Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
Jack
The narrow road twisted upward through the sleeping city, winding past shuttered stone houses and dark, silent gardens. Tires crunched over loose gravel, loud in the stillness, as if even the car knew they had no business being here this late. Or this early. Jack wasn’t sure which.
No other sound. No other signs of life.
Jerusalem at one in the morning felt like it belonged to ghosts.
The orphanage came into view slowly, like something conjured.
It rose from behind a crumbling wall—a long weatherworn building made of pale limestone, shadowed by moonlight.
When Jack had lived in Jerusalem during the war, this area had barely been dust and scrubby terrain.
Now it appeared that new buildings were being erected quickly—a sign not only of the new wealth entering Palestine but the burgeoning population.
He eased his foot off the accelerator, the car slowing to a crawl, headlights brushing across the entrance.
The building didn’t appear fortified, but it looked closed off.
Like a convent might be. A pressure at the base of his skull that hadn’t let up in miles built more strongly, the wound at his temple throbbing.
What if Alice wasn’t inside?
What if this was another false turn—another promise that ended in a body?
… or worse?
His gaze flicked to the backseat, where Ginger, Kit, and Noah had crowded in with Alastair—Ginger practically on Noah’s lap. Fahad sat in the passenger seat. Everyone wore the same somber expression. The same guarded wariness.
This had been bad enough when Jack had worried that the sheikh might somehow double-cross them. But now, with Alex’s life at stake and Prescott Federline hot on their heels, a more urgent sense of responsibility thrummed in Jack’s veins.
“Tell me again how your fifteen-year-old managed to crack Kit’s code,” Jack grumbled, needing to thaw the crackling current of tension in the car.
“According to Ivy, it was a thing of wonder, but Ivy has always looked at Alex that way,” Ginger said, her voice soft in a way that couldn’t fool Jack. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Noah’s arm tighten around Ginger’s shoulder.
“No, it’s pretty impressive,” Kit said dryly. “I didn’t design the codes to be easy. Maybe Jack has finally met his match.”
Jack’s hand tightened around the shifter.
“Best not to let a man think he’s unnecessary before he goes into battle, my dear,” Alastair said with a frown.
Choosing not to respond to either of them, Jack parked beside the orphanage, engine humming beneath his feet, then turned the key. The car shuddered once and died.
The silence closed in around them again.
He opened the door, the metal groaning too loud in the hush, and stepped out onto the packed earth. He straightened slowly, hand braced against the door frame, and looked up at the orphanage again.
No lights in the windows. No movement in the shadows. Just the building—long and solid and watching.
He slung the rifle over his shoulder, adjusted the strap, and exhaled through his nose. He was exhausted but not tired. His body buzzed with tension, every part of him wired for threat.
Fahad stepped out of the passenger side and came around the front of the car. Behind them, the back doors opened—Ginger, Kit, Noah, and Alastair all unfolding into the night in varying degrees of silence.
He didn’t like being still. Visible.
They felt too exposed here, pulled right up to the front of the building like this without easy cover and no idea who was inside or who else might be watching.
He didn’t say it aloud. Knowing Noah and Alastair as he did, he knew they felt it too. Hopefully, the sheikh hadn’t decided to come early, like they had.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the others, who were now all standing in a loose semicircle behind the car. Kit looked pale. Ginger had her hand on her arm. Alastair hovered at the fringe, unreadable as ever.
Fahad met Jack’s eyes briefly and gave a barely perceptible nod. A signal. Then he and Noah dropped back, away from the group, moving toward posts across the street with their rifles.
Well past the time the sheikh understands two can play at this game.
Jack waited until Fahad and Noah had disappeared completely from view, then he went forward toward the main door.
With Kit here now, they didn’t need the sheikh.
Neither could they afford to wait—who knew when Prescott might arrive?
Hopefully, if all went according to plan, by the time the sheikh arrived, they’d already be long gone, with Alice in tow.
Kit knocked on the door, then turned toward Alastair and Jack with somber eyes. “The nuns may not allow you inside. Especially not at this hour. But we’ll see. If the sheikh has already made arrangements with them, I’ll smooth it over. They trust me.”
