really going to be able to get all the way out of their house and to the interstate without them noticing? “Okay.”
“She wanted me to give you this number too.” Her hands shook as she reached over me and navigated on my phone to the phone book. “It’s Anton’s number, but she has his phone. She says if there’s an emergency, she’ll call you on that number, but do not call her, just in case.”
This whole plan left me feeling uneasy, but I had to trust that Avion knew what she was doing. She was taking back her freedom and had to have risked a lot to get the message to me. The least I could do was be there for her when she made her escape.
“Thank you, Lorie,” I said, then I looked up at Punk and Kelly. “Get her home and then come back here. I need you two here in case anything happens.”
Punk cracked his knuckles with a smile on his face. “I really hope I get to wreck some shit.”
I snapped my fingers in his face. “I need you to focus. My place was already raided once today. If anyone other than you two or Milli tries to get in this place, you have my permission to kill them.” Lorie threw her hands to her face and her eyes went wide with fear. “And for god’s sake, get her home. She’s too squeamish for this.”
“What are you going to do?” Kelly asked. “You’re going to the Narzand brothers’ estate alone? Take some backup at least.”
“No!” Lorie yelped, then recoiled. “Sorry. That was the other thing Avion said. She told me to tell you that you should come alone. They have the property under complete surveillance and too many cars would raise suspicion.”
“That sounds like a trap,” Punk said.
“It’s not, I swear,” Lorie said. “She’s really scared. She just wants you to come and get her.”
Given that I already half felt like the Narzand brothers were trying to smoke me out, to begin with, if it was a trap, I didn’t care. I had an actual location that I could go to to get Avion and I wasn’t going to turn back now. I started for the door and then hesitated just as I was about to get to it and turned around and looked at Kelly.
“Contact Milli,” I said.
She nodded. “And say what?”
“Tell him to meet me back here,” I replied. “Do not give him the information where I’m going. I’ll do this myself.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she seemed to agree, nonetheless. “Okay. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” I said, before turning and leaving the room.
I was going to need it.
26
AVION
I was sitting in the middle of the bed in the room Anton and Vincent had provided me with, waiting for a word from Lorie that she had gotten in contact with Gio. For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to take off into the woods until I knew for a fact that he would be waiting for me on the other side, but every additional minute I spent in my brothers’ presence, I became more and more worried that I was going to get hurt.
I’d noticed that they were doing passes by my room once every hour or so. I kept the light off in my room so that I could see when their footsteps were blocking out the light coming from the hall outside. Occasionally, they would stop in front of the door, and I imagined they were listening for something, and then they would carry on. It seemed a little too good to be true that Anton would just leave me his phone, but the reality of the situation occurred to me very quickly.
He left me with his phone to try and entrap me.
Any fear that this wasn’t the case became clear when he poked his head into my bedroom a couple of hours after he left me with his phone and told me that if I wanted to hang onto it for the night, I could. He was trying to lure me into a false sense of security to see if I slipped up and tried to contact someone.
Little did he know, I was already one step ahead.
After realizing that my brothers were keeping a very close eye on me, I knew I was going to have to time my escape carefully. I had to leaveimmediatelyafter one of their passes so that I had the entire time between when they last checked on me and when they would come to check on me again, in order to escape.
