We're parked in a string of trucks along a forest road, snow piled high on either side. All the drivers turn their engines off so we don't give ourselves away.
I'm in the back seat of the lead vehicle, squeezed between Cass and the door. The bulletproof vest is crushing my ribs and the ivory silk is bunched up underneath the big, black coat.
But I feel like I've never looked better.
Up front, Lukas is on the radio. Kir is staring at a tablet with the drone feed on it, a gray-and-white aerial picture of the lodge and the woods around it, with infrared glows surrounding the heat from anything alive.
"Six men outside," Kir reports. "Maybe eight, nine inside. Hard to tell through the roof."
"Matvei?" Lukas asks.
"There." Kir points at the screen. A small heat shape moving away from the lodge, two bigger shapes flanking it. "They're walking him out. East side. Toward the road."
My heart jumps. "They let him go?"
"Reznik keeps his word," Lukas says. He keys the radio. "Team two, alert: Matvei is on foot moving east. Two escorts. Take them quiet and get him clear. Do not fire toward the lodge."
A crackle of acknowledgment.
As I watch the little shapes on the screen, two more emerge out of the trees and close on the escorts. There's no sound from here. Just the shapes meeting, tangling, going still. Then the blurry red haze that is Matvei gets folded into the group and pulled into the tree line, away from the lodge.
"Matvei's clear," a voice announces over the radio. "He's beat up but walking. We've got him."
Cass sighs next to me, a single broken exhale of relief, and presses her hand to her mouth. I grab her other hand and squeeze it.
"That's one," Lukas says, though his voice has lost none of its edge. "Afon's still inside."
I look at the screen. There's a cluster of heat shapes in the big main room. One of them is sitting down, lower than the others. Stationary. Surrounded.
I know it's him. I don't need anybody to tell me.
"They're not moving him," Kir says after a moment of silent watching. "He's staying in the lodge."
"Then so is Reznik," Lukas concludes. "He wants it done where he can watch." He turns around in his seat and looks at me. "It's time. You understand what you're doing?"
"I walk up the front drive. Slow. I keep his eyes on me," I recite, just like we practiced. "And while he's wondering what the hell I'm doing, your people come through the back."
"You stop the second anyone tells you to stop. Remember that part?"
"I know."
"Caroline." His gray eyes hold mine. "If this goes wrong, my men have orders to put themselves between you and the guns. That means men might die so you don't. Do you understand the weight of that?"
I understand it more than he would ever guess. You don't bury your parents as young as I did without learning something about the heaviness of death.
"Then don't let it go wrong," I say boldly.
He nods, then turns away from me.
"Convoy's quiet from here," he rumbles into the radio. "Teams on the back approach, hold at the tree line until I call it. Decoy on the drive in three minutes." He looks at me one more time. "Go."
The walk up the drive is the longest walk of my life.
The lodge sits at the end of a quarter-mile of churned snow. The trees crowd close on either side, and somewhere in them, behindme and to the sides, are Lukas's people. I can't see them. Then again, I'm not supposed to. So job well done to those guys, I guess.
I keep my hands out of my pockets so they're visible. I left the coat open. Underneath it, the ivory dress catches the light, bright against all that black and gray. A bride walking up a snowy drive toward a house full of killers.
I get about halfway before a man steps out from behind a truck near the porch, rifle swinging up.
