Since when did Aidan get so tactical? I wasn’t sure I liked it, but he was right about how important the intel could be. If there was something going on at Innisfree, we needed to know. I didn’t like the idea of taking him out there with me, but I wasn’t going to leave him alone in the car or back at the motel, either. And at least we were both in sneakers and dark clothes. “Okay,” I muttered. “But we go slow, you don’t make a noise, and when I say run, yourun.”
Aidan smiled. “Oh, I will.”
* * *
We foundthe campgrounds and parked, and checked the display map of the site to get our bearings. There were warnings not to cross a boundary out past the lake—Private Propertysaid the notation. Innisfree wasn’t marked by name, but that had to be it.
We found the track and started down it.
Aidan was quiet as a mouse the whole way. I wondered if he was scared, but then I remembered what I’d heard when I was eavesdropping the other night. That Aidan O’Leary had put himself between Mr. D and Sam Fuscone’s gun without hesitation. He’d helped save Frank D’Amato that day, too, and he’d never said a peep about what had happened to Fuscone.
Aidan might have been sheltered in his life, but he was no coward. I needed to remember that. Brave people did dumb things. Much better to be scared and well-trained, like me.
Once we’d walked another ten minutes, we saw lights among the trees. These were no tiny flashlights, either, but huge spotlights, some of them pointing far into the woods and onto the path. It was time to move into the trees, I decided, and Aidan followed without hesitation. We had to move slower, both to help quiet the noise we made and to make sure our path was clear. But little by little, we crept closer to the fence that separated out the Donovan estate grounds.
We both heard someone coming at the same time, and froze together behind a large tree. I peeked around the tree when the footsteps went past. Inside the fence was a guard, dressed all in black and with a balaclava, heavily armed like the guards out the front.
Whatever was going on at Innisfree, it didn’t look like a renovation project.
No. Seemed to me that Tara Donovan had been restocking her own private army.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Aidan
As soon as I saw the armed guard I began to realize how foolish my idea had been. I’d known it at the time, but desperation and a desire to deal with the situation once and for all had overtaken my caution. Now, looking at a man with a semi-automatic weapon in his hands, I began to rethink my position.
Teo and I stayed silent as he passed by, and then I took Teo’s hand and motioned away with my head. I’d made him come out here, but now I just wanted to get away. He stared at me for a moment, then shook his head grimly. He pointed to me and then the ground, then to himself and held up five fingers.
Then he slipped away from me into the night, closer to the fence.Give me five, I assumed he’d meant. I put my hands over my mouth to make sure I didn’t call out to him, even though every instinct I had was to get him away, get him to safety. But I had to trust Teo. He knew what he was doing.
Didn’t he?
I listened hard, trying to figure out where Teo might be, and heard nothing but crickets—literal crickets. But then the hard silence was shattered with a crackle of feedback and a distorted voice. I grabbed the tree as adrenaline surged through me, and reminded myself to think rationally.
Faintly I heard an answering voice. “…out at the perimeter, no trouble.” I peeked out from behind my tree again, and caught sight of another guard—or maybe the same one from before—wandering out of the gloom. That was okay, I told myself. I just had to stay where I was and he’d stroll right by along the fence, like he had before. But with a cold ripple from my scalp to my toes, I realized that this guard wasn’t inside the fence line like the last one had been.
He was on the outside, and he was heading straight for me.
I moved around the tree, trying to hide myself more fully, and stepped right on a pile of leaves. Their crackling underfoot sounded as loud as fireworks in the night, and the guard immediately stopped.
I heard a click, mechanical and immediate, and I could guess what it was: the safety coming off an assault rifle. But before I could even think what to do next, the guard let out a grunt, and I heard a thudding noise.
“Here—” a voice began to shout, but it cut off with a choking sound.
I swung around the tree and saw a black shadow sitting on top of a struggling body. As I watched, the struggles ceased.
A new fear sprang up in me. “Don’t kill him!” I hissed.
The black shadow moved, shifted, stood. It was Teo, his face hard and resolute in reflected light from one of the spotlights. I heard the figure on the ground, the guard, give a few choking, heaving breaths. The same crackling feedback I’d heard just moments ago sounded again, the walkie talkie a few yards away from both of them.
“What’s going on out there?”
Teo leaned over to pick up the rifle and then the walkie talkie, which he turned off and threw far into the woods. The guard was still coughing and spluttering. Teo leaned over him and patted him down, then hauled him up.
“Don’t kill him,” I said again weakly, but Teo was already busy securing him to a nearby tree with his own zip ties, and gagging him with his balaclava, keeping that in place with another zip tie.
“They’ll find him when they come looking,” I whispered.
