Audrey
The little blinking dots moved farther and farther apart, and it took all my restraint not to cry. The goodbye with my son remained on repeat like I kept hitting the same note on the piano over and over again.
“They’re on the move,” Seraphina told me, sitting in the front seat next to Ryder as the three of us drove down the icy, snowy roads in Ryder’s rental truck.
Chase’s little blinking light was no longer stationary. That meant he was now on the snowmobile with Trevor, making his escape.
There went my already-in-overdrive heartbeat, soaring at an even more dangerous speed. “I see,” I whispered, finally ripping my gaze from the disposable phone.
“Don’t leave me, Mommy!” Chase’s cries before Trevor had to pull him off me so I could get into the truck haunted me all over again, and I shut my eyes and rested my head against the side window.
“We’re coming up on that turn now,” Ryder said a few minutes later, ushering in a new wave of panic.
“What’d Alex nickname this turn?” Seraphina’s soft, easy voice was comforting. If she didn’t seem terrified, maybe I didn’t need to be?
Eyes open again, I focused on Chase’s dot like it was a heart rate monitor. Every blink was a beat of my own, remaining alive as long as he was safe.
“Something like ‘Where Old Souls Go to Die,’” Ryder said as he slowed down, and I twisted back to see Reed, driving my SUV behind us, do the same.
“So, he’s going to send his rental off the cliff, and with it, the burner phone that text came from.” I repeated what they’d told me earlier, needing to digest that idea all over again. “And you said you, um, mirrored that phone so if contact is made again, we’ll still get the message?”
“Exactly. We’re just trying to burn our trail and send whoever’s keeping tabs on us in the wrong direction for now.” Ryder briefly caught my eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Because they’re not literally driving behind us, but they did tag that phone and ...” I let my words drift just as the truck did a little side slide, too, sending my stomach along with the movement.
Ryder easily corrected the steering. “Presumably, yeah. They’ll expect we’ll try and ditch them, and that we might be successful, which is why you received that text as well. Scare you into thinking that, to protect Chase, you have to help whether you want to or not.”
“Alex is done rigging everything now; then he’ll set the car to coast over the cliff to buy us a little time to get to the airport,” Seraphina said, still studying an iPad. “The snow helps, but this is just an extra decoy.”
Alex had left ahead of us, bravely leading the way to create a diversion.
“And Beau’s sending deputies for those bodies and the one you kept alive to keep questioning him, yes?” I asked despite knowing the answer. I had to stop doing that, but it made me feel better to hear their confirmations.
“Yeah, and hopefully we’ll get a hit on their identities by the time you all make it to Wyatt Pierson’s cabin in Boulder,” Seraphina replied as the road narrowed into a winding bend flanked by snowbanks. Icould see the drop-off looming ahead since the snow had stopped falling a few minutes ago.
Ryder slowed the rental truck to a crawl, then pulled off to the side and cut the engine.
I turned around to see Reed parking behind us.
“It’s time?” I asked Ryder, and at his nod, I followed up with, “What if someone goes off that cliff because we took out the guardrail?”
“Natasha made a call to have two snowplows come block off access to this road from both sides to prevent civilians from getting into an accident.” He twisted in his seat to study me, his 9mm resting on his lap as if it were an extended limb. “The plow drivers will clear out, so if the assholes show up to follow the trail, no one’s here to get hurt.”
Good.I couldn’t live with anything happening to an innocent person because of me. “Will the bad guys really bite and believe we went over that cliff?”
“Probably not. But we’ll have the only way on and off this mountain blocked, and it’ll be obvious a car did go off the cliff, right along with their tracker,” he replied. “All of this is to buy us time to get to the airport to switch vehicles.”
Misdirection. An illusion. A decoy to get my son and us to safety.I needed to have faith, but gosh, I was still lacking in that department right now, and I hated myself for that.
Ryder faced forward as a call came over the dash. He placed it on speakerphone.
“Hey, Natasha here, patching in from CIA aerial. No thermal pings from your route yet. You’re clear. All of you.”
I let the comfort of those last three words sink in, and checked Chase’s blinking dot again—still on the move, which was a good sign.
“We watched the vehicle go over the ridge. We’re going to jam all external frequencies in a ten-mile radius after this call and induce a short power outage on the grid. We’ll blame the snowstorm that rolled through your area. But that means you’ll temporarily lose all signals as well,” she went on.
I vaguely remembered meeting Gray’s sister at some point in the past after he had married Trevor’s cousin, but we hadn’t had a chance to really speak too much. Thank God she worked for the CIA and her father was who he was, though.
