"For two things," he says finally. "First, we get a drone up. Kir's working it. We need eyes on that lodge before we move on it. How many men, where they are, where they're holding Matvei."
"And second?"
"Second," Lukas says, "we put people on the road between the camp and the lodge. When Reznik's men transport Afon, we hit them on the move. It's the only stretch where they're exposed."
I look down at the map.
And something clicks into place. The same kind of click I used to feel in a courtroom, when I'd been staring at a problem for hours and suddenly the shape of it would just appear, whole and obvious, like it had been there the whole time.
"That's too late," I say.
Lukas's eyebrow goes up. "Excuse me?"
"If you wait until they're moving him, that's too late. He's already unarmed and surrounded." I press my finger on the camp. "You hit them on the road, fine, you maybe get Afon, you maybe get Matvei. But Reznik's not on the road—he'll be waiting at the lodge. And the second the road thing goes wrong, he kills whoever's left with him and runs. You'll just scare him into a hole for another twenty years."
The room's looking at me now. The men. Kir has stopped moving his phones around.
Lukas folds his arms. "Go on."
I'm not sure where this is coming from. Three weeks ago, I was lost in the woods crying over a granola bar. But I've spent a thousand hours of my life sitting across a table from people whowant something they shouldn't have, figuring out how to take it apart.
And this is just that. A bad deal somebody's trying to run on me, and a way to break it.
"You're thinking about this like a rescue," I say. "Get Afon, get Matvei, get out. You're playing defense, not offense."
"And you think you have a better idea." It's not quite a sneer. It's almost curious. Respectful. Attentive.
"I think you have to make him think he won," I suggest slowly, the idea taking shape as I go. "He set this up because he believes Afon's going to walk in alone, scared, beaten, ready to die for his nephew. So we let him believe that."
"Meaning we let them move Afon?"
I nod, scared but increasingly certain. "Afon walks into the camp. He gets moved to the lodge. The whole time, Reznik will be watching the front. That's the obvious way in, right? Cavalry can only ever come from one direction."
"But that's when we come from the back," Kir infers slowly.
"Exactly." I look at him. "Through the woods. Throw a distraction out front, the obvious way, and then send your real people in from behind."
Lukas is quiet. He's looking at me like he's never quite seen me before.
"You want to give him a front," he says. "Something that would grab his attention."
"Exactly," I say again. "And what's more attention-grabbing than a runaway bride?"
That gets the room. Every head turns.
"No," Lukas barks immediately.
"Hear me out?—"
"Not a chance, Caroline."
"He doesn't know what we know." I'm talking fast now, before he can shut it down. "He thinks the wedding's going to happen and we're all going to be standing around drinking champagne when Afon doesn't show up. He'scountingon us being slow."
"Which is why we don't show him our hand," growls Lukas.
"We're not showing him our hand. We're showing him the back of it." I lean over the table. "If Reznik sees vehicles coming up that drive, he's going to do one of two things. He's going to think it's you coming to fight him, in which case he kills everybody and flees out the back, right into your people. Or he's going to think it's something else, and he's going to stop and look, and stopping and looking is exactly what we want, because every second he's watching the front is a second he's not watching the back, where the people who actually matter are coming through the trees."
"You're describing a decoy," Kir says. "But the problem with that is that decoys get shot."
