Caroline
Eight minutes later, I'm back in the war room.
This time, I'm wearing a wedding dress.
Not the whole thing, not the train and the veil and all that.
But the ivory silk gown is on and girded for war.
I put it on because I don't have time to do my hair and makeup and get all dolled up, and because if Lukas is going to make this wedding happen on time, then I am going to be ready the second we get Afon back.
I'm not going to waste a single minute changing clothes.
Over the dress, I've got one of the men's spare coats.
It's black and huge, it reeks of cigarettes and gun oil, and it hangs down past my knees.
I look insane. I know that. A bride in a men's coat and a pair of borrowed flats, hair shoved back behind my ears, jaw clenched tight, chin held high and proud.
I don't give a fuck.
Lukas looks at me when I come back in. His eyes go down to the dress, then back up to my face.
"You're committed," he notes.
"I told you I'm getting married today," I say. "Did I stutter?"
Kir is at the table, three phones going at once. The map's still spread out, but now, there are pins in it, little colored ones, and somebody's drawn a circle in red marker around a spot up north.
"The camp where they took me," I say, walking over. "That's where he's going?"
"That's where Reznik said," Kir confirms without looking up. "Whether Reznik actually staged the meet there is another question."
I frown. "Why wouldn't he?"
"Because a man like Reznik doesn't tell you the real spot.
" Lukas comes to the table. He moves slow, like always, but I can sense anxiety, or whatever the equivalent emotion is for a man with ice in his veins like him.
"He tells you a spot. Then he watches it.
If anyone shows up who isn't Afon, he knows. Then the real meet is somewhere else."
I stare at the red circle. "So we don't know where Afon's actually going."
"Not yet."
"But we will?"
Lukas doesn't answer. He's looking at one of his men, the one with the scarred eyebrow, who's got a phone pressed to his ear and his hand cupped over the other.
"Boss," the man says. He lowers the phone. "Ivanov's on the line. Says he's got something."
Lukas holds out his hand. The man puts the phone in it. Lukas presses a button so it goes on speaker and sets it on the table.
"Alexei," Lukas says.
"Lukas." The voice is tinny through the speaker, but I can hear it clear enough. A man's voice, smooth, careful. "I heard our old friend went and got himself in trouble."
"How did you hear that?"
"Because that old friend called me three days ago and told me Reznik was alive. I've had my ear to the ground ever since. When Afon Satyrin tells you a dead man is breathing, you start listening for footsteps."
"What do you have?"
"Reznik moved his people out of the logging camp the night before last. The whole operation. Trucks, men, the snowmobiles. Gone."
"We know," Kir interjects.
"Right. So the question is where they went.
" Alexei's voice takes on a careful hush.
"I have a man who runs fuel up in that county.
Diesel, propane, gas for the generators.
People like Reznik can't run a camp without fuel, and there aren't many places to buy it that won't ask questions.
My man got a call two days ago. Big order, cash on delivery to an old hunting lodge off County Route 9, about six miles east of the logging camp. "
I look at the map. Kir's already sliding his finger across it.
"There," he says. He taps a spot east of the red circle. Nothing's marked there. Just a thin gray line of road and a little black square that might be a building.
"Pemberton Lodge," Alexei says. "Used to be a private hunting club 'til it went bust years ago. Big main building, couple of outbuildings, a long drive in. One road. The fuel went there, not the camp."
"That's where he's holding Matvei," Lukas says.
"That's my guess. The camp was always going to be a decoy.
He tells Afon to come to the place he knows, the place with the history.
It's got poetry to it. Reznik likes poetry.
" He clears his throat. "But he's not stupid enough to actually sit in a spot he already knows we can find.
The lodge is where the fuel is. The fuel is where the people are. "
We're all holding our breath, everybody looking at that little black square.
"You're sure?" Lukas asks.
"Sure? Hell no. In this business, I never pretend to be sure," Alexei says. "But I'd bet on it. And I figure you don't have time to bet on anything else."
"He doesn't," I say.
There's a pause on the line. "Who's that?"
"Caroline Oglethorpe," I say. "I'm the one marrying Afon today."
A longer pause. Then: "Bill's girl?"
"Yeah. That's me."
"Huh." He sounds pleasantly surprised. "Your father did me a good turn once, a long time ago. I was sorry to hear what happened with him." He clears his throat again and all the emotion disappears from his voice. "Anyway, once you boys get Afon back, tell him he and I are even."
"You can tell me yourself when it's done," Lukas says. "Thank you, Alexei."
