6. Nataliya
SIX
“The decryption program is nearly finished,” Drake announced over lunch. It had been running for more than twenty-four hours and going smoothly. I hadn’t been able to keep a close eye on it because Elias was still recovering, but it didn’t seem to have hit any snags.
Adrian looked up from the sandwich Layla had put in front of him. He had barely touched it. I didn’t know him very well—or at all, to be honest—but I don’t think he’d relaxed since finding Elias in the middle of a spasm. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
I hummed. “I just hope it has something useful on it for you,” I said, and all of their eyes turned to me. “I mean, I don’t think my brother encrypted a porn stash or anything so stupid, but…what if whatever he has isn’t enough? What will you do then?”
“That’s my problem to figure out,” Adrian said. “You and Elias don’t have to worry about it.”
“You’ll still take us to see Dr. Mayfield?”
Adrian’s mouth pressed into a line for a moment, like he was irritated I even asked, but then he nodded. “Of course. As soon as he recovers, like I said.”
I blinked, surprised. Our deal had been that I’d help him and then he’d help me. In RoW, our definition of an honest man was someone who wouldn’t sell you out after they’d gotten your bribe. We didn’t really have a word for someone who would help you without getting something in return.
“When he has an attack like that,” Layla said, cradling Spencer to her chest. His twin was sleeping in a Pack-N-Play a few feet away. “How long does it take him to feel better?”
I lifted my shoulders in a shrug. Any time I was asked questions about Elias’s disease, I found it easier to keep it together if I spoke more…clinically. “An attack that bad only happens once or twice a month, for now. Recovery can take a day or two.”
Layla patted Spencer’s back softly. “Can I ask?—?”
I hummed. “What’s his prognosis?” I filled in for her. She nodded, looking a little guilty as if she knew it was a question I didn’t like answering. But I didn’t blame her for asking. She was hardly the first. “For now, Elias is doing well on his medication. He doesn’t have any major side effects, and they keep his muscular spasms to a minimum.”
“For now?” she asked.
I tried not to wince. “I’m hoping that’s something Dr. Mayfield can help with. Her research for a cure, not just a treatment, shows promise.” I wanted to wrap my arms around myself but didn’t. “I’m holding onto that.” The alternative is unthinkable, I added in my head.
The silence that followed was deafening…and then a warm hand touched my arm. Layla smiled at me, warm and encouraging. “I’ll hope too,” she said.
I smiled back, grateful she didn’t offer me cheap platitudes—she didn’t tell me he was going to be okay. “Thank you.” I stood, picked up all of our plates, and took them to the sink. Grabbing one of the apples from the basket on the counter, I quickly cored and cut it and put it on a clean plate. “I’ll go check on Elias,” I said.
I found him sitting up in bed, book in his lap. “Hungry, sakharok?”
Elias looked up. “Do I have to be?” he asked.
I smiled and nodded. “Yes,” I told him. “You have to be.” I sank onto the bed beside him and watched him struggle through a piece of apple. Eating was always hard after a bad spasm. Thankfully, it didn’t make him nauseous—he could usually keep down what he ate—but food held little to no appeal for him.
When he’d choked down two of the apple slices, he looked at me. “Was that enough?”
“One more,” I coaxed, “and you can stop.”
Elias’s face scrunched, but he dutifully reached for another one. When it was gone, he looked completely rung out. “Tired, Mama,” he mumbled.
I kissed his hair. “I know, sakharok. Why don’t you get some sleep? We’ll try getting up in a little while.”
Elias nodded, and he snuggled back into his pillows. Once he was settled, I took the plate back to the kitchen. “He wasn’t hungry?” Adrian asked.
I shook my head. “He never is, really, but he doesn’t normally fight with me about it.” I looked around. Drake, Layla, and the twins were gone.
“They took the twins on a walk,” Adrian supplied.
I hummed and went to check how the software was running. It was finished. Anton had labeled everything with a date; I clicked to open the earliest file, and my breath caught in my throat. “Adrian.”
He was by my side in a blink. “It worked?”
I scooted over so he could look at the screen with me. The first file was a screenshot of an email about a drug shipment. It was moved into the United States by a group of Hayes’s mercenaries coming back from a mission abroad. Nothing in the email indicated that Ian Hayes was the one who ordered the shipment, but it was solid evidence against the organization itself.
I opened the next file, and then the next, and they were all similar. Evidence, good evidence, that the Hayes Group was involved in illegal smuggling, but nothing that would indict the CEO specifically. The forwarding address on the emails would be omitted, or there wouldn’t be a signature, etc. It was somehow more frustrating to have evidence so close to what we needed, but not quite there. “Damn it,” Adrian muttered next to me. He ran a hand through his short, dark hair. “This is everything and?—”
“Nothing,” I finished for him. “I mean, this could launch an official investigation into the organization and get them shut down, maybe even get some people convicted and facing jail time, but since specific names aren’t mentioned, all of the higher ups at the company could blame each other, with everyone claiming that they had no knowledge of any of this.”
Adrian swore again. “We need more.”
I clicked through the files. It was more of the same: trafficking drugs, selling weapons of war to whoever had the most money. This was what Anton got mixed up in? The idea made my stomach hurt. “I knew that whatever Anton was doing wasn’t legal,” I said, not able to look away from the screen. “But this—?” I clicked my tongue against my teeth.
“It doesn’t make him a bad man,” Adrian said softly.