“Do whatever you need to do,” Jack said, his voice gruffer than he expected. He didn’t mean to sound so unfriendly toward her.
She was his Kit.
Except she wasn’t. She hadn’t been for a long time.
And maybe she never was.
And yet … Kit had saved Alice for him, hadn’t she? She’d explained in the brief moments before they’d left Fahad’s house what had happened with Alice, why she’d hidden her.
The door to the orphanage opened, and a tall, narrow-faced nun appeared in the archway.
Her dark habit seemed to absorb the moonlight, making her look like part of the stone.
Her eyes, sharp and unsentimental, moved over them all with the steady patience of someone who had seen far worse than armed men and sleepless women on her doorstep in the middle of the night.
She probably has seen worse, for that matter.
She didn’t speak.
Kit stepped forward. “Sister Agnes. It’s me.”
The nun inclined her head slightly. “I see that.”
“We’re here for Alice.”
A beat passed and Jack held his breath.
Sister Agnes looked past Kit to Jack and Alastair, then beyond them into the darkness, as if she could sense the two hidden figures across the street.
“I was told to expect Sheikh Omar,” she said simply.
“He may still arrive,” Kit said. “But we can’t wait for him.”
Another beat. Then Sister Agnes stepped aside. “Quickly. Before someone sees.”
Kit moved first and Ginger followed. Jack touched Alastair’s arm lightly, signaling him to keep close, then entered last, pausing briefly in the doorway to scan the shadowed corridor beyond.
Cool stone walls. The faint scent of candle wax and incense. And silence. Dense silence.
The door closed behind him with a weighty click.
He didn’t particularly like orphanages, even though he sympathized with their mission. But they made him uncomfortable. Made him think of too many broken hearts and devastated dreams that would never be repaired, no matter how many years passed. Wounds like that went too deep.
Sister Agnes walked ahead of Kit, guiding them deeper into the building. A second nun passed them in the corridor without a word. No one looked surprised to see them. No one asked questions.
That made him feel worse. Would the sheikh be angry that they hadn’t waited for him—or feel deceived? Maybe he hadn’t considered enough what that might mean for Fahad and his family. His selfishness had already cost too many people too much.
The hallway turned, revealing an alcove lit by a single oil lamp. Its flame flickered against a crucifix on the wall. Before it stood another nun—older, round-faced, her expression hard to read. But she stepped aside as Kit approached and opened a door without a word.
Ginger and Alastair hung back, letting Jack past them.
Inside, the room was dim. Sparse. A cot in the corner. A pitcher and basin. A single window, shuttered, slatted shadows from it spreading across a wall only decorated with a cross, illuminated by a lit candle on the table beside the bed.
And in the chair near the window, dressed as a nun and seated as if she’d been waiting hours—Alice.
She stood slowly, and the light caught her face.
Jack’s chest seized.
It was her.
Older. Thinner. Her hair longer and darker than he remembered—it had been practically golden when they were children, but now it was as dark as his own.
But her eyes … those were the same.
“God … Alice,” the name left his lips with an agonizing gasp.
Alice’s eyes filled with tears, her brows coming together with a pained expression. Then she rushed toward him. “Jack,” she cried, tears streaming down her face. She threw her arms around his neck, sobs racking her thin frame as she clung to him. “You’re here. You came.”
Jack stiffened, a memory playing at the back of his head of his sister as a little girl, barely able to breathe from asthma, looking up at him with wide, desperate eyes as she clung to his hand.
Or waking from a nightmare in the middle of the night.
Laughing, on his shoulders, as he carried her across the yard at his family’s home, with chickens squawking around them. Jumping into the creek, patiently teaching her to bait a hook, and showing her how to read.
Then, all those tears he’d been holding back—for years—flowed freely down his cheeks as his arms wrapped tightly around his sister. Jack’s throat locked up, his arms rigid around her as if were he to let go now she’d vanish again.
She sobbed into his collar, trembling. “Oh, Jack … Jack, Jack,” whispering his name like a prayer.
