4. Nataliya
FOUR
Adrian was trying to be patient, but I could tell he was coming to the end of his rope. “Do we have to stop again?” he asked as I found a wider stretch of shoulder to pull over.
He had no idea what it was like to travel with a child with a muscular disorder. “Elias needs to stretch,” I said.
“Well, what’s stopping him? He’s the only one in the backseat—can’t he do his stretches while we drive?”
I shook my head. “He’d have to take off his seat belt to get in some of the positions. It wouldn’t be safe. Not in a moving car.”
“And he can’t wait until we get a little further along? We’ve already stopped twice.”
Elias winced as he wiggled in his seat. “I can wait a little longer, Mama,” he offered, but I could hear the pain in his voice. Loorer’s Disease caused agonizing cramps in the muscles, particularly in the limbs, and Elias couldn’t stay in cramped places for long. Long car rides could be particularly bad for him if he wasn’t given the opportunity to stretch every so often.
“No, sakharok,” I said. “We’ll stop for a few minutes. You need to move around.”
Adrian didn’t say anything else as I found a safe place to park, but I could tell he was antsy. I ignored it and unbuckled my belt before climbing out and going around to let Elias out. When he held out his hand for me to help him, I knew he was really hurting.
He stepped out of the car, and a whimper rose in his throat. “How bad?” I asked. “Give me a number.”
Elias’s breath panted out. “Six,” he said.
Shit. “Do you want a pill?” Rarely, Elias would take a pain pill. Neither of us liked it when that happened: Elias because he didn’t like how groggy he got, and me because it meant his symptoms were getting worse.So far, it had just been temporary flare-ups…but I knew the day would come when his condition would start a downward spiral, and I wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to stop it.
Elias shook his head. “No, I’ll be fine. I just need to move around.”
I leaned against the car as he walked around in grass off the shoulder. Adrian rolled down his window. “We need to get going,” he said.
I didn’t take my eyes off my son. “We will when he’s ready,” I said. “If I rush him, we’ll just be stopping again in forty-five minutes.”
“Nataliya—”
“It’s torture for him to sit in a car,” I explained, still refusing to look at him. “What would you like for me to do?”
“If Hayes has men after us?—”
“We’ll handle it,” I said and finally looked his way. “Right, Mr. SEAL?” I nodded my head in Elias’s direction—he was currently doing stretches to try and work out the stiffness in his arms and legs. “Isn’t that what you promised me? That you would protect us?”
Adrian scoffed. “Of course I will,” he said. “But we have to be practical here: what can we do so we don’t have to stop every hour like this?”
I had to give Adrian a little patience here; he had probably never been around a chronically sick child before. I could see that he was frustrated, but he hadn’t snapped or yelled at us—that was a point in his favor. Plus, from the way he watched the road around us, he was clearly on high alert for any more attackers. He wasn’t rushing us just to be a jerk. He was rushing us because he was worried about our safety…and possibly also because he was a jerk. I still hadn’t made my mind up about that. “If we don’t stop every so often, Elias is going to have a serious flare up, and then we’ll truly be stuck.”
“Well, can’t we wait until he says he needs a break?”
“No.” Adrian didn’t understand. He couldn’t unless he saw what Loorer’s actually did to a child. “He knows we’re in a hurry, so he won’t say he’s hurting. He hates to be a disappointment.”
Adrian nodded and settled back into his seat. Elias finished his stretches and came back to the car. “I feel better, Mama.”
I smiled and touched his face. His skin was always just a little cool to the touch, and the chill in the air wasn’t helping, but his little exercise had brought some pink to his cheeks. “I’m glad.”
We set off again, and the road stretched before us. Elias lasted longer, but we were getting closer to his scheduled medication time, so as we passed into Texas, I began looking for somewhere to stop for dinner. “Do you have a preference for what you’d like to eat?”
“You want to stop and eat?” Adrian asked.
“So Elias can take his medicine,” I said. “It has to be taken with food at the same time every day.”
