38. Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
“Our force was recently replenished after the attack. Currently, we have sixty-five. Half of that are the new soldiers sent over from Russia. They’re still in the middle of their evaluation, so I’m unsure of their skill set, but they should all be proficient in basic hand-to-hand combat and weapons training.
We could possibly get more if we reached out to Sergei—”
“No,” Drea and I said at the same time. We shared a look with one another. She knew as well as I did that they didn’t have a great relationship with their grandfather, that they wouldn’t want him involved. We had to do this without him.
“We’re not going to Sergei,” Drea said sternly, her voice laced with authority.
Vladimir bowed his head in acknowledgement of her command.
“Where do we sit with weapons?”
“We have enough to supply our own soldiers, but not the others,” Vladimir answered.
Arturo finally sat down but his leg bounced repeatedly, like he still couldn’t keep still. A nervous habit, no doubt. “We still have the shipment of guns supplied to us by Dimitri. It’s not enough to arm everyone, but we can make do.”
“I can cover the rest,” Mikhail added. “Just get me the final numbers and I’ll pull it from my personal inventory.”
Vincenzo pulled his phone out. “On it.”
Drea took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s start getting the soldiers all here. I don’t want to waste any time. I want to leave the moment we have a location.” She raised a hand to silence Mikhail, who had been about to say something. “Yes, I know we haven’t figured that out yet, but we will.”
The man looked doubtful but kept his mouth shut.
To be honest, so was I. Surely if there was some other way to find the island, they would have thought of it the first time around instead of putting Nikolai undercover.
“Mine are already on the way,” Arturo said. “They’ll be arriving within the hour.”
Drea checked her phone for the time. “Good. The cartel will be here roughly at the same time. Now—”
The laptop on the desk dinged with an incoming notification. Drea ignored it, but when she tried to continue on, it dinged again.
And again, and again.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she screeched, picking it up and preparing to throw it across the room.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I rushed forward and quickly took the laptop from her hands before she could let it go.
Nikolai had a thing about smashing electronics. He was still holding a grudge against Aleksandr for some fancy computer the brute had broken years ago.
Drea growled, releasing it with a huff. “I’m good. I’m good.” She ran her hands down her hair and flicked them down her chest, taking a deep, calming breath.
The laptop was still dinging. Someone was clearly desperate to get a hold of Aleksandr or something. The notifications were going off the charts. Drea’s eyes sliced to it and I swear it looked like she was going to take me out to get to it.
I started opening the laptop. “Okay, I’m just going to shut it off—what the hell is this?”
The entire screen was black, and smack dab in the centre of it was a set of numbers in big, white block font.
“What? What’s going on?” Arturo asked.
I showed Drea first and then turned the laptop around to face the room.
Mikhail frowned and got to his feet, coming closer. “They’re…coordinates. Latitude and longitude.”
Vincenzo’s eyes widened as something flashed across the screen. “Whoa.”
I curved my body over the top of the device so I could see. Text was literally being written across the screen beneath the numbers right before my eyes, like someone was typing it in real time, but no one was.
At least, no one there.
“You’re running out of time.
Save my Lukyan.”
“Save my Lukyan?” Vincenzo read out loud, brows snapped together. “Save my—” he gasped in realisation and pointed vigorously at the screen. “That’s Lukyan’s stalker!”
“She hacked into Aleksandr’s laptop to give us these coordinates to save him?” Christian asked, speaking for the first time.
When Arturo cut him an angry scowl, I understood why he hadn’t said a word before, why none of the four guards responsible for Illayana’s safety had said a word. The poor guys were in trouble for losing Illayana…again.
My dad moved to the window and looked outside cautiously. “That means she’s watching us. Right now. How else would she know we’re around Aleksandr’s laptop to see that message?”
Made sense. From what Nikolai told me of the woman, she was incredibly smart and resourceful. She was also completely infatuated— obsessed —with Lukyan.
Mikhail took the laptop from me, looking it over. “How did she find the location of the island?”
“Who cares?” Arturo jumped to his feet, eagerness in his eyes. “We have what we need. Let’s go.”
Vladimir cleared his throat. “We don’t even know if we can trust this information. For all we know, Talon could have sent that.”
“It’s highly doubtful.” Mikhail typed on the laptop, but nothing happened. The device was being controlled by someone else. “Talon has what he wants. There’s no logical reason why he’d risk sending an army to his doorstep.”
“So we’re in agreement?” Drea looked around the room. “We’ll treat the information as accurate and prepare to strike?”
“Uh, just hang on a second,” I said, raising a finger in the air.
“We might have the location of the island now, but how the hell are we going to get to it? Talon surely has some sort of precaution in place for that. Lookouts or something. People watching for intruders. There’s no way we’ll get within ten miles of that island without being spotted. ”
“Oh, that’s easy.” Mikhail slammed the laptop shut, clearly giving up on trying to hack the hacker. “I have a submarine.”