Chapter 5
Five
Grace watched her words land. Magnus’s face went through emotions she couldn’t look at for long. She’d braced for anger. She got the expression of a man realizing the ground he’d built his life on had a fault line running straight through the center.
The rain hammered against the truck’s windshield, each drop exploding into a dozen smaller fragments before being swept away by the wipers. The thump-thump-thump rhythm matched the painful beating of her heart.
She pressed her palms harder against her thighs, feeling the cold vinyl of the seat through her soaked jeans, using the discomfort to anchor herself in the present instead of drowning in the past.
Magnus sat frozen, his knuckles white where they gripped the steering wheel, the tendons standing out like cables under his skin. A muscle in his jaw ticked once, twice, then he put the truck in gear.
The mechanical precision of his movements terrified her more than screaming would have. This was Magnus containing something volcanic, packing it down with the same discipline he’d used to face wildfires. But fires eventually found their oxygen.
He drove without speaking, without looking at her. The truck’s engine knocked rhythmically, still protesting its abuse from the chase. Steam wisped from under the hood, mixing with the rain to create ghostly tendrils that the wind tore apart.
She didn’t ask where they were going. Didn’t dare break whatever fragile control was keeping him from exploding.
He wasn’t yelling. The silence was so much worse.
Magnus drove through town without looking at her.
Past the harbor, past the fishing boats and processing plants, across the Bridge to the Other Side where Unalaska sprawled along the bay.
Grace counted the windshield wiper strokes, using the numbers to keep from spiraling.
Oliver needed her functional, not falling apart.
Magnus pulled up to a building just steps from the beach. He got out without a word and left the door open behind him.
Grace sat for a moment, rain drumming on the roof. The smart move was to leave. Not run — she was done running — but handle this alone. Get to her cabin, grab her equipment. Keep Magnus out of Lars’s world.
But Magnus was already in Lars’s sights. Leaving wouldn’t protect him. It would just guarantee they both failed alone.
She forced herself out of the truck. Her ankle twinged where she’d turned it during the chase. The stairs to the apartment felt like a walk to the gallows.
Inside, Oliver was everywhere. His rumpled bedding on the pull-out couch. Lego pieces on the floor. On the side table next to the couch, a framed photo of Oliver and Magnus, squinting into the sun, Oliver mid-laugh.
Magnus paced the living room, the bay stretching gray and endless through the windows behind him. He’d shed his wet jacket, revealing a flannel shirt dark with blood along the collar where a cut on his temple had bled down his face. His knuckles were already purpling from the fight.
“Start talking.” His voice came out dangerously quiet. “From the beginning. And don’t you dare lie to me.”
The command landed hard, but she’d expected it. She’d rehearsed this conversation a thousand times in her head over the past ten months, but every carefully prepared explanation crumbled under his controlled fury.
Give him the truth, the parts he needs to know. Don’t make excuses. Don’t ask for forgiveness. Just give him the intel. Make him understand the enemy.
She forced the words through a throat that wanted to close. “Lars Eriksson owns Eriksson Arctic Technologies. It’s a front. He’s one of the largest illegal arms dealers in the world.”
Magnus stopped pacing.
“He deals in more than just weapons,” she continued, her old analyst instincts taking over. “Money laundering through a network of shell companies. Human trafficking, when it suits his purposes. He has senators in his pocket. Federal judges. At least three members of the National Security Council.”
The taste of bile rose in her throat as she cataloged Lars’s crimes. Each word felt like glass in her mouth, but she forced herself to continue.
“He finds people with specific skills and makes them offers they can’t refuse. Sometimes it’s money. Sometimes it’s threats. Sometimes...” Her voice cracked. “Sometimes he finds desperate fourteen-year-old hackers on the dark web and promises them a future.”
Magnus’s eyes narrowed. “You.”
“Me.” The admission tasted sour coming out. “I was brilliant with computers and stupid about everything else. By the time I understood what I was really building for him, people had already died because of the code I’d written.”
She pressed her thumbnail into the side of her index finger until it hurt to keep from breaking, then kept going.
“We can’t call anyone.” She pressed forward, needing him to understand the complete picture. “He owns people in every agency. Anyone we contact will report back to him. Going to the authorities would be signing our death warrants. Oliver’s death warrant.”
Magnus’s jaw tightened at Oliver’s name. “So, we’re alone.”
“Completely.” She stayed where she was, fighting the urge to pace, to move, to do something with the energy crackling under her skin. “I’ve spent eight years building a virus that would tear his world apart. I was close. Days away from deploying it.”
