35. Xander
Xander
Iwanted to jump in Shade’s car and head in the direction the camera had seen her and a woman in black go. A woman who looked suspiciously like my mother.
Instead, he’d all but muscled Vik and me into the back of the car before tearing back for Matteo’s underground communications room.
Everyone was gathered by the time we arrived.
The triplets, Juniper, Josie, and Jolene, were front and center in the large monitor.
Judging by the background, the three hadn’t left Accardi Tactical and were still in the room we’d spent so much time in earlier in the day.
“The truck left less than two minutes after y’all did,” Josie explained as Juniper typed frantically on her keyboard. “And her phone’s GPS is still pinging from her wi-fi, so I’m assuming she left it somewhere in the house.”
“Isn’t she chipped?” Savage wanted to know. “I thought y’all just had to pull up the satellite data to track us.”
Jolene shook her head. “Operatives are the only ones with permanent trackers. The rest of y’all‘s MC circle had the option, but most rejected them. Support staff wouldn’t have a reason to be tracked, and it’s not like these things aren’t pricey.
I hate to say they’re cost prohibitive, but honestly, it’s not like we’re outfitted with bullet proof vehicles the way the head honchos are, either. ”
“They took my truck. Can’t you track the GPS?” Vik asked, pacing behind me.
“Working on it,” Juniper said, not taking her attention away from her screen. “But it looks like someone had a jammer in their bag of tricks, and it’s interfering with the signal. Let me see something else …”
She trailed off, and the screen split. “I’m pulling up traffic cameras. We know the plate number, but a dark blue pickup in Texas isn’t exactly hard to come by, and there isn’t CCTV covering even half of the roads they could have taken. With traffic, trying to see all the numbers won’t be easy.”
“There,” I pointed to one of the feeds on the screen. Junie had played back the few that were near the house at the time Andrie had left. “You see that. She stopped for four seconds at the stop sign.”
“The angle isn’t right to see a plate … the car behind them is too close. Are you sure?”
“Positive.” All of us sounded off at once. Only Andrie would abide by all traffic laws while being held at gunpoint.
Sure enough, as Juniper followed the truck onto the main highway, then quickly onto the interstate, she was able to keep tabs on the truck until it made its way out of the city.
Again, only Andrie’s diligence in keeping to the exact speed limit let us know we were watching the correct truck.
We were able to speed up the process by doing the math and anticipating when she’d be passing the next camera.
Irina—if I was correct—had Andrie double-back several times, clearly suspicious of a tail, but eventually, they ended up in a suburb. They turned down a road that had several offshoots into large neighborhoods, with yet a few more roads past them that were larger private residences.
“Fuck,” I swore when Juniper stopped and sat back, clearly at the end of that avenue of tracking.
“Don’t give it up yet,” Grimm said, coming to stand next to me. His confidence was something I greatly needed at the moment. Every second Andrie was in the presence of the monster who birthed me was another step closer to her end, and I knew it.
“Anyone of note with property in that area?” he asked. “There’s no way she could have snuck out of Europe and had the time to hunt down a vacant property.”
“No,” Jolene shook her head, looking over Juniper’s shoulder to look at her screen.
Josie tapped the screen. “But look at this. What do you think the odds are she booked a house through a website?” she asked almost absentmindedly.
“There are only two listings.” Junie started typing vigorously at her keyboard again. “Let me hack into their security cameras. It’ll be faster than me breaking into the site’s records.”
It took a few minutes, but Juniper was finally able to pull up the security cameras for the first house.
The outside camera showed several vehicles, making hope rise that we’d found them, but a quick look at the interior ones showed a kid must have “borrowed” a parents’ credit card in order to book it because a full party of underage and over-imbibed teens filled every screen.
She cut the feed and switched to hacking into the other house while Josie made an anonymous call to the local police station to report the rave.
Seconds ticked by, with Vik pacing behind me, while I stood frozen, unable to move.
I knew more than anyone what Irina was capable of, and the thousands of scenarios racing through my head weren’t possibilities; they were past experiences.
I’d watched her knock out teeth with a hammer—one at a time.
She’d taken ears, tongues, fingers, toes.
Once, I’d watched her castrate a man after he’d been forced to rape another victim of her games.
Electrocution, waterboarding, hanging a person on a wall using nothing but hooks through their own skin … she’d done them all.
I’d realized before I’d even hit puberty that Irina got off on torture, not sex.
She didn’t care about age, race, or gender either.
Other people didn’t matter to her. The only person I’d seen evoke even a hint of emotion was my grandfather.
And even then, I wasn’t sure how far down her affection for him went, though he loved his only child blindly, only laughing at her exploits and killing anyone who dared say anything negative about her.
“Here we go,” Juniper said, pulling me from my thoughts.
My eyes went back to the screen, relief almost making me sag when I saw her, alive and breathing, before horror had me freezing again.
She was bound to a chair, naked, though she sat as regal as a queen. Irina’s back was to the camera, but there was no mistaking it was her.
Not waiting for a second longer, Vik and I ran from the room, ignoring the shouts to stop. We could call on the way if needed, but no way in hell were we waiting now that we had a location.