Something inside him split open.
He hadn’t even let himself hope.
He’d followed the signs, tracked the codes, crossed cities and deserts and oceans—but always with that cold sliver in the back of his mind that told him that the girl he’d known and loved was gone. That he was too late. That this, like everything else he’d touched, would end in ruin.
But she was here. Real. Alive. Fragile in his arms.
The realness of her broke him.
His knees buckled, and he sank to the stone floor, pulling her with him, cradling her like a child.
Her weight barely registered, but the pain and hurt of years of unspent tears lanced up through his chest and throat and into his skull like fire.
He pressed his face into her hair, and the sobs came without warning.
Raw, choking, gasping sobs he couldn’t stop if he tried.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” he managed. “I thought—I left, and I never—God, Alice, I never even looked for you.”
“It’s my fault,” she said, still holding him. “Jack. I should have listened to you. Believed you. You didn’t know I changed my mind. I didn’t know who Prescott was until it was too late and then I was alone and I didn’t know how to get out.”
“I was too afraid of what he’d do to you to punish me.” His voice cracked. “That’s the truth. I was too scared to find out. I just … ran. I’ve been running ever since.”
He shook his head, gripping the back of her head as if it could anchor him to the present. “I should’ve found you. I should’ve—” His voice dissolved into another sob. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Alice pulled back just enough to look at him, her hands framing his face. Her eyes were red, her cheeks wet. “You’re here now. You came back.”
“I don’t deserve that,” he whispered.
“Maybe neither of us deserved what happened. But I’m still glad you came back.”
She leaned in again, resting her forehead to his. For a long moment, they just breathed.
The weight of nearly twenty years of silence burned into his soul, his hands shaking with the emotion. The grief. The ache of every version of himself he’d had to become just to survive it.
The room was quiet around them. Jack lifted his gaze, his eyes locking with Kit’s for just a moment. Kit stood near the door, her arms crossed tightly against her chest. Ginger’s hand covered her mouth. Alastair looked away, giving Jack the dignity of privacy.
The only three people in the world he didn’t give a damn saw him like this.
“Thank you,” he mouthed to Kit, and she gave him a sad smile, tears in her eyes.
The candle flickered on the bedside table, casting its light over the cross on the wall.
Jack didn’t pray. He hadn’t in years.
But in that moment, holding his sister like a man pulled from a wreck, he wanted to believe that something—Someone—had kept her safe long enough for him to finally catch up.
Then one of the nuns approached. She went directly to Kit and whispered something low and undecipherable in her ear. Kit stiffened.
“We have to go,” she said softly, her voice barely carrying in the room. “A car has just pulled up in front of the orphanage—and it’s not the sheikh.”
Prescott.
Jack nodded. They couldn’t linger here, no matter how much he might want to. Not if Prescott was here. The moment Alice found out, she’d be terrified.
But it wasn’t as though they could simply avoid Prescott, either. They needed to get Alex back too.
Jack released Alice, who gathered a bag in the corner of the room, then they hurried out, following Ginger and Kit down the hallway. Alastair remained behind them, taking up his position as a sentinel without being asked.
Their footsteps sounded harsh and loud in the stone corridor, every step reminding Jack of everything they’d had to face to get here—and what they still needed to overcome. “Prescott is here,” he told Alice in a low tone, grasping her hand. “And he’s gotten hold of the microfilm.”
Alice flinched.
For now, she doesn’t need to know that’s my fault.
“He’s taken someone close to me. We have to get him back.”
Alice’s head tilted. “Are you suggesting you’re going to use me as bait?”
Jack didn’t have the chance to answer before Alice nodded, then said, “I think you should. I’ve caused too much trouble already.”
“We’ll see about that.”
They neared the main door, and Jack glanced at Alastair, then Ginger. He released Alice’s hand and reached over, squeezing her shoulder. “We’re going to get him back, Red.”
Only the quick rise and fall of Ginger’s breathing gave away the panic in her body. She only nodded.
Alastair and Kit pulled guns from their holsters, readying them.
Jack pushed open the door to the orphanage and stepped into the cool night air.