I glanced at him. The only time I’d heard the former SEAL talk so gently in the last few days was to Elias or one of the twins. But I wasn’t a child. I didn’t need to be shielded from the hard truths of life. I’d faced them head on over and over again in the past few years. “It doesn’t make him a good one either.”
Adrian’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything else. Instead, he put his hand over mine and steered the mouse to the last file. “Open that one,” he said, but it was hard to hear what he had said with his hand over mine. His touch was warm, and the skin of his palm was work-rough. What would it be like to have that hand touch other parts of me?
I nearly jerked at my own thoughts. Where had that come from? I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t know how attractive Adrian was, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d imagined another person touching me. Let alone felt a wave of desire at the prospect of intimacy.
I cleared my throat and opened the last file like he wanted. Adrian let his hand fall away, and I missed that little bit of warmth. “What the hell?”
I looked at the screen—this file wasn’t like the others. Instead, it was another ciphered message. “Get me a piece of paper?” I asked, and when he did, I started translating the message. The English nonsense became Waathanian, one letter at a time, with a few stops and starts as this was a much longer message than the one before. Once I created something I understood, I translated it back into English for Adrian. “There are originals,” I said. “‘Hayes keeps everything. He’s paranoid. He doesn’t trust anything but his servers.’”
Adrian was quiet for a moment. “Servers…like at the company headquarters? That would have top of the line security, yeah?”
I hummed in agreement. “On a locked intranet system, I have to imagine.”
He nodded. “Well…shit.”
My sentiments exactly.
When Drake and Layla came back from their walk, Drake was limping. “What the hell happened?” Adrian asked.
“He tripped over a tree root,” Layla said, obviously trying not to giggle.
“I’m fine,” Drake insisted, but when we got him sitting on the couch and took his shoe off, it became obvious he wasn’t fine at all. His ankle was already starting to swell and turn purple. “Shit.”
“You need to get an x-ray, as soon as possible.”
Drake wanted to try icing and elevating it first, believing it could just be a bad sprain. In the meantime, he insisted we talk to him about what the program had decrypted. “Was it anything useful?” he asked.
“The Hayes Group’s headquarters is in Atlanta,” Adrian said. “I think that’s my target.”
“Our target,” I said softly.
Adrian startled. “I don’t expect you?—”
“Do you know how to access a server on your own? And decrypt a file on the fly?” Adrian’s jaw tightened—I was starting to like when that happened; it meant I was surprising him. He shook his head, and I looked at Drake. “Can you?”
“Probably not as well as you,” he said, “but I can.” He glanced at his ankle. The swelling hadn’t gotten any worse, but the color was nearing plum. “Though I don’t think I would be able to run if push came to shove.”
“So, I’ll have to go.”
“But—”
“You know it’s the best way,” I said, and as much as I could tell he didn’t want to, Adrian nodded.
“We should call Nate, Gabe, Owen, and Zach,” Drake said. “Get their take before we make a decision.”
Layla’s gaze bounced from Drake to Adrian, and then back to me. “Why don’t I settle the twins in the nursery, and then I can check on Elias for you,” she offered. “Take him a snack.”
I smiled and thanked her. “He has the rest of his apple from before, and if you’ve got something with salt? Plain potato chips or crackers?”
“You got it.”
While Layla headed up the hallway, snacks in hand, Adrian and Drake called their friends, who I quickly learned were other former members of their SEAL team. Adrian quickly briefed the others, and like when he was fighting Hayes’s men outside the diner, I got to see him in “SEAL” mode. Before, I had been so filled with terror and adrenaline that I didn’t have time to truly…appreciate it. The men, even through a video call, looked to Adrian. They listened to him. Their bond was as obvious as their respect for their former leader.
“The goal is to get Nataliya into the building to do what she needs to do,” Adrian said, “and get back out again in one piece. With as minimal risk as possible.” He glanced at me, and something fluttered in my belly at his dark, appreciating eyes. “She’s got a little boy who needs her even more than we do.”
“Getting in is the easy part,” one of the former SEALs on the call—the youngest, Nate—said. “You know that.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Adrian said. “For now, Owen, do you and Sam mind some house guests?
“Not at all. Why don’t we all meet in Birmingham? Come up with a plan in person?”
“I can pick up Nate and Zach on my way,” Gabe said with a nod.
“No need to get me,” Nate said. “Em and I are in Tupelo right now, in a vacation rental. We’ll meet you all there.”
While the others talked about the wheres and the whens of getting to Alabama, Drake hesitated. “Do you think all of us need to go? The twins are still so little, and?—”
Adrian put a hand on his shoulder. “Take care of your family, Shep.” He looked at the other men. “You all have families also, and we aren’t SEALs anymore. There’s no obligation to come.”
Zach snorted. “Are you giving us an honest-to-God out? Where was this concern over letting us make our own choices when we had to tandem jump out of that helicopter because we didn’t have enough bail-out parachutes for everyone? As I recall, you told me to?—”
“You say that as if staying in the helicopter with a failed engine was an option,” Adrian said, and I had to bite back a giggle.
“You know I’m coming, jackass,” Zach said. Nate and Gabe echoed the sentiment.
After agreeing to meet in Birmingham in the next three days, the former SEALs ended the call, and Adrian turned to me. “Can Elias make it to Birmingham that soon? Seriously? If he needs more time, we can take it.”
That flutter again. Damn it. “He’ll be bouncing off the walls by tomorrow,” I said. “It’s going to be a long drive, but we can manage with?—”
“Lots of stops,” Adrian said. “I promise.”