“Only a sedative. Tomorrow is a big day for all of us, Domina,” he says. “We must be well rested to do our parts. I’m told you will feel the effects in a few minutes, so I suggest you get comfortable.”
The door slams shut, and I throw the bottle at it with a scream. I was already dizzy, and my heart races, thudding so hard, I wonder if I will pass out from that alone.
It’s hard to keep my eyes open. Hard to think. What did Leo say to me? Did I tell him I love him? I wanted to.
Lying on my side, I try to picture him. His face as he slept. His hand on mine. His lopsided smile.
I hope I see him again. I hope…
CHAPTER THIRTY
Leo
A tiny mothclings to the ceiling, opening and closing its wings like it’s breathing. Do moths have lungs? Do they breathe? Why don’t I know this?
With a groan, I pull Domina’s pillow closer to my chest and roll onto my side. The clock on my phone reads 4:03 a.m., and I’ve only slept in short, fifteen or twenty minute bursts since yesterday morning.
We spent three hours with West on a secure video call going over dozens of ways the plan could go pear-shaped. The former SEAL practically told us we were fools for evenattemptingto do this on our own. Until we shared our theory that my former SSO—a man who still supervises every CIA officer in Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru—is a piece of shit traitor working for Muñoz.
Before Austin and Trevor ordered me to get some shuteye, we took bets on whether Sampson would ignore orders and show up anyway.
If only I could sleep. I pull my phone off the charger and bring up the second video of Domina that showed up a little after midnight.
She looks so scared sitting in that plain, wooden chair, Pinzon’s hands on her shoulders, tears in her eyes.
My own voice spills from the speaker. “The night we met…what did I tell her to hang on her chair?”
“Bells,” she says, so quietly, I have to strain to hear. After a beat, she stares directly at the camera. “You told me to put bells on my chair, and it made me feel safe.Youmade me feel safe, Leo.”
Safe, my ass. I couldn’t protect her. I was holding her fucking hand when she was ripped away from me.
I watch it another six times, wishing I could talk to her for even a minute. I need her to know I love her, but there’s no way in hell I’ll pass that information along to the bastards who took her. And even iftodaydoesn’tend with Manuel Cortez’s dead body all over the news, it would take a fucking miracle for me to survive long enough to have Domina in my arms again.
No amount of tossing and turning is going to bring me peace, so I shuffle back out to the living room.
Austin’s stretched out on the sofa, his arm flung over his eyes while Trevor uses Street View to “drive” all around the church for the hundredth time.
“Take the bed,” I say, dropping into the chair next to him. “I’m not sleeping anyway.”
“If we can’t get a lock on Domina’s location, you’re the one who has to get Cortez into Kevlar, fit him with a squib pack,andshoot him in the space of thirty seconds.” Trev sits back and looks me up and down. “And then run before his security detail puts a bullet in your brain.”
“If I have to do all of that, we’re fucked and you know it.”
His denial rings hollow, and I pull up the new app Zephyr sent to my phone. “You think this thing is going to work?”
“If Zephyr says it’s solid, then it’s solid. The whole team has been working on a way to speed up traces for a year.”
The whole team.
Every few hours, another person logged into the ZEO app and introduced themselves to me. West’s wife Cam, who runs one of the leading companies in business security systems, explained how Muñoz’s team could hack into the Presidential Palace’s security feeds to spy on Garcia and Cortez.
Royce—the guy who designed the GPS trackers—walked Austin through the operation of the state-of-the-art drones he and Trev brought with them. The head of Hidden Agenda K&R, Ryker McCabe, called in a shit ton of favors to get three extra-large Palermo’s pizzas delivered a little after 7:00 p.m. Inside the boxes? Two hundred feet of det cord, jammers that won’t touchourcomms units but should disable all other radio and cell signals in a quarter-mile radius, and fifty thousand dollars in cash. Along with enough pizza for ten people.
“Dax called,” Trev says on a yawn. “He got in touch with his contacts.”
“Can they do it?” Trevor’s boss lost his sight at the hands of the Taliban, but in addition to running a private security firm in Boston, he’s spent the last seven years building a network of the most influential—and deadly—military vets around the world.
Frowning, Trevor laces his fingers together over his head and stretches from side to side until his back pops. “If you’d asked me that eleven months ago, I’d have said no way in hell. But then Dax and Ry—and you—broke me out of La Crypta. I should be dead. Not coming up on a year with the woman I’ve loved since I was a teenager.”
