The red dot for her phone shows it’s still in her room. The one in the tracker is…
Oh, god-damnit.
She’s in the air.
Taking the stairs two at a time, I grab her phone from her room. She didn’t just up and leave for Cartagena, there must be something she didn’t tell me. Shoving it in my bag, I take the back stairs leading out to the garage. There’s no way Gregor will let me go after her without clearance from Lachlan. My husband needs to focus on Petrov, I’m not going to let Gregor or Elana’s rashness distract him.
Sliding behind the wheel of one of our multiple black SUVs, I call Zed as I head out the back gates.He’s meeting with an important client in British Columbia.
“Did Elana talk to you about the Alonso deal?” I blurt the minute he picks up.
“No, what are you talking about?” he says, concern sharpening his voice.
“She left a note, saying that it was her turn to do what was right for the family. I tracked her pendant, she’s in flight, heading south.”
“This is not fucking happening,” he groans. “I should have seen it. She’s been acting so weird recently. I’ll duck out of these meetings. Will you call Captain Kirkland, and tell him to get my jet prepped?”
“I will,” I promise, “I’m taking the Gulfstream from here. I already texted Monroe to meet me with a team of ten men at the airstrip. You’re in Vancouver, I’m six hours closer. Track my phone, and I’ll call you the minute I know where she is. Shit… Zed.” Dread clogs my throat. “If he’s got her and he gets her into the Alonso compound, we don’t have an army big enough to bring her back.”
I can hear something clattering on his side of the call and some urgent murmuring to his assistant. “Don’t think that way. If she went willingly, I’m putting my money on Juan manipulating her, not his father. Juan’s an arrogant little prick. We might be able to work with that.”
“In her note, she said ‘Juan.’ Not Juan Alonso or the Alonso Cartel, but Juan. Like she knows him. Like…” My headache’s back. “Like they’ve been talking.”
“If she’s been talking to that manipulative fuck and hiding it from us…” Zed’s furious.
“I’m going through her phone as soon as I’m in the air,” I say, “even if she deleted the messages I can retrieve them.”
“Keep me posted, and be safe. Promise me you won’t charge in and try to save the day without me.”
“Zed-”
“Promise me!”
“I won’t,” I lie.
I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.
***
Cartagena…
I’ve been to Columbia before, attending business meetings with my father. At the time, we had the ‘hospitality’ of one of the bigger cartels, and no one touched us. Still, Dad traveled with at least ten bodyguards wherever he went, so I’m doing the same.
The security men and women are spread out around the Gulfstream, sharpening knives, checking weapons, sleeping, and in the case of four of my men, playing poker and swearing for the last four hours. I’m about to force them to switch to Solitaire just to shut them up.
“What else have you learned from the messages on her phone, ma’am?”
Monroe is enormously tall - almost as big as Lachlan - with a quiet, deceptively mild voice. However, I’ve seen him shoot a man in the head three times with no change of expression, so I’m feeling confident about our chances of moving around safely with him leading the team. But to storm the Alonso Cartelcompound? I don’t think a nuclear strike would be enough. He’s sitting across from me in a secluded bank of seats, the table in front of us littered with laptops and reports on the cartel.
“They’ve been messaging back and forth for at least two weeks,” I say, rapidly scrolling through her recovered texts. “He kept pressuring her by telling her she would be saving our lives if she came to him. The satanic little turd was lurking on a yacht out in the harbor.”
My phone next to me on the leather seat buzzes angrily.
“Do you need to get that?” Monroe asks politely.
I can see from the screen that it’s Gregor again. “I’ll text him when we land.”
“With all due respect,” he says gently, “it’s not like he can stop you now. The sooner Mr. MacTavish knows about the crisis, the less likely he will be to shoot me when he catches up with us.”
