There is no way in. Or out. The locked doors will give us only seconds.
Aksel glances around the room. Rather than looking scared, he seems invigorated.
His eyes catch mine. “We’ve got this,” he says, half smiling. Because we don’t have this. We are outnumbered, outgunned, and cornered.
But I see in his eyes the confident, soothing calm I saw when we were trapped in the avalanche. He is unequivocally fearless, assertive, and willing to do anything to save us.
Boom! In a flash of bright light, the doors burst open. The force of the explosion thrusts me across the room. I land hard on my bleeding leg. A man charges forward through the smoke.
Aksel shouts at me, his words muffled in the echo of the blast.
The man lunges for Aksel’s neck. Aksel spins hard around, hitting the butt of his rifle into the man’s face with a bone-crunching sound.
A second man comes at Aksel from behind. Aksel wrestles him to the ground and connects his knuckles to the man’s jaw. He shouts at me again, “Get out of here, Sophia! Now!”
But all I see is … him.
The man with the curly hair and hazel eyes is walking toward me, smirking.
I scramble backward on my injured leg.
He swipes for me. I skid around the counter, my dress catching beneath my feet. He snatches the chiffon fabric of my skirt, ripping half of it from the bodice.
I reach behind my back. My hand slides across the counter.
If I can somehow …
My fingers find the hilt. My palm finds the blade. When he reaches for me a second time, I swing the kitchen knife forward, aiming it straight into his stomach. He turns, so I lance his hip instead.
His forearm cuts down hard onto my right elbow, sending the blade clattering to the floor.
The man flips me around and pushes my face brutishly against the countertop.
“Sophia!” Aksel roars.
Yelling to the others, the man holds my arms behind my back and wraps a cable tie around my wrists.
Impervious to the gunfire around us, Aksel shoots at a man coming from his left, dodging bullets and backing toward me.
The man with the hazel eyes—the Chechen—tightens the cables, attempting to clip them together. I thrash, trying to wrestle my wrists away from him.
Another man, wearing a bulletproof vest, enters the kitchen from the great room and raises a semiautomatic, trying to get a bead at Aksel’s back—
“NO!” I scream.
I throw my head backward with as much force as I can. Crack! The Chechen lets go of me, pulling both his hands up to his fractured chin. Instantly, I sweep his legs from under him, reach into my bodice, lock the blade into place, and fling my Ladybug across the room.
The Ladybug pierces the man’s suprasternal notch, right above his bulletproof vest. The semiautomatic drops from his hands as he tries to stop blood spurting from his neck.
Standing, I rip more pleated tulle fabric from the bodice so I can move. The wound in my thigh is still leaking blood, but adrenaline numbs the pain.
A man springs forward, swinging his knife at me.
Aksel vaults over the table, takes the man’s right forearm, and twists him around. The man spins, attempting to swing his knife backward. Aksel hits him brutally on the side of the head, and the man drops to the ground with a thump.
The men regroup. Aksel has his rifle again, taking aim. He shoots at the men fanning out around us—Pop! Pop! Pop!
I look down. Aksel’s backcountry pack is open on the floor, its contents rolling out onto the rug. I reach forward, snatch the aerosol can, and snap off the top. When the man nearest me raises his gun, I spray him in the face.
He shrieks as the bear spray burns his eyes. Rather than drop his weapon, he blindly pulls the trigger, screaming and shooting wildly.
A bullet grazes my left shoulder, singeing my skin. I cry out.
Aksel shouts my name.
With a look of frenzy devouring his hazel eyes, the Chechen lunges at me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see another figure barreling toward me like a cannon. Suddenly, a blazing orange flame shoots from Aksel’s hand, engulfing the room in a blinding, incandescent light.
Aksel swings his rifle onto his back, hooks his arm around my waist, and hurls us into the windows.
CHAPTER 38
With an earsplitting crash, we catapult through the glass. Even with a meter of snow packed onto the lower deck, we land hard.
