Her Rogue Alpha (X-Ops Book 5)

by Paige Tyler

  “I am a loyal Russian citizen of the DPR, but what is happening now with the militia is not the Russian way. Something must be done to stop them.” The words seemed hard for Victor to say, but he took a deep breath and straightened his spine, then pointed at the picture in the center of the wall. “This is Colonel Grigori Zolnerov. He’s the senior commander of most of the militia forces on this side of Donetsk. He has been responsible for the fighting that has gone on here. He is the one who has kidnapped these girls.” The old man swallowed hard as he lovingly touched a photo of a smiling girl with dark, curly hair and big dimples. “This is my granddaughter Larissa. My wife and I raised her since her parents were killed. She was one of the first taken.”

  “How do you know Zolnerov grabbed them?” Jayson asked.

  “I’ve talked to several witnesses who saw some of the girls get abducted,” Victor said. “In each case, it was Zolnerov’s personal bodyguards who either kidnapped them or picked them up from another holding facility.”

  “What is he doing with them?” Layla asked, almost afraid of the answer.

  Victor shook his head. “I don’t know. The only thing I can say with certainty is that Zolnerov’s personal guards have all left the city and are now in a dacha—forgive me, a luxury home—north of the city that the colonel took over shortly after he arrived here. They’ve been on nearly constant alert since then.”

  Victor took a photo off the wall. With all the other pictures, Layla had completely missed this one. It was of a huge brick house surrounded by a high wall. Even in the limited view offered by the picture, Layla could count six heavily armed guards. Her stomach clenched. She tried to think of some other reason a man like Zolnerov would keep a dozen girls captive in that house, but her imagination failed to come up with anything that wasn’t depraved.

  Victor handed the picture to Jayson. “The dacha is about thirty miles outside of town, due west. The address is on the back, and I will let you use one of my trucks to get there. Mikhail will know the way. He is a smart kid, never afraid to stand up to people when it is necessary. Try not to get him killed.”

  Jayson regarded the Russian thoughtfully. “If you’ve known where your granddaughter is all this time, why haven’t you tried to rescue her? Those men out there who searched us look capable enough.”

  Layla wondered the same thing.

  Victor didn’t say anything for a long time. “We tried,” he finally said in a sad voice. “But they are police officers, not soldiers. The team of men I sent in four days ago were killed before they even made it through the front gate. They never had a chance.” His gaze went from Jayson to her. “I am praying you two can do better because there’s no one else who can stand up to Zolnerov and his guards, and I fear what he has planned for my granddaughter and those other girls.”

  * * *

  Jayson leaned over a table in one of the few areas of the library that hadn’t been bombed to pieces watching as Layla and Olek added details to the map they were drawing of the large estate where Victor believed the girls were being held.

  When they had come back from their meeting with Victor, Layla had immediately called Kendra and asked if she could find out anything about the layout of the house as well as dig into Zolnerov’s background. It had taken a few hours, but Kendra emailed a ton of information. And none of the intel on the colonel was good.

  The man had been booted out of the Russian army two years ago for corruption and had taken over leadership of the militia forces in the area when the more senior officers had died during a supposed terrorist attack. No one thought the senior officers’ deaths had been a coincidence and most doubted that pro-Ukrainian loyalists had been responsible.

  Since then, Zolnerov had developed a reputation as an ambitious man willing to do whatever it took to gain more money and power. He’d been leaning on many of the local businesses and charging them protection fees while doing as little actual fighting along the regional borders as he could get away with. According to Kendra, it looked like he was positioning himself for a run at president of the DPR if and when it became an independent country. While there were quite a few other political figures in the race ahead of him, Jayson doubted they’d be around long enough to claim it. People who stood up to Zolnerov seemed to disappear.

  “I wish I could get you guys some more help, but it looks like you’re on your own for a while longer,” Kendra had said before hanging up. “I still haven’t heard a peep out of Clayne and Danica. And Trevor and his team had a hell of a time getting out of South America. It could take them another twenty-four hours to reach you.”

  The thought of waiting around another twenty-four hours didn’t sit right with Jayson. His gut told him they needed to get to those girls sooner rather than later. To do that, they needed a solid plan. That was why Layla and Olek were transferring the drawings of the house Zolnerov had commandeered from Layla’s iPhone to a large sheet of paper. Jayson needed the layout of the place before they tried to slip in there. He had no desire for this rescue mission to end up like the one Victor had attempted.

  While Layla and Olek were doing that, Dylan and Mikhail were out trying to find more ammunition for the pistols he and Layla carried, as well as the AK-74 assault rifle he still had from the raid on the RSA building. Jayson felt a twinge of guilt about sending them out to hunt up ammo, but Dylan and Mikhail had a better chance of getting the task done than if Jayson attempted it.

  He scanned the map, paying special attention to the perimeter walls around the house as he tried to develop a feasible assault plan. Not that he was used to coming up with plans for breaking into a heavily guarded residential estate, taking on anywhere from fifteen to twenty soldiers, and saving a group of kidnapped girls from who knew what kind of fate, all with only two armed DCO operatives and three teenaged boys. He should have been freaking out at the thought of such an impossible task, but he felt more alive than he had in a long time. Most of it had to do with the fact that he and Layla were finally truly together.

