Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
“Clear!”
Ash didn’t slow as he moved past the first room. The house smelled like stale coffee and overheated electronics. That wasn’t new. Neither was the pregnant silence ringing in their ears.
It was what raids sounded like just before hell broke loose.
By the time Chase shouted from two rooms over, Ash was already moving.
Chase had two men on the floor, face down, hands stretched above their heads. Ash yanked the zip ties from his pocket and moved in to secure them.
Cipher’s people folded fast—two in this room and a third located in an upstairs bedroom. They were the kind of men who knew enough to be useful to the terrorist but were smart enough not to die for him.
Within minutes, Con handed them off to the FBI agents waiting outside, along with two hard drives and a server unit that made the agents’ eyes light up.
It should have felt like a win. But the only thing Ash felt was the anxiety balled in his gut.
He stood in the yard, the cold night air cutting through his gear, and tried to figure out why the back of his neck hadn’t stopped prickling since they’d left base.
He balled his fists at his sides in an attempt to ground himself in the moment—and stop the flood of memories lobbing into his brain like a missile strike.
Melina.
He remembered loving her. Remembered the heaviness of it. The certainty.
But the feeling itself was distant now—like something he could observe through a wall of glass.
He hoped that distance held. Because the last time his instincts had gone this tight, this quiet…
An op had unraveled. And she hadn’t come home.
This op wasn’t the same at all. Blackout Charlie had come here to do a job, and everything had gone exactly as planned. There was nothing wrong.
Then why the fuck did his veins itch this way?
Across the yard, Con and Chickie stood on the outer edge of a group of FBI agents milling around the property, taking photos and collecting evidence. Con pulled out his phone and his whole body stiffened.
The kind that moved through a man’s body when he heard something—or saw something—he didn’t like.
Con lifted his head and fixed his stare on Ash.
His gut plummeted straight through the ground.
In a few quick strides, he crossed the yard. “What.” His flat tone held a command.
Con turned the phone so he could see the screen. Six messages from Elin, the timestamps running close together like she’d sent one every few minutes.
Before he even skimmed the words, he already knew what they were about.
Ellory’s gone.
She left base.
Vehicle’s missing.
She won’t answer her phone.
I don’t know where she went.
I’m sorry.
Halfway through, the words stopped making sense and the buzz in his ears turned into a swell that swallowed him. He read the messages again.
“First timestamp’s two hours ago.” His same flat tone was a thin layer over the torment taking over.
Two hours. She’d had a two-hour head start into whatever she’d walked into. Nobody knew where the hell she was. And he was standing in a yard hours from base with Cipher’s lackeys being loaded into a van not ten feet away.
He took off for the van, boots thundering on the ground. He reached inside, locking his hand around one guy’s neck. He half-yanked him out of his seat and thrust his face into his.
“Where the hell is she? Tell me what you know!”
A strong arm banded around his middle and yanked him back while another peeled his fingers off the guy’s throat.
Con and Chickie dragged him away as the sound of the guy’s explosive coughs filled the night.
Ash struggled against their restraint, jerking his arm to throw off his teammates. In a distant part of his brain, he registered Con ordering the FBI to question them about Ellory.
“Ash—” Con began.
He slashed the air with a hand. “Let’s go.”
Nobody argued. They took off to their vehicle.
But Ash’s mind, his heart—his goddamn soul—was far away.
He piled in the back with the rest of the team with his weapon across his knees and his jaw locked so tight his back teeth ached.
Con was on the phone with Elin before they hit the end of the long driveway, his words clipped and rough as he gathered whatever details existed. Which apparently weren’t many.
Ash listened to the half of the conversation he could hear and tried to keep his head from going to a dark place he couldn’t come back from.
Con lowered the phone, not moving, staring straight forward. “No one knew she was leaving. Elin was the last person who saw her. Ellory told her that she found Cipher’s mainframe.”
His mind went into a nauseated spin. His lips felt cold and numb when he spoke. “She doesn’t even have a gun.”
Sinner twisted in the seat in front of him. “No weapon? At all?”
“No,” he grated out through wooden lips. “She really is an accountant. She’s untrained in self-defense.”
Ash bent forward, fighting to fill his lungs with air. “Before I recruited for Blackout…I-I was in charge of a task force. My bad call got my girlfriend killed.”