Above us, the avalanche flare fades to an orange shimmer.
Instantly, bullets burrow like torpedoes into the snow millimeters from Aksel’s head. Although I feel dazed, it’s Aksel who bears the brunt of the fall; his forearm is shredded, as he used it to break the glass.
Standing, I tug Aksel’s hand. “Come on,” I urge.
However, between my tattered gown, bare feet, and injured thigh, I also struggle to move.
Leaning on each other, we hurtle down the steps, plowing through the snow in the direction of the forest.
I hear shouting far behind, Aksel’s steady breathing beside me, then the whine of motors.
More of them.
We veer left, away from the sound. Aksel swings his rifle from his back, glancing between the house and the forest. We are surrounded.
The snowmobiles reach the forest edge. One of the snowmobiles breaks off and drives at us. The driver unslings an assault rifle.
Aksel steps in front of me and raises his bolt-action, taking aim—
“No!” I shout, knocking aside Aksel’s rifle barrel.
Before the snowmobile comes to a complete stop, my father launches from it, firing.
He surges past us, evading the muffled cracks of gunfire. He returns fire at the house—smooth, efficient, effective.
Another snowmobile circles us. In seconds, my father is back on his snowmobile, pulling me up behind him. Aksel leaps aboard the second snowmobile and we steer into the forest.
I curl up behind my father as he swerves every thirty meters, careening through the pine trees, taking air over a ledge. I keep my head low to avoid branches. Bitter wind tears at my cheeks.
Snowmobiling down Eagle Pass, we eject from the forest near the top of Charlotte’s driveway. A large black Suburban idles in front of us. The snowmobiles come to a halt and we jump off.
“Careful,” Aksel says in a low voice. He is at my side, holding his hand to my bleeding thigh as we clamber into the Suburban along with the others.
Within seconds, we are speeding through the dark streets.
Steadying my breath, I turn to my father.
“Them,” I say. Terror stains the simple word. “Dad, it was them.” My voice catches between a whisper and a scream.
How? Why? I want answers so badly I feel incendiary.
The vehicle has been fixed with two bench seats facing each other, so although I’m in the back row, I’m facing my father. He is dressed in a blue button-up shirt and a sport coat, like he’s just come from dinner.
Aksel’s mangled forearm is being bandaged by a young African American man who, unlike my father, is dressed in combat gear—all black, with a bulletproof vest, two Smith & Wesson revolvers holstered cross-draw at his waist, and an HK in his belt.
Watching my father, Aksel appears to be forcing calm. Breathing in through his nose and holding his lips tight, he doesn’t acknowledge the disinfectant being poured onto his wounds.
Prying my eyes from Aksel’s injuries, I turn to my father. “Dad,” I force the words from my parched lips. “How?” My left shoulder aches. I cradle it with my right to alleviate the throbbing.
Moving aside a remnant of tulle, my father winces at the laceration in my thigh. “It’s deep, but clean,” he utters. “Should heal fast.”
He knots a rubber tourniquet above the wound.
Warm blood trickles from my left temple and drips onto my cheek. I wipe it off with the back of my hand. The medical kit is on the floor; I snatch a loose butterfly strip and pass
it to my father. He adheres it in place on my temple.
When my father finally meets my gaze, his steel-gray eyes appear heavy and worn. His skin is pale, but what startles me most is the return of that hollow, calculated stare. With its reappearance, I feel a torrent of dread.
I glance sideways at Aksel. He knew I was being followed. He tried to convince me. Warn me. I knew too. And I denied it.
Aksel’s eyes shift from my father to the man plucking shrapnel out of his arm, to me; he doesn’t look hurt, he looks enraged.
“Who is he?” I ask again. “I kept seeing him … I told myself … believed … it was a coincidence … I should have trusted my instincts … this is my fault …”
My father interjects, shaking his head, “No, Sophia. It’s mine.”
My whole left side is bruised from the fall; I can feel scratches on my face from the snowmobile ride and a stinging pain where the bullet grazed my left arm. But these wounds hurt less than the look on my father’s face—he’s not surprised?
