Chapter 23
Ella
“No!” I screamed, watching helplessly as the jet began racing down the runway. My knees felt like they were going to buckle beneath me as the reality hit—they had my daughter. My baby. “Nora!”
I took off running, futilely attempting to stop the plane.
Not even thirty feet, and Jake caught me around the waist. I was lifted off the ground and turned towards him.
His strong arms wrapped around me as I sobbed uncontrollably.
The jet rose into the air, its lights disappearing into the night sky, taking my heart with it.
“Ella, listen to me,” Jake said urgently. I looked at him; his eyes were fierce with determination. “I put a tracker in Nora’s boot yesterday. The one with the loose insole, she’s always complaining about, I stuck it under it. We can follow them.”
I stared at him, barely comprehending his words through my panic. “A tracker? You—”
“After Mikhail warned us about his father, I took precautions,” Jake explained, wiping tears from my cheeks with his thumbs. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you more.”
Hope flickered within me, fragile but alive. “We can find her?”
“We will find her,” Jake promised, setting me back on my feet.
Mikhail approached, his face a mask of cold fury. “We need to move. Now. My father won’t expect us to follow so quickly.”
The drive back to the ranch was a blur. I sat rigid in the passenger seat, staring at the tablet in my lap where a small red dot pulsed steadily—Nora, flying away from me with every passing second.
“They’re heading east,” Kane noted from the backseat, looking over my shoulder. “Not north toward Russia.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, my voice hoarse from crying. “Why wouldn’t he take her straight to Moscow?”
Mikhail’s jaw tightened. “Because he’s not stupid. He knows we’d alert authorities and have the flight tracked. He’ll take a more circuitous route.”
Back at the ranch, we gathered in Jake’s office, the tension thick enough to cut with a knife. Rory had set up a larger monitor displaying the tracker’s signal, which was now moving steadily across a map of Canada.
“Toronto,” Declan said, studying the trajectory. “They’re heading towards Toronto.”
Mikhail’s phone buzzed, and he stepped away to answer it. When he returned, his expression had shifted.
“That was my contact in Moscow,” he said flatly, eyes boring into the center of the table.
“My father isn’t in the city. He’s gone to ground, holed up at his private mansion outside Milton, Ontario.
If the tracker is to be believed, that’s where they’re taking Nora now.
My contact says there’s a blizzard building in the region—whiteout conditions as of this morning.
Commercial flights are being grounded, and roads are impassable in places.
He’s not stupid. He knows the storm buys him time, and he can wait it out in relative comfort while the rest of us are scrambling. ”
The silence in the room was immediate and total.
I could almost feel the collective calculation, the way each of us cycled through the implications of this new information.
Outside, the wind had picked up, rattling the windowpanes as if to punctuate Mikhail’s words.
The idea of Nora, my tiny, resourceful, stubborn daughter, trapped in some elaborate estate in the middle of a Canadian whiteout, was almost too much to process.
I pressed my palms flat to the desk and tried to center myself, but the mental images kept coming, of her alone, afraid, maybe cold, maybe hungry, surrounded by strangers who saw her as nothing more than a pawn.
Jake spoke first, his voice brittle with urgency. “How many men does he have at the mansion?”
Mikhail answered immediately, as if he’d already tallied the numbers.
“Eight on staff, all ex-military. The estate is walled and monitored. He’s had the security system overhauled twice in the past year.
I doubt they’re expecting a direct assault, but there’s a panic room, and he’s certainly paranoid enough to use it if he feels threatened. ”
Declan leaned forward, gesturing to the monitor, which was still pulsing with the red dot. “If they’re hunkered down in the storm, that’s our chance. We can’t beat them there, but with the storm, we could at least get onto the grounds unseen; we would have the element of surprise.”
“We don’t have vehicles equipped for this,” Rory muttered. “Not for those roads—not in this weather.”
Jake looked at me, and I realized he was waiting for my input.
It struck me, then, that this was no longer just his operation, or Mikhail’s vendetta, or even a security nightmare for Declan and his team.
It was, as always, my responsibility. Nora was my daughter, and the time for panic had long since passed.
I cleared my throat, surprised at how steady my voice sounded.
“We have less than 8 hours before the worst of the storm hits in Ontario, 2 hours here. If we leave now, we can reach the mansion in 7 hours. But we’re going to need more than just guns and bravado—we need an actual plan.
We need a way in, and we need to know the layout. ”
Mikhail nodded, already dialing another number. “I can get blueprints—give me ten minutes.”
“And if the roads are blocked?” Rory asked, skepticism clear across his face. “How do we get there?”
“We fly,” Jake said, and for a moment I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t. “We charter a helicopter. If the storm holds, they won’t be expecting air traffic, and we can drop in close to the estate.”
Declan was already halfway down the hall, phone to his ear, calling in favors and burning through contacts at a speed that would have made our father, Tomas MacGallan, weep with pride.
Kane was at the whiteboard, drawing possible entry points on a rough sketch of the mansion’s perimeter.
Everyone moved with the unspoken understanding that time, once again, was not on our side.
I looked at the map, then at the red dot passing at the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and made a silent vow to Nora, wherever she was: I was coming for her. There was no blizzard in the world, no fortress or army of ex-KGB mercenaries that could keep me away.
Mikhail finished his call and looked up, his eyes meeting mine. “He’ll wait out the blizzard,” he said. “And then he’ll move her—probably to Europe, if not directly to Russia. Once he makes that jump, it becomes exponentially harder to find her.”