Chapter 26 #2
My knees hit the asphalt hard enough to bruise. I collapsed, clutching my daughter against my chest. Her small body shook. Her arms locked around my neck. She smelled wrong. Antiseptic and airplane and fear-sweat. But underneath it all was still Sophia.
My Sophia.
“I got you, baby,” I whispered into her hair, rocking her as gunfire continued. I was vaguely aware of Ethan and Trent and others forming a circle around us, guns up. “I got you. You’re safe now.”
“The scary people took me on the airplane,” she sobbed. “They put a needle in my arm and I went to sleep and when I woke up you weren’t there and they wouldn’t tell me where you were and I thought you forgot me—“
“Never.” I pulled back just enough to see her face. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, eyes red-rimmed and wild. “I would never forget you. I’ve been looking for you every second.”
“They said you didn’t want me anymore. They said I belonged to them now.”
White-hot rage bloomed behind my eyes. I would kill them. Every last person who’d made my daughter believe that.
“They lied,” I told her. Smoothed her tangled hair back from her forehead. “They took you from me. But I found you. And I’m never letting you go again.”
“Evelyn!” Trent’s voice cut through the moment. Urgent. Sharp. “We need to move. Now.”
I heard it then. Sirens wailing in the distance, growing louder—the Finnish police responding to reports of gunfire on the highway.
We had minutes.
Maybe less.
Then another sound. A deeper, rhythmic thumping that I felt in my chest before I heard it.
A helicopter roared overhead. Black. Unmarked. Coming in fast and low over the highway.
“Your chariot awaits,” Nolan’s Irish lilt sing-songed through the comms, cheerful as always.
Where he got that helicopter was anyone’s guess.
“All units, exfil now,” Ethan ordered. “Rafe, give them something to think about.”
The second charge blew. This one bigger, louder. A section of the overpass erupted in flame and debris. Not enough to bring it down. Just enough to block the highway. Keep the police from following.
“Sorry about your infrastructure,” Rafe said, not sounding sorry at all.
“Time to go.” Trent physically lifted me to my feet. One arm supported me while the other kept his weapon ready.
The helicopter touched down in the middle of the highway. Fifty yards away. Rotor wash whipped my hair across my face, and debris scattered around our feet.
“Heads down and run,” Trent said and pressed a hard, fast kiss to my temple. “I’m right behind you.”
Flynn and Decker provided cover fire as we retreated.
Leo and Alistair fell back from the disabled security vehicles.
Lyric was already rappelling down from the overpass.
Fast. Hand over hand. She was running as soon as her boots hit the pavement, reaching the helicopter first and pulling open the side door.
Ethan moved last, walking backward, weapon up. Covering our retreat. “Move, move, move!”
I reached the helicopter, and true to his word, Trent was steps behind me. He took Sophia from my arms and lifted her inside. Then me. My hands shook so hard I couldn’t grip the safety harness that Lyric shoved at me.
“Let me,” Lyric said. She buckled Sophia in, smiling as if this were just a sightseeing adventure tour. “There you go, Bunny. All set.” She glanced at me, and her smile faded a bit as she handed me a set of headphones. “You did good, mama. She’s safe now.”
The rest of the team piled in. Flynn. Decker. Leo. Alistair. Gage. Rafe scrambled in last, a remote detonator still in his hand.
“Just in case,” he said, holding it up.
“Don’t even think about it,” Ethan growled as he hauled himself aboard. “We’ve already caused too much damage.”
Rafe simply shrugged and slammed the door shut behind him. “We’re loaded. Get us out of here, Mav.”
“Hold on to your butts,” Nolan called cheerfully from the cockpit, and the helicopter lurched skyward.
My stomach dropped into my toes, and I let out a strangled, startled laugh that was dangerously close to a sob. “Is he quoting Jurassic Park?”
“Don’t get him started,” Trent said.
Sophia clung to me with both hands, her face buried against my chest, little fingers digging into my arms. I held her close, my heart pounding so hard I was sure she could feel it through my tactical vest.
Gage sat across from us, leaning against the vibrating wall of the helicopter, his face half-hidden in shadow.
Something made me look up, and I caught him staring at Sophia with an expression that made my heart stutter.
Not just concern or relief, but raw pain mingled with a kind of awestruck wonder, like he was seeing a ghost or a miracle.
His eyes traced her features with such intensity that I instinctively pulled her closer.
His gaze snapped to mine. He realized I’d caught him looking, and his expression shuttered. He looked away, but not before I saw something close to grief flicker across his face.
The helicopter banked sharply, making my stomach lurch back up into my throat as we gained altitude, leaving the chaos of the highway behind. The disabled convoy. The guards sprawled on the pavement. The flames from Rafe’s charges. The flashing lights of police vehicles arriving at the scene.
“Finnish authorities are not happy,” Kate reported over the radio. “Multiple units responding. Reports of American mercenaries conducting an armed assault on a public highway.”
“Fuck,” Ethan said. Just that.