Aksel makes a deep growling sound in his throat. The man pops Aksel’s shoulder back into place with a grinding, snapping sound. Aksel doesn’t flinch.
My father applies pressure to the wound in my thigh. He pricks my skin with a needle of lidocaine.
“You knew?” I whisper.
He doesn’t have to speak to answer my question.
“I believed you!” I exclaim. “You told me I was safe here! I believed you from the night we left Tunisia!”
“You were safe here, Sophia!” With a pair of sturdy tweezers, he removes the glass shard lodged in my flesh. He begins stitching.
“How is this safe?” I ask through gritted teeth.
“Because at first, he only wanted to observe you,” my father says, ripping open a bandage with his teeth and holding it to my leg.
“You call that observation?!” I shout.
“He’s been watching you for months. He was sent to confirm, then return, and reconfirm. They were only tracking your movements, so we let them. Monitoring him while he followed you gave us essential intelligence into how CNF has rebuilt.”
My voice is barely audible. “You let him follow me?”
Beside me, Aksel glowers at my father with barely concealed rage.
“Since he was imprisoned in Libya, Bekami has grown CNF into a transnational organization of multilingual, technologically sophisticated terrorists with access to untraceable funds and an endless supply of recruits—”
“So, you used me to draw them out—”
“We did it to protect you!”
The driver turns onto Highway 81. I slide harder into Aksel. With my body pressed against his, I want to cry, to stop this.
“How is this protecting me?!”
“I killed every man who hurt you,” my father declares, “except Bekami. And I would have killed him too had he not landed in a Libyan prison—”
“But Bekami is in prison, so how …” I trail off.
My father says nothing.
“He is still in prison, right?” I persist, a cold sweat dampening the back of my neck.
My father tosses the bloody cloth onto the floor, avoiding eye contact.
“Bekami escaped from prison eighteen days ago. We have no idea where he is.”
CHAPTER 39
I always imagined that if I ever heard those words, Bekami escaped from prison, fear would cripple me. Instead, fury roars through me.
“Go back there!” I order. “Find the Chechen who’s been following me and interrogate him until he tells you where Bekami is!”
“We will, Sophia. A team went in behind us. But those men tonight know nothing. They are an action team; they follow instructions from encrypted text messages—”
“He has to know where Bekami is!”
“He doesn’t! That man who followed you is a Chechen American, a pawn; he’s an extension of Bekami’s international terror branch of CNF. He doesn’t even know Bekami. We have only one purpose now, and that is—”
“We?” I interrupt. “You mean you and Andrews?”
“Do you want the truth?”
“I deserve the truth!”
My father holds my gaze. “You know my work is attached to—”
“Kent,” the man tending to Aksel’s arm interjects.
“Todd, she deserves to know—”
“Know what?” I demand.
“Not too much,” Todd says coolly, reaching into the emergency kit.
My father starts addressing the graze wound in my arm, applying a disinfectant gel.
“I work for a counterterrorist team at the Department of Defense.” His eyes flash to my neck. “Operations Network YX is its official name, but we go by our acronym: ON-YX.”
Almost of its own accord, my finger moves to my neck. Hanging at the base of my collarbone, embedded in the gold pendant, is a small crystal—a white onyx stone I’ve worn every day since my parents first gave it to me ten years ago.
Never take it off, Sophia. Wear it always, Sophia. Promise, Sophia.
I rip it off my neck. The clasp breaks. Clenching the delicate chain in my fist, I want to destroy it.
This is why they let me live freely in Waterford. This is why …
“You knew.” The words tumble out of me in gasps. “You knew where I was in Istanbul,” I stammer. “Y-You knew where I was, and you didn’t rescue me?”
My father’s face is pallid. “We tried … there was interference on your tracer.” He points to my necklace.
“I don’t believe you!”
My father is so pale he is gray. “When we came for you, Sophia, the room was empty. It was a trap. A part of me died that day, Sophia. That was the only moment I thought we had lost you forever.”