“Eight years.” Magnus’s voice held something sharp. “You’ve been planning this for eight years.”
“Since the day I escaped when I found out I was pregnant.” The memory of that night threatened to overwhelm her.
“That’s why I was here. Alaska was supposed to be the final staging ground.
Remote enough that he wouldn’t think to look, connected enough that I could upload everything when the time came. ”
Behind her, she heard Magnus’s breathing change. Deeper. More controlled.
“But life can’t cut me a break.” The words came out broken, her carefully maintained control finally cracking. “A tourist snapped a photo of me and posted it to Instagram. Years of perfect discipline undone by a hashtag. And Oliver is paying the price.”
She pressed her hands flat against her thighs again, using the pressure to keep herself grounded. The guilt threatened to pull her under like a riptide. Her son. Her beautiful boy was in the hands of a monster.
“Stop.” Magnus’s voice cut through her spiral. “Whatever is running through your head won’t get him back.”
The bluntness of it shocked her into focus. He was right. Breaking down wouldn’t help Oliver.
Magnus moved closer, and she could feel the heat radiating from him, smell the rain on his clothes.
“So, you’re telling me,” his voice was rough as gravel, each word carefully measured, “that the only way to get my son back is to trust you?”
There it was. The impossible question with only one answer.
Grace forced herself to meet his gaze. She could see the rage. But she could also see how scared he was, and that’s what made her believe he’d help.
“Yes,” she said, pouring every ounce of conviction she possessed into that single word.
Magnus stared at her for a long moment, that muscle in his jaw working.
“He won’t kill him,” Grace said, grasping for the one piece of hope she could offer. “Not yet. Lars needs me for something. Oliver is leverage to get me back. That’s our window. That’s what we have to use.”
“Leverage,” Magnus repeated the word like it was poison. “He took my son as leverage.”
The possessive hurt more than any accusation could have. Magnus had earned the right to call Oliver his son through ten months of breakfast conversations, homework help, and bedtime stories. She’d forfeited that right the night she’d walked away.
“I know every system he uses,” she said, switching back to tactics because emotion would drown them both.
“Every weakness in his security. Every person in his organization. I can get Oliver back, but I can’t do it alone.
I need someone Lars doesn’t know about. Someone completely outside his network. ”
“Me.”
“You.” She turned to face him fully. “You’re invisible to him. Have no connection to his world. He won’t see you coming.”
Magnus laughed, but there was no humor in it. “A day ago, I was teaching Oliver to play cornhole in the backyard. Now you want me to what—take on an international arms dealer who laid me flat without even breaking a sweat?”
“I want you to help me get Oliver back.” She met his gaze steadily, unflinching. “Everything else is just details.”
The silence stretched between them, taut as a wire. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet but firm.
“I don’t trust you.”
Fair enough. She’d expected worse, honestly.
“But looks like I need you,” he continued. “And right now, that has to be enough.”
Grace let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Not relief. There was nothing relieving about any of this. But the ground under her feet felt solid for the first time since she’d watched that van pull away.
“What do you need?” Magnus asked, and she heard the shift in his voice.
“First, we need to get to my cabin. I have equipment there—computers, encrypted drives, everything I’ve gathered on Lars. Then we need to move fast. He’ll reach out to me somehow or send a team to collect me, expecting me to come quietly in exchange for Oliver’s safety.”
“Maybe with this?” Magnus pulled a burner phone from his pocket and tossed it to her.
“What?”
“Your man Lars dropped that next to me after kicking the snot out of me.” Magnus took a deep breath, but flinched and touched his side. “You’re not handing yourself over. That won’t get Oliver away from him.”
“No. I know.” The fear burned off. What was left underneath was sharper. “But I’m done running. Done hiding. He took my son. And I’m going to destroy him for it.”
Magnus studied her for a long moment. His expression remained unreadable. She longed to break his stare, but she held still, tension radiating up her esophagus until she feared she’d vomit on the worn wood floor.
“Okay, Annie,” he said simply, and her tension eased. “Then we’d better get started.”
She cleared her throat and squeezed her eyes shut in a cringe. “My name’s Grace.”
“Of course it is.” Magnus scoffed and headed toward the door. “Let’s go get our son.”
Our. She didn’t miss that. Forgiveness was too much to ask for. They were allies now, united by purpose if not trust.
And somewhere out there, flying through gray skies toward an unknown destination, Oliver was waiting for them to come.