“We can get a snack, eat in the car, and keep going, if Elias is up for it,” he suggested. “If we stop, we’re going to lose another hour, and we’ve got at least five more hours to get to Dallas without stops.”
“Mama—”
“No,” I said. “Look, we’ll be as fast as we can, but a gas station snack just isn’t going to cut it. He has to have a meal. Junk food will upset his stomach, and that becomes a whole other issue.” I didn’t want to push Adrian too far, but there were some points where I had to stand my ground. If he wasn’t happy about it, he’d just have to learn to deal.
Luckily, Adrian let it drop. He fell quiet again.
I found the first exit to a fast food restaurant and pulled off.Once the food was placed on the trays, we went to sit in a booth. Adrian, I noticed, put his back to the wall so he could see the entire restaurant and keep an eye on our parked car.
After Elias had eaten most of his dinner, I took out the medicine case from my bag. Elias accepted the palm full of pills with an ease that only came from taking multiple medications daily. “Do I have to finish?” he said, gesturing to his burger.
“At least the drink,” I said. “You know how dry your mouth gets.”
Elias sighed—the medication ruined his appetite, and some days, he ate and drank from sheer force of will alone—but did as I asked. Once Elias finished, we went back to the car. I held out the keys to Adrian. “I’ll work on decoding the message,” I said and hoped I could still remember the cipher key. “But if I say stop, we have to stop. All right?”
Adrian nodded. “Sure.”
It was late when we finally arrived in Dallas and pulled up to my friend Drake Shepperton’s condo. Luckily, Drake was waiting for us; he buzzed us in after a text. “What the hell took you—?” Drake asked as he opened the door, but he cut himself off when he saw that my arms were full with Elias.
The boy had finally gone to sleep in the car, and while Nataliya insisted she could carry him, I knew we could move faster if I did it. Nataliya watched me like a hawk when I picked the kid up, but she seemed satisfied with how careful I was. As we were getting closer to the city, the kid’s discomfort from sitting for so long was getting worse. It was awful to see him in such pain…and Nataliya did this day-in and day-out. Finally, when even stopping to stretch wasn’t helping, she was forced to give him a pill from an orange prescription bottle in her bag, and he passed out.
Drake was standing in the doorway. “Can you—?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.” He moved out of the way so we could come through. “There’s a guest room down the hall,” he said, pointing. “Second door on the left. Just please be quiet. The twins are sleeping, and Layla will murder me if you wake them up.”
It was still funny to think of Drake as such a family man, with a wife and kids. Settled in Dallas, no less—the hometown he’d always sworn he’d never return to. He’d never been one to talk much about background, and I hadn’t even realized he was one of those uber-wealthy Sheppertons until about a year ago, when his twin brother, Devon, died and Drake had to come home to settle the estate. Back then, the plan had been to divest himself of the family’s manufacturing business as fast as he could so he could get back to the team. But then he met Layla, who was pregnant with Devon’s twins after a brief fling, and who was worried someone might be after her. She ended up being right about that—and in the process of protecting her and his late brother’s babies-to-be, Drake had fallen in love.
As quietly as I could manage, I carried Elias down the hall, Nataliya on my heels. She opened the guest room door for me. It was spacious, and the bed looked comfortable enough. I held onto him as Nataliya removed his jacket and shoes before I deposited him on the mattress. “You think he’ll wake up?”
She shook her head. “His pain medication pretty much knocks him flat.” She looked around the room, and I saw her white teeth sink into her bottom lip. I had to shake myself from staring. “I don’t like leaving him alone in strange places.”
I could only imagine how tired and frazzled she must be. It had been a long day. “Did you want to sleep?” I asked. “We can wait to look at the message in the morning. This room is for the two of you—I’ll take the couch out in the living room.”
Nataliya thought for a second but shook her head. “I don’t think I could sleep yet,” she admitted. “Too much adrenaline for one day, you know.”
I did. “Still, if?—”
“It’s fine,” she insisted. “I’m fine.” I wasn’t sure about that, but I also didn’t want to argue with her any more than I already had.
