“Ivy knows how to take care of herself,” Landon said. “The faster we find our suspect, the faster we can help her. Are those addresses on the paper still good?”
Hayes snorted. “Yeah, but these two have to know Thorn is onto them by now. They’re likely holed up somewhere that’ll make them hard to find.”
“Then let’s get moving,” Ivy said.
She appreciated how smoothly Landon had gotten Hayes off her back so she could focus on finding the shifter on her own. Now she just had to hope she could do it before Thorn’s goons found her first.
“Be careful out there,” Landon whispered, lightly running his fingers down her arm when Hayes wasn’t looking.
She nodded, reaching up to finger the engagement and wedding rings she kept on the necklace she wore underneath her blouse. It was just one of the ways she and Landon communicated their love for each other while working in an organization that forbid partners from dating, much less marrying.
“You guys be careful too,” she said. “Thorn probably knows by now that you tried to come for him, Hayes. He isn’t going to take that well.”
Hayes looked surprised. “You think he’d be ballsy enough to try to take out a cop?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Giving them a nod and another reminder to be careful, Ivy took the keys Landon held out and quickly hurried to the SUV, dialing John on the way. Now that they had a name, Adam would be able to find the shifter even if she’d gone into hiding. Ivy was sure of it.
* * *
Layla was surprisingly relaxed as she and Jayson walked slowly up the sidewalk toward the small, carefully maintained home in front of them. The place was a one-floor ranch house with flower boxes on either side of the porch and a beautifully painted exterior. She could easily picture this house sitting in the middle of almost any small town in America. That in itself reminded her once again that Donetsk used to be a normal place before all the politics, militias, and fighting had taken center stage.
She probably should have been more uptight than she was, considering they were walking unarmed into the home of a man who might help them find Anya or might turn them over to the militia for all the reward money that was being offered for them. But it was difficult to be tense after having multiple orgasms, even when the local militia was offering a hundred thousand Ukrainian hryvnia for information on the foreigners who had broken into the RSA building and vandalized the place. Fortunately, the only people who knew about their involvement in thevandalismat the militia headquarters were the prisoners they had helped escape, and Layla was pretty sure they weren’t going to say anything.
Three dark-haired men were waiting for them on the porch. They came down the steps as she and Jayson approached. Mikhail had told them that the former Donetsk police officer Victor Garin would have men there to search them for weapons before letting them inside.
“You’re friends of Mikhail?” the tallest of the three men asked.
“Yes,” Jayson said.
“He said you’d be unarmed, but you will understand if we want to see for ourselves.”
The man didn’t wait for an answer but simply nodded to his buddies, who quickly and expertly patted her and Jayson down for weapons. When the first man gave her and Jayson a nod, Jayson placed his big, warm hand on her back as they followed the men up the steps and into the house. She liked the feel of his hand there. It reminded her of how he’d held her waist when they’d made love a few hours ago and the fierce way he’d gripped her hips as he gave her more pleasure than she’d ever felt in her life. If someone had told her that she and Jayson would take their relationship to the next level in a half-demolished library in the middle of Donetsk, she would have said they were crazy. She’d been madly in love with him for so long and knowing that he felt the same about her meant more than she could have imagined.
Layla expected at least one of the men to follow them into the house, but they all stayed outside, leaving her and Jayson with Victor Garin. Layla would have pegged the man standing in front of the fireplace for a former soldier-turned-cop even if Mikhail hadn’t told them what Victor had done for a living. At least sixty years old, with more salt in his hair than pepper, he still stood like he was at attention, his muscular shoulders filling out the crisp button-down shirt he wore, his blue eyes sharp.
“I expected you to be older,” he said in heavily accented English. Giving them a nod, he gestured to the floral-upholstered couch and matching chairs. “Sit, please.”
She and Jayson did as he asked, taking a seat on the sofa. The inside of the home was as neat and quaint as the outside. There were lots of framed photographs of soldiers and police officers in uniform, as well as pictures of Victor with a pretty, dark-haired woman his age that Layla assumed was his wife. There was also a big Russian flag pinned up to the wall on one side of the fireplace and another flag for the Donetsk People’s Republic on the other.
Victor sat down in a wingback chair across the coffee table from them just as his wife came into the room with a tray filled with ceramic cups and a teapot. She set the tray on the table and poured tea into each of the cups, then looked at Layla and Jayson.
“Cream and sugar?” she asked.
Layla nodded. Beside her, Jayson did as well.
Sitting down in a matching chair beside Victor, the dark-haired woman fixed their tea in silence, handing their cups to them when she was done. Then she added sugar to one of the remaining cups and milk to the other, giving the sweetened one to her husband and taking the other for herself.
“Mikhail tells me that you two are American CIA,” Victor said. “Is this true?”
Jayson answered for both of them. “We’re from an organization very much like the CIA, but you’ve never heard of it. Very few people in the world have.”
The answer seemed to satisfy the former police officer because he moved to his next question. “Did you come here to spy on the DPR?”
“No,” Jayson said. “We came to rescue the American boy, Dylan. He followed his girlfriend here, and his father at the embassy in Kiev wanted us to bring him back. Quietly.”
“You have the boy,” Victor pointed out. “Why are you still here?”