  Jayson smiled as he watched her work. When she concentrated really hard on something, she had this adorable way of sticking out her tongue. It was all he could do not to walk around the other side of the table and kiss her. Of course, he couldn’t do that because kissing would definitely lead to other things, and they didn’t have time for that right now.

  It was hard to believe it had been twelve hours since they’d made love on the floor a few feet away in the other room. For the first time in his life, Jayson actually understood the difference between sex and making love. Because there was no way in hell he would ever describe what had gone on between them this morning as a simple roll in the hay. It had been epic, mind-blowing, and powerful. He supposed that was what sex was like when you were completely head over heels in love with the other person.

  They had lain naked together on the floor for nearly an hour afterward, her head on his chest, her hair splayed out, her body warmly wrapped around his. They’d talked about their respective pasts and collective future. Jayson found himself talking about dreams he’d long since given up and some he’d never known he had.

  Layla wanted to travel the American Southwest with him, while he wanted to see France with her. She wanted to go snorkeling with him along the Great Barrier Reef, and he wanted to lay on the beach with her in Hawaii. When she talked about wanting to learn how to hang glide, he suddenly felt the urge to learn with her. She made him want to do things he’d never even thought about doing.

  They’d even talked about having kids. Layla hadn’t been sure of what he would think about that since he’d been an only child, but he couldn’t imagine anything better than a whole house full of kids with Layla’s big, dark eyes and silky, black hair running around. Hopefully they wouldn’t look too much like him. He wouldn’t wish his mug on any kid.

  That was when Layla had brought up subjects that were a lot harder to talk about, like Dick and all the stuf
f that had happened at the DCO before he’d gotten there. She told him about what had happened to Ivy, Tanner, Kendra, Declan, and Minka, and how Dick and some guy on the Committee named Thomas Thorn had been behind all of it. By the time Layla was done telling him about all the manipulative shit Dick had done, it wasn’t hard to see how the man had been able to sucker him into being a voluntary test subject for the hybrid program. It turned out that Dick was a total asshole and really good at getting people to do what he wanted.

  “But as much as we’d both like to put all of the blame on Dick, we’d be lying to ourselves if we did,” Jayson told her. “He was only able to convince me to take the hybrid drug because I was so desperate. Yeah, he saw me coming, but I was the one who took the bait hook, line, and sinker.”

  Layla kissed him hard before pulling back to look at him, her eyes flashing green. “None of that matters now. You survived—that’s what’s important. Just remember that Dick will always try to twist every situation to his advantage. He’s going to try to convince you that you owe him for what he’s done for you and that you need to do one more thing for him. If you go down that road, it’s never going to end.”

  He caressed her hair. “Dick can say anything he wants. It doesn’t mean I’ll believe him. The only thing that matters is that we’re together and that we’re partners.”

  She bit her lip. “And what if Dick—or other people at the DCO—try to get in the way of that? We’re not like Ivy and Landon. We can’t hide our relationship because everyone already knows we’re together. What if they say we can’t be partners?”

  Jayson hadn’t even thought about that. “Then we’re both out,” he said. “I don’t know what we’ll do after that, but I can promise you that we’ll do it together.”

  Layla smiled. “We stay together,” she said fiercely. “In the DCO or out.”

  Then she’d given him a kiss that was well on its way to leading to lots of other distracting activities when Dylan and the others returned. The teens were too excited about the possibility that Victor might know where Anya was being held to notice that he and Layla had barely finished getting dressed before they’d bounded down the stairs.

  Jayson stifled a groan as he tried to get the sexy image of a half-naked Layla wiggling into her jeans out of his head. He leaned forward, pretending to look at a detail on Layla’s side of the drawing, hoping the move would hide the bulge in his jeans. While it did that, it also reminded him how tight his left hamstring was. Making love to Layla had been incredible, and having her draped over his chest afterward had been heavenly too, but it had also hurt like a son of a bitch. His back was throbbing, his left leg was numb all the way down to the knee, and his butt felt like one big muscle cramp.

  He was finally starting to realize that while the aches and pains were a nuisance, they weren’t anything he couldn’t deal with. That was a serious epiphany in itself, but the bigger one involved the fact that he’d come to the conclusion that Dick’s hybrid serum treatment had been a bust.

  When he’d first gotten to Donetsk, he told himself it was the serum that allowed him to run all over the place when the militia soldiers had been chasing him. That his new hybrid abilities had allowed him to make the leap onto the steel pipe and run across it after Powell had tried to kill him. That he never could have swum across that river without the help of a magic cure-all drug.

  Hell, for a time, he’d even convinced himself it was the serum that allowed him to be a man worthy of Layla.

  Looking back, he realized none of those things had been true. He’d run all over Donetsk because he was being chased by men trying to shoot him and the teens, and he hadn’t been willing to let either of those things happen. He’d made the leap to that pipe out of necessity because not making it would have meant falling to the ground with a loud and painful splat. Likewise, he’d swum across the river because the idea of drowning had scared the hell out of him.