Silence throbbed in the van, but outside he heard the low thump of chopper blades as they approached their connection.
“I was too passive then and I’m too passive now,” he choked out.
Sinner gave a rough shake of his head. “You couldn’t have known she would leave, Ash.”
No one spoke, as if anything too loud would cause him to crash out.
“Both times the intel looked solid enough to act on, or in the case with Melina, not act on. Both times I committed to the fucking plan!”
A hand came down on his shoulder and squeezed, but he went on, hot words pouring out.
“I told Melina to wait. I followed protocol. She died because I ignored my instincts. With Ellory…Christ, Ellory is gone. I followed orders, goddammit!”
“You didn’t make a bad call either time,” Con gritted out.
He gave a jerky nod, breathing hard through his nose. “It was the right call…and it still wasn’t enough.”
He was a damn good operative with solid instincts. He’d done the honorable thing both times. He lost people anyway.
And it still felt like something had been stolen from him.
And that was breaking him open.
He jerked his fists in the air, needing violence, but there was nothing to connect with. He pushed hot air through his nose to keep his emotions at bay.
From the front came Con’s voice. “She’s smart. We’ll find her.”
“Elin’s been digging through Ellory’s computer, tracing her steps,” Mason said, the empathy in his tone slicing through Ash.
Before he could react to either statement, Con’s phone vibrated. He turned his head to Chickie who was behind the wheel. “We need in that chopper. Now.”
Ash snapped. “What do you know, Con? What the fuck aren’t you saying?”
“An email just came in. It’s from Ellory’s number. There’s a video attachment.”
Ash dug the heel of his hand into his knee and stared at the floor. Fury and terror fused into something sharp inside him, cutting from his ribs straight through his gut.
Chickie skidded into the parking lot where the chopper waited. He cut the engine, everything dead still as Con pulled out a tablet.
The video loaded and Ash looked at it for exactly one second before he had to look away.
Ellory. Hooded. Hands bound. Nothing on her but her bra and panties, which meant they’d stripped her down and gone through everything and found nothing.
She was sitting straight-backed and her chin was up even though she couldn’t see, and the way she held herself even now… made his chest crack clean open.
His chest heaved, and he had to swipe a bead of sweat away with the back of his knuckle.
A voice attached to an unseen person was gritty and scrambled, not unlike the one that had projected into Times Square when Cipher targeted Izzy.
“Don’t come after me. You do, she dies. Give me twenty-four hours and I’ll send you her location. She’ll be unharmed. You have my word.”
The video cut.
Nobody moved for a second.
Then Con said, low and final, “We’re not waiting twenty-four hours.”
“No,” Ash said. “We’re not.”
Con’s phone buzzed, and he snapped it to his ear. He listened for a beat before putting it on speaker.
Opal’s voice exploded through the vehicle. “A tracker’s missing! She took a tracker when she left.”
Ash’s head came up. “Trace that tracker. Even if he stripped her and moved her to a new location, we’d be close.”
Another voice filtered in. Elin’s voice was frantic. “She wiped some files from her computer. I’m not sure yet what she was researching—or what she found.”
Ash remembered then. The last message he’d sent her. 459.
He drew out his phone and switched it out of airplane mode. It took a few seconds for it to come back online, and when it did, he saw her message.
4592
She’d deciphered his code…and said she loved him too.
He was grappling with hard emotions when Dante’s voice broke into his thoughts.
“I got the tracker. Pulling up satellite now. I’ve got the heat sensor.” A beat of silence, then Dante picked up his head and looked at Ash. “There are three people in there.”
The guys talked over each other.
“The tracker can’t be on her clothes.”
“If Cipher stripped her, he would have found it and destroyed it.”
“She’s got nothing on her.”
Opal’s voice on the speaker cut through his spiral, the sound slightly amused and almost filled with…
Awe.
“I think she swallowed it.”
Every head turned toward the phone Con held.
A smile echoed in Opal’s voice. “The tracker. Before she left, she swallowed it.”
The silence lasted about two seconds.
“That’s—” Sinner started.
“Brilliant,” Opal finished his sentence. “It’s fucking brilliant.”
Ash closed his eyes for one second. Just one.
That was all he’d allow himself to lose his grip.
