“That’s not comforting,” Ella snapped.
“It should be,” he countered. “It means he’ll keep her safe until we can get to her.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror, meeting his eyes. “And how exactly do we get to her? Storm a private airfield against armed guards?”
“If necessary,” he said.
For once, we were in complete agreement.
Twenty minutes later, we pulled off the main road onto a service track that Mia had directed us to. Through the trees, I could see the lights of the airstrip—and the sleek private jet already taxing down the runway.
Chapter 23
Ella
“No!” I screamed, watching helplessly as the jet began racing down the runway. My knees felt like they were going to buckle beneath me as the reality hit—they had my daughter. My baby. “Nora!”
I took off running, futilely attempting to stop the plane. Not even thirty feet, and Jake caught me around the waist. I was lifted off the ground and turned towards him. His strong arms wrapped around me as I sobbed uncontrollably. The jet rose into the air, its lights disappearing into the night sky, taking my heart with it.
“Ella, listen to me,” Jake said urgently. I looked at him; his eyes were fierce with determination. “I put a tracker in Nora’s boot yesterday. The one with the loose insole, she’s always complaining about, I stuck it under it. We can follow them.”
I stared at him, barely comprehending his words through my panic. “A tracker? You—”
“After Mikhail warned us about his father, I took precautions,” Jake explained, wiping tears from my cheeks with his thumbs. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you more.”
Hope flickered within me, fragile but alive. “We can find her?”
“We will find her,” Jake promised, setting me back on my feet.
Mikhail approached, his face a mask of cold fury. “We need to move. Now. My father won’t expect us to follow so quickly.”
The drive back to the ranch was a blur. I sat rigid in the passenger seat, staring at the tablet in my lap where a small red dot pulsed steadily—Nora, flying away from me with every passing second.
“They’re heading east,” Kane noted from the backseat, looking over my shoulder. “Not north toward Russia.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, my voice hoarse from crying. “Why wouldn’t he take her straight to Moscow?”
Mikhail’s jaw tightened. “Because he’s not stupid. He knows we’d alert authorities and have the flight tracked. He’ll take a more circuitous route.”
Back at the ranch, we gathered in Jake’s office, the tension thick enough to cut with a knife. Rory had set up a larger monitor displaying the tracker’s signal, which was now moving steadily across a mapof Canada.
“Toronto,” Declan said, studying the trajectory. “They’re heading towards Toronto.”
Mikhail’s phone buzzed, and he stepped away to answer it. When he returned, his expression had shifted.
“That was my contact in Moscow,” he said flatly, eyes boring into the center of the table. “My father isn’t in the city. He’s gone to ground, holed up at his private mansion outside Milton, Ontario. If the tracker is to be believed, that’s where they’re taking Nora now. My contact says there’s a blizzard building in the region—whiteout conditions as of this morning. Commercial flights are being grounded, and roads are impassable in places. He’s not stupid. He knows the storm buys him time, and he can wait it out in relative comfort while the rest of us are scrambling.”
The silence in the room was immediate and total. I could almost feel the collective calculation, the way each of us cycled through the implications of this new information. Outside, the wind had picked up, rattling the windowpanes as if to punctuate Mikhail’s words. The idea of Nora, my tiny, resourceful, stubborn daughter, trapped in some elaborate estate in the middle of a Canadian whiteout, was almost too much to process. I pressed my palms flat to the desk and tried to center myself, but the mental images kept coming, of her alone,afraid, maybe cold, maybe hungry, surrounded by strangers who saw her as nothing more than a pawn.
Jake spoke first, his voice brittle with urgency. “How many men does he have at the mansion?”
Mikhail answered immediately, as if he’d already tallied the numbers. “Eight on staff, all ex-military. The estate is walled and monitored. He’s had the security system overhauled twice in the past year. I doubt they’re expecting a direct assault, but there’s a panic room, and he’s certainly paranoid enough to use it if he feels threatened.”
Declan leaned forward, gesturing to the monitor, which was still pulsing with the red dot. “If they’re hunkered down in the storm, that’s our chance. We can’t beat them there, but with the storm, we could at least get onto the grounds unseen; we would have the element of surprise.”
“We don’t have vehicles equipped for this,” Rory muttered. “Not for those roads—not in this weather.”
Jake looked at me, and I realized he was waiting for my input. It struck me, then, that this was no longer just his operation, or Mikhail’s vendetta, or even a security nightmare for Declan and his team. It was, as always, my responsibility. Nora was my daughter, and the time for panic had long since passed.