“Gets better.” Ozzy’s voice now. “US State Department just got a priority call from Finnish Foreign Ministry. They’re demanding explanations. They’re using words like ‘act of war’ and ‘international incident.’”
Through the helicopter window, I watched another police vehicle arrive. Then another. Then what looked like military vehicles. Uniformed soldiers spilling out. Securing the scene.
We’d done it. We’d gotten Sophia back.
But at what cost?
“Mommy,” Sophia whispered against my chest. “Are the bad people coming after us?”
I glanced at Trent. His jaw muscles knotted and his gaze was locked on the world slipping by beyond the plexiglass window—patches of dark forest giving way to rolling fields. When his eyes finally met mine, I saw the math in them: we’d just crossed a line we couldn’t uncross.
“No, sweet pea,” I whispered, pressing Sophia’s little body against my tactical vest even as distant sirens wove into the helicopter’s drone.
The misty afternoon light flashed against the spinning rotors as we banked hard toward the coast—toward Estonia, toward anywhere that wasn’t Finnish airspace. “No one is taking you from me again.”
Sophia buried her face in my chest, her fingers curled around the fabric of my shirt. A soft whimper trembled through her.
Alistair ducked past the bulkhead, his satchel of medical tools clinking. “Let me check her over.”
I clenched my arms tighter around Sophia, but Trent’s hand settled firmly on my shoulder, forcing me to loosen my grip. “Let him work, Evelyn. We have to know if she’s hurt.”
I eased my arms an inch. Alistair knelt on the wet metal floor, boots squeaking on a slick patch of spilled water.
He brushed Sophia’s bangs aside, his fingertips cool against her skin as he found her pulse.
He checked her pupils with a flashlight’s beam, then ran his fingers along her skull, pausing at faint bruises.
“No broken bones,” he murmured, his crisp accent softening each word. “Some bruising on her arms, a few pinpoint marks—looks like injections. But nothing life-threatening.” He met my eyes. “Physically, she’s okay.”
That ‘physically’ hung between us like a warning. We both knew the real scars ran deeper.
Ethan shifted on the opposite bench, his boot scuffing against the deck plates. “How long until we’re clear?” he asked, staring at the rivets in the floor.
“Twenty minutes to coastline,” Nolan’s voice crackled from the cockpit, low and measured. “Then open water—once we hit international airspace, they can’t touch us.”
“They can try,” Decker muttered, reloading his sidearm. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone took potshots over open water.”
“Comforting,” Flynn replied, running a hand over the butt of his pistol as if to reassure himself.
Static hissed in my headset, and Kate’s voice came back. “Update: Finnish authorities have lodged a formal protest with the U.S. State Department. NATO is being briefed. This is escalating rapidly.”
Ethan’s breath caught. “How rapidly?”
After a heartbeat-long pause: “The U.S. Ambassador to Finland has been summoned to Helsinki’s Foreign Ministry. They’re demanding our arrests.”
The helicopter shuddered suddenly, diving toward a ragged line of hills. My stomach flipped; Sophia screamed. My arms locked around her tighter than ever.
“Contacts,” Nolan reported with deceptive calm. “Two Finnish Air Force jets, tailing us—ETA four minutes.”
“In this bucket?” Nolan laughed, hollow and sharp. “We’re toast if they try to outrun us. But I can make them earn every inch.”
The chopper plunged again, wind roaring through gaps in the armor. Branches clawed at the underside as we skimmed the forest canopy—leaves snapping and showering the cabin with grit.
“Hold on,” Nolan warned. “It’s gonna get bumpy.”
Above us, the fighter jets’ engines screamed. The rotor blades trembled under the turbulence. Nolan yanked the cyclic stick, weaving between ridges, following the terrain to throw off the jets’ targeting.
“They’re not firing,” Decker observed, voice tense. “What gives?”
“They don’t want bodies floating in the Baltic,” Ethan replied. “They’re herding us down, not shredding us.”
Decker snorted. “How considerate.”
Another hard bank—right this time—so sudden that rifles and gear slid across the floor. Someone swore; Lyric grabbed a ceiling strap with white-knuckled hands.
“Two minutes to coast,” Nolan said, voice tight. “Almost there.”
Through a side window I caught sight of the fighters banking in unison, grey missiles glinting under their wings. They pressed us inland, cutting off any straight line to the shore.
“Not today,” Nolan muttered. The helicopter dropped again, branches scraping the belly plate, sparks flickering in the gloom. Then, at last, the trees fell away, and the cold gray expanse of the Baltic Sea yawned open beneath us.
I forgot to breathe for several long minutes before Nolan finally announced, “We’re clear. International waters. They won’t touch us now.”
The jets peeled off, slashing back toward Finnish airspace, but I watched their silhouettes shrink against the horizon until they were gone, not fully trusting they wouldn’t come back.
The cockpit fell silent except for the helicopter’s steady thump and the rush of wind against the fuselage. We weren’t safe yet, and we all knew it. We were fugitives now, but none of that mattered to me because I had Sophia. I had my daughter back in my arms.
And this time, I wasn’t letting go.