He opened his eyes and gave the order. “Follow that signal.”
* * * * *
“What kind of plan?” The voice was hoarse, and it sent a chill through her to think that it might be so rough because he’d been screaming.
Possibly tortured.
A shiver ripped down her spine and settled in the pit of her stomach like a black stone. Without her sense of sight, Ellory’s hearing seemed amplified. She turned her head in the person’s direction.
“We move our chairs together and help each other get out of these…are they zip ties?”
He huffed a breath, weighted with a thousand things he wasn’t saying. “Yours might be. Mine are handcuffs.”
She rattled her wrists to check her own and sure enough, there was a metallic clink.
“Dammit.”
“You must be The Accountant.”
She snapped her head toward him. “How do you know that?”
“Because I heard him say it. Before he put you in that chair.”
Her blood iced over. Desperation took hold. “How do we get out of these handcuffs?”
“We’d need to dislocate our thumbs to slip out of them.”
Despair made her dizzy, and she struggled through three revolutions in the darkness of her hood before she surfaced. “Do you know how to do that?”
“I’ve escaped them before.”
She sucked in a breath. “How many times?” she whispered.
“Nine. There’s no point.”
A sob rose into her throat and lodged there.
“It’s not just getting free. It’s also getting out. Then getting away. I’m not making another move until I have a full plan.”
She panted for air, suddenly feeling like there wasn’t enough oxygen inside the hood. Her stomach pitched, and she forced it to settle. The last thing she wanted to do was be sick.
Then it hit her.
The tracker.
“Backup is coming.” Her voice sounded stronger.
“How do you know?”
“I swallowed a tracker.”
“Okay, and?”
“It belongs to a SEAL team.”
“Now we’re talkin’. Let’s dislocate our thumbs.” The noise of chair legs grating on the floor seemed way too loud in the silence.
Anxiety surged in her veins. “I have a hood over my head. I can’t see my wrists.”
“So do I. I’ll tell you what to do.”
“I don’t think I can do it. The cuffs are too tight!”
“Listen to me,” the man said from somewhere closer. “You want out of those cuffs, you’re going to have to make your hand smaller.”
Her pulse roared in her ears. “That’s not possible.”
He slid his chair even closer. “It is. But it’s going to hurt.”
Cold dread slid down her spine.
“What do I do?”
A beat of silence. Then, his words came out steady. Clinical.
“You’re going to feel for the joint at the base of your thumb. When I say go, you don’t hesitate. You force it. Don’t think about it. Thinking will stop you.”
Her stomach flipped. “Force it how?”
“You don’t need details,” he said. “You need commitment.”
Tears burned behind her eyes. “Will I be able to use my hand after?”
“If we stay here,” he said quietly, “that won’t matter.”
She swallowed hard and began to work.
Only seconds later, a cold hand touched hers. She jerked her head around. “You’re free!”
“You will be too in a second. On three. And whatever you hear—whatever you feel—don’t scream.”
She gave a frantic nod, bracing herself. Sweat rolled down her spine.
Slamming noises reverberated through the building. It sounded like doors were blasting off the hinges.
Her heart soared. “It’s the team. They’re coming!”
“One. Two.”
She barely swallowed the scream, and she wasn’t prepared for the pain. She also wasn’t prepared for the second pop that was her other thumb.
A second later, the hood left her face as he yanked it off.
She blinked, shaking, cradling her wrists against her stomach, her arms on fire from the elbows down.
Light sliced under the door, thin and sharp, cutting across the man crouched in front of her.
She registered his build first. Then the world stopped.
“Archer!” The name exploded past her lips.
She stared at him, dumbstruck. His voice had been hoarse and muffled beneath two hoods, but that wasn’t the real reason she hadn’t recognized it.
In her mind, her brother was still somewhere far away from this nightmare.
Her brain had never even considered the possibility that the voice belonged to him.
She jolted to her feet and almost fell over. But she didn’t care if she hit the floor because she was looking at her brother’s face. Eyes she’d looked into her whole life.
He was thinner and older and marked by whatever the last months had done to him. But he was there.
“Ellory.” His voice broke on her name.
She lunged forward and hit him hard enough that he had to catch her. He staggered back a half step, arms locking around her like he was afraid she’d vanish.
She buried her face in his shoulder—
And the door blew inward.