I fight back the memories threatening to surface—the rough cloth fibers binding me to the copper pipe. The smell of smoke and yenibahar and black tea and Yves Saint Laurent cologne. His slimy skin. His voice I can never forget.
Aksel grimaces under his breath. Todd is using medical tape to cover the abrasions on the side of his face.
“Why didn’t you keep searching?” I ask, wincing at the sight of Aksel’s lesions.
“We lost a man in that raid, Sophia. Andrews risked everything to convince HQ to let us go after you. But they wouldn’t risk more men on bad intelligence.”
“So why didn’t you ignore Andrews?”
“Andrews was trying to help, but we had no idea where you were—your mother was tracking a new lead when Jozef called saying you had escaped.”
My head is foggy. I feel faint. I’ve tried for so long to block it that it physically hurts to remember.
“Wait, Mom is … actually involved with ON-YX too? Not just covering you?”
Something about this thought—that she’s not on my side—unravels me.
“Your mother is our best operator,” my father mutters. “Her cover is airtight. We were both pulled from CIA to start ON-YX years ago; we operate the way CIA originally operated. We can do this because we don’t exist. You, Sophia, don’t exist.”
“I don’t exist?”
“Not until Istanbul.”
Trying to comprehend this logic, I shake my head. “And what about Nemcova? What does she have to do with Bekami?”
My father wraps my wound with gauze. “Everything, unfortunately.”
Beside me, Aksel twitches.
“You got another one here,” Todd tells Aksel.
“Another what?” Aksel says combatively, looking over at him.
Todd retrieves a pair of tweezers. “Another bullet, Rambo.”
I slide my hand into Aksel’s; he squeezes it tight.
“If you’re who they want”—I turn back to my father—“why don’t they go after you? Why are they so determined to get revenge through me?”
My father sighs. “CNF thinks you can help them get what they need.”
Aksel winds his free arm protectively around my waist.
“Still?” I say, both infuriated
and bewildered. “Why?”
My mind spins. I’ve been used as part of my parents’ diplomatic covers my entire life. My parents chose their operations over me. They are no different than Bekami—using me to accomplish their missions.
The truth cuts into my skin like Farhad’s blade—Istanbul was because of my father. He chose his job—his obligations—over keeping me safe.
I will always be in danger because through me, terrorists like Bekami can retaliate against my father. Blackmail him into doing, or giving them, something.
I hit the window button with my right finger, rolling it down. Frigid air sweeps through the car.
I catch my father’s eye and throw my necklace out as far as I can.
My father finishes bandaging my arm and wipes his hands off on his pants.
Aksel straightens up. His arm behind my back flexes hard as granite. His fingertips press down on my hip, as if he’s holding me in place.
Ahead, I see lights on the ground.
Tarmac.
We’ve been in the car twenty-three minutes when the Suburban brakes beside a C-2 at the edge of an empty runway.
CHAPTER 40
Panic rises within me like a fast-approaching tide.
An airman ducks beneath the doorframe of the plane, stepping onto the platform at the top of the retractable stairway. Another airman in a flight suit at the bottom of the stairway bellows, “Two minutes!”
My father reaches the bottom step and turns back, beckoning me forward.
I stand motionless beside the Suburban, whispering, “No.”
“Sophia.” Aksel steps in front of me. His eyes sweep my face. “You’re leav—”
“No, I’m not,” I say, shaking my head. I look over Aksel’s shoulder at my father, standing at the base of the stairway.
“We’ve got to get in the air, Sophia, come on!” my father bellows.
Fear that has nothing to do with Bekami overwhelms me. “I’m not leaving you,” I gasp. “I’m not going.” I link my fingers determinedly with Aksel’s.
An airman steps up to me and puts a hand on my elbow, easing me forward.
“Hey,” Aksel snaps, pushing the airman’s arm off my elbow. His eyes are hostile. “Do not touch her.”
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