"Don't thank me. Just don't lose Satyrin. He's one of the last good bastards. I'd hate to drink alone."
The line clicks dead.
Lukas straightens up over the map. "Six miles east of the camp," he says, mostly to himself. "Reznik summons Afon, Afon walks in alone and finds a ride waiting, and then they'll move him to the lodge."
"Or kill him then and there," Kir suggests.
"No." Lukas shakes his head. "Reznik would never do it quick and simple like that. Not with Afon. They've got history. He'd want to drag this out, make it bloody and nasty." He glances at me and nods apologetically. "I'm sorry. That's just the truth of it."
I make myself nod back. It's not easy. I've got a picture in my head now and I can't get rid of it—Afon walking into that empty camp where they zip-tied me to a folding chair, hands open, no gun, no Wolf, no anybody. Walking in like a man going to his own funeral.
Because that's exactly what he thinks it is.
"So he goes to the camp, it's empty… And then what?" I ask. "They move him to the lodge?"
"Most likely," Lukas says. "Which gives us a window."
"A window for what?"
He looks at me a long moment, and I can see him deciding how much to tell the anxious bride in the wedding dress.
"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 who want 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's counting on 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."
"Not right away," I insist. "If he sees a Bratva soldier in black, yeah, he'll unload every bullet he has and then some. But me? Nah. He'll want to figure out what the hell this crazy bride is doing walking up his road in a wedding dress."
Lukas stares at me for a long, long moment.
"You'd put yourself in front of his guns," he says, "on purpose."
"He's not going to shoot me. I just told you why."
"You don't know that."
"No," I admit. "I don't. But I know that if I'm sitting safe in a car six miles back while Afon walks into that camp to die, I'm going to spend the rest of my life knowing I had a play and I didn't run it."
I meet his eyes, no longer afraid.
Nobody says anything.
Then a new voice rings out from the doorway.
"She's right."
I turn. Cass is standing there, and behind her, Rae and Jillian. All three of them are in regular clothes, hair pulled back, faces hard. Cass's eyes find mine and she nods in approval.
"My husband's up that mountain," Cass declares, striding in uninvited. "So whatever you're doing, I'm in it, too. Don't even think about telling me to stay home."
"Cassandra…" Lukas starts.
She comes to stand beside me at the table. Up close, I can see her hands are shaking, same as mine. She rests one of them on my elbow. "Caroline has a real plan, and you know it's a good one. I can see it on your face."
Lukas looks at the three of them. Then at me. Then down at the map, at the camp and the lodge and the road and the woods behind it.
"It's reckless," he says.
"Everything about the last three weeks has been reckless," I say. "I got concussed, kidnapped, shot at, and proposed to by a man who then ran off to die rather than say the words to my face. Reckless is the water I'm swimming in now."
He sighs and scrubs at his beard. "You sound like Afon," he murmurs. "Never once in thirty years did he let me talk him out of a thing once he'd decided it was the right thing."
"So that's a yes?"
"That's a we'll see." He turns to Kir. "Get me that drone.
I want to know how many men are at that lodge before anyone goes anywhere near it.
Get teams staged on the back approach, through the tree line.
Quiet. No engines past the ridge." He points at the scarred-eyebrow man. "Decoy vehicles for the front."
The room comes alive again, faster this time, harder, more frenetic than ever.
Jillian comes to me holding a bulletproof vest. "Arms up," she instructs. "Your boobs are gonna get smushed into pancakes in this thing, but at least you'll be alive to complain about it."
Laughing like a deranged woman, I lift my arms. She straps the vest over the ivory silk, cinching it tight, and Rae steps in to help with the side buckles.
"I can't breathe," I wheeze when they're done.
Rae pats my shoulder. "That's how you know it's on right."
When it's done, I shrug the big black coat back on over all of it. The vest, the dress, the whole insane costume. I shove my hands in the pockets and find the granola bar wrapper where I tucked it. Afon's ring is on my right thumb.
I look down the length of that table. Maps and phones and guns and grief, all of it turned now into one clean line pointing north.
"Okay," I say. To the room. To Lukas. To myself. "Let's go get my husband."
Lukas picks up his coat off the back of his chair. He steps into it slow, but his eyes are bright and hard, and for the first time, I understand what Afon must have seen in this man for thirty years.
"Convoy in five," Lukas says. "Kir, eyes up first. Nobody crosses that ridge until the drone's clean." He looks at the four of us women standing there in our half-armor. "A war and a wedding," he says in disbelief. "Afon would have loved this. Let's go bring the stubborn bastard home, shall we?"