“She didn’t care, did she?” Dex asks knowingly. “You don’t even need to answer. I know she wouldn’t care. Only that you didn’t tell her.” His lack of response tells us Dex is right. I’m not surprised, Wren is too forgiving, but I couldn’t say I wasn’t grateful for the way she looked beyond our pasts and instead judged us on who we are today.
I watch silently as Elias starts to lay fresh gauze over her wounds. “Won’t that just get stuck in there, too?” Dex asks worriedly.
“Hopefully not. We need to keep it clean. I’ve put some antiseptic cream on there to help clean the wounds. Tomorrow,if they don’t look infected, we can let them breathe a little.”
Elias climbs off the bed and gestures for Jagger to lie down beside her. I can tell it’s painful when he peels his shirt off and blood starts to drip down his back.
I can’t believe he’s Ivan’s son. They have the same eyes, but the similarities end there. I never would have guessed the connection. I understood why he didn’t tell us, and by the state of him, it’s clear he wasn’t secretly working with Ivan this whole time.
Jagger lies on his stomach then motions for something to write with, and I unlock my phone, open the note app, and slide it into his hand. He types one-handed and gives it back to me.
“He wants us to tell him how we got here.”
“It’s a bit of a long story,” Pete begins, “but it looks like we have some time. I guess we should start at the beginning. When you and Wren were taken, we were surrounded by the feds. Elias had been shot in the arm, and the rest of us were forced to the ground and cuffed. That’s when he started to make a deal.”
Elias picks up the story from there. “I had previously worked with the agent that was in charge of the scene, Simmons. I told him if he let us all go, we’d get rid of Ivan and get a list of all his contacts.”
“We were carted off to a jail cell at the field office while Elias was taken to the hospital,” Pete explains. “We were there a few days when Elias came in and said he’d made a deal, that we were free to go. We went back to the safe house so we could track Wren?—”
“Elias put a tracker in the necklace he gave her,” I explain before letting Pete continue.
“Right, so we saw the signal was in Russia. Elias got the feds to fly us there in their jet, then it was just a matter of planning your rescue.”
“You were a few steps ahead of us,” Elias explains. “Sly and I had just reached your room when you must have gone out the window. The tracker showed you in the yard, so we ran back to where the others were waiting by the truck and decided to just drive around back to get you, following Wren’s tracker to get there.”
“I can’t believe you put a tracker on me,” Wren says, suddenly sounding wide awake.
“Wren!” Pete says, in alarm, as he drops to his knees at her side, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “Are you okay? How do you feel?”
“A little dizzy, and my back hurts a lot, but I’m okay.”
He holds her hand tightly and nods. “I’m sorry, angel. Do you know why you passed out?”
“I think I just got overwhelmed.”
“It has been a busy day for you,” I tell her, my eyes trailing over her back. “A busy few days, I think.”
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Elias asks as he finishes up with Jagger’s back.
“No, I don’t think so. I was actually left alone most of the time. I only saw Jagger for the first time yesterday when Ivan started to try and play us against each other.”
“What do you mean?” Elias asks as he rounds the bed to stand behind Pete so he can see her face.
“Do you know what happened to Jagger? With his parents?” she asks.
“We know most of it,” Pete confirms.
“Well, I think Ivan wanted Jagger to feel the same pain he did when Jagger’s mom left him. He told me Jagger was hisson, hoping that would make me angry, and when that didn’t work, he tried other tactics, like only providing one meal and making me choose who gets it.”
Dex snorts in annoyed amusement. “Something like that would never work on you two.”
“On any of us,” I add.
“Ivan doesn’t understand what love is,” Wren explains. “I don’t know how he treated Jagger’s mom, but I don’t blame her for leaving him. He’s a psycho, and for all we know, she never wanted to be with him.”
I shiver, understanding what that might have meant, that she was raped.
“Jagger, do you know?” Pete asks, and Jagger shakes his head no.