We came back to Drake in the living room. I had been with this man through some of the most dangerous places in the world, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen him so tired. “How’s fatherhood, Drake?”
He chuckled. “Like an acid trip some days.”
Nataliya laughed, and it almost startled me—it was such a pretty, rich sound. “Good and bad, yeah?” she asked, and Drake nodded. “How old are your little ones?”
“Five months,” he said, face stretching in a wide, proud smile. “They were born on Halloween.”
She hummed. “I’ve heard somewhere that’s lucky.”
“With twins, I’m going to need all the luck I can get.”
They shared another laugh, and I felt a little like an outsider, which I hadn’t anticipated, considering Drake had been my friend and teammate for years. “Nataliya, you were working on the message in the car. Did you figure it out?”
She nodded. “It’s a cipher. It’s easy if you know the trick to it. Here, I’ll show you.” She looked at Drake. “Can I borrow a piece of paper and a pen?” He grabbed them from his desk and gave them to her. We both watched as she carefully copied out the message, and then at the bottom, wrote down a key. “We used Waathanian idioms translated into English. You have to translate the phrase back into Waathanian, and then each first letter of the words spells out the message.”
Generally, I thought of myself as a smart guy…I was feeling decidedly less so right now. “You designed this as kids?”
She nodded. “Our mother always read our notes, so we created it to have some privacy.”
“What does it say?” Drake asked.
Underneath the message in Waathanian, she wrote the English translation. “It’s a log-in for a OneDrive account.”
I was relieved, truly, to know what the message was and vindicated that I was correct that it wasn’t nonsense…but I had a feeling things weren’t about to get any easier.
“I have my laptop,” she said. “But, if I know Anton like I think I do, the files in the account are going to be encrypted.” She nodded toward the massive computer setup that served as Drake’s desk. He’d always been our tech guy on the team, and he’d clearly bought all the necessary toys to keep up with the latest advances even now that he was a civilian. “Can I?”
Drake was visibly surprised. “You sure you can handle it?”
Nataliya smirked, and it was a touch smug. “You could say that,” she said. “I have a masters in computer science from ETH Zurich. Before I moved to the United States, I worked in cybersecurity.” The smile slipped off her face. “Although I haven’t gotten my hands on a system like that in a long time.”
“You’re welcome to it,” Drake said.
“In the morning,” I added, and they both looked at me with surprise. “It’s late, and it seems likely there are hours’ worth of work ahead. It can wait until sun-up.”
Nataliya thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Okay. I guess…goodnight, then.”
She headed toward the guest room, and Drake and I watched her go, not saying anything until we heard the door click shut behind her.
“Dude, she’s hot,” Drake said. At my flat look, he laughed. “What? Layla is the love of my life, but I’m not dead.”
I shoved at him. “Idiot.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Hayes followed me right to her today. I put her and Elias at risk.”
Drake clapped me on the shoulder, and I grunted as he landed a hit directly on a bruise. “You need a first aid kit?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Just some bruises. I’m fine.”
He sighed. “Blaming yourself for today won’t do anyone any good. What was it you used to say to us? ‘It happened, it’s over—what matters now is dealing with what comes next.’ Anyway, they would have found her eventually. At least this way, you were there to help her.”
His words didn’t take away my guilt, but they didremind me to focus on what mattered…like the tracker on my car. “Hayes is escalating, and he knows I’m onto him. Whatever he thinks she knows has to be big enough to warrant such a move.”
“And you’re sure she doesn’t know anything?”
I wasn’t. “She said she doesn’t…but I guess we’ll see what’s in those files tomorrow.”
Drake clapped me on the shoulder again, hitting that same bruise. Asshole. “Glad you’re here, man.”
“Me too, Drake,” I said. The situation was gearing up into something major, and it felt good to have someone I trusted as much as Drake at my back. Things were only going to get more dangerous in the days to come. I’d need all the help I could get to finally bring justice for Cuddy and Roger while keeping Nataliya and Elias safe.