  And as far as the serum making him good enough for Layla, he knew now that was bullshit. He’d always been good enough for her. He’d just needed to get to a place in his head where he could see and believe that.

  If the serum had made any changes to his body, they weren’t monumental. It definitely hadn’t healed all his injuries, and it certainly hadn’t turned him into some kind of lean, mean animal machine. But that was okay. Because he didn’t need a magical hybrid drug to let him do the things he needed to do to feel alive—he just needed Layla.

  Jayson turned his attention back to the drawing and was just starting come up with a plan for breaking into Zolnerov’s estate when Dylan and Mikhail jogged down the rubble-filled steps. The two teens reached into the gray sports duffel that Mikhail had been carrying and came out with three boxes of 9x18mm ammo for their pistols, and two boxes of 5.45mm cartridges for his AK-74. Two thirty-round boxes of ammo for an automatic weapon wasn’t much, but then again, if he ended up having to shoot that many rounds, it meant they were in deep shit and were probably screwed anyway. With what he already had, it should be enough.

  Mikhail dumped the boxes on the desk to the side of Olek and Layla’s drawing, then pulled out three battered and abused-looking Makarov pistols and placed them on the table too.

  “What are those?” Jayson asked as he saw Layla look at the weapons from the corner of her eye.

  “Those are Makarov pistols,” Mikhail said.

  Jayson arched a brow, wondering if the Russian kid was trying to be a smart-ass or if he were just clueless. “No shit. The question is why do you have them? I sent you out for ammo, not more weapons.”

  Dylan was the one who answered. “They pretty much came with the ammo. This might be a big town, but word gets around. People have heard about what we’re trying to do, and when we talked to one of Victor’s friends about needing ammo, he gave us the weapons too.”

  “He said he knows one of the missing girls.” Mikhail shrugged. “He just wanted to help.”

  Jayson opened his mouth to tell them to ditch the weapons, but Dylan interrupted. “Look, I know you don’t want us getting involved in any shooting, but we may not have a choice. What we’re doing is going to be dangerous, no matter how much you try to protect us.”

  Jayson glanced at Layla to see her regarding him with a questioning look. Clearly, she was going to leave this up to him. The ultimate in go ask your father, he supposed.

  His gut was shouting at him to leave the kids out of this, that they weren’t old enough to risk their lives in a shoot-out, but he didn’t have the right to make that decision for them. Dylan was going to do whatever was necessary to get Anya back, and Olek was going to help. As for Mikhail, he’d been risking his life against these people for a long time now. Jayson couldn’t change the circumstances or the danger the three teens were in. The best he could do was try to manage the situation and reduce the risk to the lowest level possible. But no matter what he did, things could still go wrong. If it did, these kids had to be able to defend themselves.

  “Okay,” he said. “You keep the weapons. But you fire them only as a last resort. Understood?”

  All three of them nodded in return.

  “What’s the plan?” Dylan asked. “How are we going to get Anya and the other girls out?”

  Jayson readjusted the flashlight until it shone fully on the drawing of Zolnerov’s residence. The main house seemed like a cross between a Tuscan villa and an American ranch with a multifloor structure in the middle and single-floor wings spreading out to either side. If Layla’s drawing was to scale—and Jayson had no reason to think it wasn’t—the place was easily ten thousand square feet. And that wasn’t counting the outlying buildings or the smaller structures set at various places along the perimeter wall that served as guard shacks.

  “Dylan, you’ll be out on the road in front of the villa with Mikhail and Olek. When I give the signal, I need the three of you to draw the attention of the militia soldiers in that dire
ction. I’m not sure how you’re going to do that, but I need as many guards heading that way as possible. You just need to keep them occupied for a few minutes. Then I want the three of you to bail.” Jayson pointed at an intersection on the map about a quarter mile from the gate. “Fall back to this road junction here and hide.”

  Dylan glanced at Mikhail and Olek. It was obvious that none of them liked the idea of hiding, but after a moment, they nodded.

  “I might know some other people who can help us,” Mikhail said. “We’ll be the distraction you need. What are you and Layla going to do once we get the soldiers moving our way?”

  “Layla and I will be going in over the perimeter wall in the back of the property,” Jayson said. “We’ll find Anya and the other girls, then get them out over that same wall.”

  Mikhail frowned. “That is a very big house. How will you be able to find Anya in time? Even with a distraction, you probably won’t have more than five or ten minutes.”

  Jayson didn’t point out that Mikhail was probably being optimistic with how much time they’d have. “That’s Layla’s department. But to find Anya, she’s going to need that scarf you’ve been carrying around, Dylan.”

  Dylan looked as confused as the other two teens, but he reached inside his coat and pulled the piece of colorful material out, handing to Layla. “I don’t understand why you need this, but please bring it back. It’s Anya’s favorite. It’s pretty important to me too.”

  Layla nodded solemnly. “We will. I promise.”

  Jayson looked at the tense and worried faces around the table. “I won’t lie and say this is going to be easy. Or that it’s not dangerous. But I promise, if we all stick together and have faith in each other, we’re going to find Anya and those other girls, and we’re going to get them out alive.”