Chapter 27
Chapter twenty-seven
Noah
It was hard to believe that Ashford Grove sat in the middle of the fourth-largest city in the US. With wide streets and houses that sat back from the road behind gates and hedges, it had the kind of peace and quiet that only money could buy in a city the size of Houston.
About a half a block before the house, Jackson killed the lights, and we slowly crept along the road trailing the other vehicle driven by Hawk. After what felt like forever, Jackson pulled the SUV to a stop behind Hawk in the service entrance to the property.
“Kat’s in the system,” Jackson said, looking at his phone. “The cameras on the service entrance are looped, and the gate camera goes dark in ninety seconds.”
I looked at the house through the windshield.
In the darkness, I couldn’t make out much besides the vague shape of a house with a light in what I guessed was a second-floor window where Wolfe had told me to have her wait when I called her this afternoon with the plan.
I kept trying to imagine what it felt like, knowing help was coming, sitting in a house that belonged to the man you were leaving while you counted down the hours for help to arrive.
It made me think of Julius, and how sure he’d been that help was coming, and how sure I’d been that it wasn’t. In a world where men like Anton Corvane existed, I was just glad I could be the hope for Imogen that I hadn’t had.
Suddenly, the gate swung open. Kat’s doing, I assumed, from wherever she was sitting with her laptop, running the feed and the security loop and probably three other things simultaneously.
We drove through and came to a stop a short distance from the house.
“Noah.” Jackson’s voice was quiet. I looked at him. “You stay in this SUV until I come for you. Doors locked. You don’t open them for anyone but me.”
“I know.”
“Say it back.”
I looked at him. “I stay in the vehicle. Doors locked. I don’t open them for anyone but you.”
He held my gaze for a moment before reaching for me and pulling me over for a quick kiss. Then he nodded once and reached for the door handle.
“Jackson,” I said.
He looked back.
“Be careful.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Always,” he said.
He got out, and the door closed, and I was alone.
I reached for the earpiece Jackson had given me and slipped it in my ear so I could at least hear what was going on. I watched them move up the drive toward the service entrance. Three shapes in dark clothing, moving slowly, spaced evenly apart, with Hawk slightly ahead.
I exhaled.
The next part was supposed to be simple.
Walk up to the service entrance, Hawk would engage the guard with a story—a delivery issue, a question about the property next door, something plausible enough to get close.
Then it would be over before the guard understood what was happening. Quiet. Professional. Nobody hurt.
That was the plan.
I saw the guard at the service entrance step forward to meet Hawk, and then I saw the second man come around the corner of the house.
My stomach dropped.
He came from the far side, from the direction of the garage, and he was moving with purpose.
Something had gone wrong. Maybe he’d seen something on a camera before Kat looped it, or heard something, or just had the bad timing of coming around at exactly the wrong moment.
He was big, broader than the first guard, and his hand was already moving toward his hip.
Everything happened fast after that.
Hawk went first. He moved into the first guard, not away, the same way Jackson had taught me in the gym that day.
The first guard went down hard and didn’t get up.
Gator was already moving toward the second man, and there was this one terrible moment where the second guard had his weapon half-drawn, and Gator wasn’t close enough to stop him that I couldn’t breathe, but then, Jackson came from the left.
I hadn’t even seen him move into position.
He was just there, between the guard and Gator, one hand on the guard’s gun hand and the other at his throat, and it was over in seconds.
The man went down the way the first one had, controlled and definitive, and Jackson stepped back and looked at Gator, and Gator gave him a nod.
Through the earpiece, I heard Hawk’s voice, steady as if he was reporting the weather. “Two down. Service entrance clear. Moving in. We need to check for any more surprises before we extract the target.”
“Copy that,” Jackson said.
I watched the three of them move to the service door.
Gator tried the handle. Imogen must have unlocked it, because it opened without resistance, and they went inside.
I knew I was safe in the car, but I didn’t like being out here all alone with no idea what was going on inside the house, and they weren’t talking aside from an occasional, “Clear”.
The waiting was the hardest part. It always was. I took a moment to breathe slowly and run through my inventory.
Where am I?
Houston. Ashford Grove. The SUV. Locked doors, reinforced glass, more security features than I could name.
Am I safe?
Yes.
What’s true right now?
What was true was that Jackson was inside that house right now, making sure it was safe.
What was true was that there were two guards on the ground secured with zip ties by the service entrance, and Corvane’s security would have a very bad week explaining the gap in the footage.
What was true was that somewhere in that house, a woman had a bag packed and documents in her hands waiting on us to come and get her.
The earpiece crackled.
“Noah.” Jackson’s voice. “I’m coming to get you.”
I had to fight the urge to hop out and run to him, but I’d promised I would wait, so I waited. I watched as he strode across the drive. When he reached the SUV, I unlocked the door. He pulled it open and looked down at me.
“You don’t have to come inside. You can wait here if you want.”
“No, I’d rather be with you in there than sitting out here in the dark by myself.”
“Okay, let’s go then.”
I got out of the vehicle, and he placed his hand on my back as we walked towards the door. We had to go right by the guards, and I looked up at him. “Are they okay?”
“They’re still breathing.”
“Good.” These guards were just doing their job, so I didn’t want them to die. Of course they should’ve chosen to work for someone who wasn’t basically a monster in human form, so there was that.
Jackson checked his watch. “We have maybe thirty minutes before Kat says we should assume someone checks in.”
“Imogen?”
“Upstairs. She’s almost ready.” He put his hand at my back and steered me through the service door and into a back hallway that smelled like cleaning products. “She did good. She waited upstairs like Wolfe told her to.”
We took the back stairs. On the second-floor landing, I could hear Gator’s voice, low and steady, like he was managing a situation and keeping someone calm. The bedroom door was open.
Imogen Corvane was standing by the window with a bag at her feet and a leather portfolio held against her chest with both arms. She had her hair pulled back, and she was wearing dark pants and a sweater, very practical clothes.
She looked nothing like the elegant woman in the deep blue gown at The Hargrove.
She looked at me when I came in.
“Hi,” I said.
Something in her face shifted like a held breath finally allowed to go. “You actually came,” she said.
“I said we would.”
She looked down at the portfolio in her arms. “I have everything. Every document I could find. Account numbers, communications, three years of financial records he kept on a hard drive he thought I didn’t know about.” She looked up. “I hope it’s enough. No, I know it’s enough. It has to be.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said with a smile. I wasn’t sure at all. I had no idea what it would take to bring Anton Corvane down, but I knew that right now, she needed to believe it was enough. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Crowe
We were in the upstairs hallway, Imogen’s bag in Gator’s hand, just seconds from going down to the vehicles, when Hawk’s phone buzzed. He looked at his screen, and his whole body changed.
“Kat says there’s a car coming through the front gate,” he said.
I was at the window at the end of the hall before he finished the sentence. Below, the front drive was lit by the motion sensors, and a black sedan was moving slowly down the driveway.
“That’s his car,” Imogen said from behind me. Her voice had gone flat. “That’s Anton.”
I turned and looked at her. All the color had drained from her face. The portfolio was still clutched against her chest, and her knuckles were white around it.
“He wasn’t supposed to be back until Thursday,” Gator said.
“He must have cut the trip short.” She looked between us, and her eyes went wide. “The guards. He’ll see the guards.”
“The guards are out of sight,” Hawk said. “Gator moved them. They’re in the side yard. He won’t see them coming in.”
At least that meant he wouldn’t come in guns drawn.
“We’re not going to make it to the vehicles before he’s inside,” I said.
“No,” Hawk agreed.
“Then we don’t even try.” I looked at Hawk, then Gator, then at Imogen, and finally at Noah, who was standing in the doorway of the bedroom with his hands still and his eyes moving between all of us. “We go down, and we tell him she’s leaving. Straight up. No pretense.”
“He’ll fight it,” Imogen said. “You don’t understand what you’re dealing with. He doesn’t lose things. He doesn’t—” She stopped. Her voice was shaking.
Noah crossed to her. He stopped in front of her and waited until she looked at him. “It’s going to be okay. These three men know what they’re doing. I’ve seen them handle things that should’ve been impossible. You’re not alone in this anymore.” He was quiet, but clear.
She looked at him with the expression of a woman who wanted very badly to believe him and was scared to. “You just don’t understand what he’s like,” she said.