Chapter 8
Eight
The private Stryker Security Force jet was a trap of leather and brushed aluminum, hurtling them toward a battle ten thousand feet above the ocean.
Magnus pressed his shoulder blades against the plush leather seat, but the corporate perfection of this aircraft felt wrong.
All wrong.
This wasn’t how you went to war. Not in climate-controlled luxury with LED mood lighting and a full bar tucked into mahogany panels.
Six hours ago, he’d been teasing Oliver about bedhead hair over scrambled eggs and bacon. Now he was in a plane, flying toward a fortified island complex to steal classified technology from the U.S. government.
The jet leveled off at cruising altitude, the roar of engines fading to a whisper behind soundproofed walls.
The cabin went unnervingly quiet, leaving Magnus with nothing but the soft hum of recycled air and the weight of five pairs of eyes trying not to stare at the woman who’d torn their family apart.
Grace sat three rows ahead, her spine rigid, typing like the rest of them didn’t exist. She hadn’t looked at him once since they’d boarded. She’d answered his siblings’ hostile questions with clipped words, never once cracking under their suspicion.
Now she’d retreated into her work like it was armor.
Like she had any right to shut them out. Like she hadn’t disappeared for ten months while Magnus picked up the pieces of the child she’d abandoned.
The anger was easier than the fear. Cleaner.
“Magnus.”
The leather seat across from him creaked as Gunnar lowered into it. Gunnar’s face gave away nothing, as usual. The few strands of silver at his temples caught the cabin’s soft lighting, and Magnus noticed new lines around his eyes.
“We need to talk,” Gunnar said, his voice pitched low enough that it wouldn’t carry.
Magnus had been expecting this. Had been counting down the minutes since takeoff, actually. Gunnar was nothing if not predictable in his role as protective older brother.
“About what?” Magnus kept his tone neutral, though his jaw ached from clenching it.
“About the fact that you’re betting Oliver’s life on someone who already proved she can’t be trusted.” Gunnar’s intense gaze bore into him. “I need to know your head’s on straight.”
“My head’s fine.”
“Is it?” Gunnar leaned forward, elbows on his knees, close enough that Magnus could smell the coffee on his breath. “Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re letting a woman who broke your heart and abandoned her son call the shots on a suicide mission.”
Magnus felt the familiar surge of defensiveness, the little brother’s instinct to push back against Gunnar’s authority. But Oliver didn’t have time for their usual dynamics. Neither did Magnus.
“She’s not calling the shots,” Magnus said carefully, aware that his voice might carry despite the jet’s ambient noise. “She’s providing intel. There’s a difference.”
“A difference that matters when she’s the only one who knows the target?” Gunnar’s voice held the bone-dry skepticism reserved for bad intel and worse decisions. “When she’s the only one who supposedly knows how to get past Eriksson’s security? That’s not intel, Magnus. That’s operational control.”
Magnus wanted to argue, wanted to defend the choice he’d had no real part in making. But Gunnar was right. They were following Grace’s plan, using Grace’s intelligence, trusting Grace’s assessment of a man none of them had met. It was the disadvantage that got people killed.
“You have a better option?” Magnus asked, meeting his brother’s stare. “Because I’m all ears if you’ve got a way to find Oliver that doesn’t involve her.”
Gunnar’s jaw worked, the muscle jumping beneath stubbled skin. They both knew there wasn’t one. The Rebel family’s considerable resources had turned up nothing on Lars Eriksson beyond what Grace had already provided. The man was a wraith wrapped in shell companies and government black contracts.
“My concern,” Gunnar said slowly, each word measured, “is that you’re not thinking clearly. That you’re letting emotion cloud your judgment.”
“My emotion is the only thing keeping me functional right now.” The words came out rougher than Magnus intended. “Oliver is gone. Taken by a psychopath I didn’t even know existed. So yeah, I’m emotional. But I’m also clear. We use her to get him back, then we’re done.”
“That simple?”
“That simple.”
Gunnar studied him for a long moment, searching for something in Magnus’s expression. Whatever he found must have satisfied him, because he gave a curt nod and started to rise.
“She’s the tool,” Magnus added, even as the words turned his stomach. “The only one that can get us through the door. We use the tool, we get Oliver, and then we walk away.”
It was a lie, and they both knew it. Nothing about Grace had ever been simple. But it was the lie Magnus needed to believe to get through the next four days.
Gunnar returned to his seat, but Magnus could still feel his brother’s concern like a weight between his shoulder blades. Could feel all of their concern, actually. His family had dropped everything.
Bj?rn left his pregnant wife, Astryde abandoned her fishing season, Davis put his and Sunny’s guiding business on hold, and Tiikaan dropped his charter clients to help save Oliver. They deserved better than Magnus’s half-truths and desperate hopes.
But Oliver had to come home. That trumped everything else.
Magnus glanced at his phone’s clock for the millionth time and noticed his phone’s battery was dying. He needed to charge it, needed to maintain communication in case Oliver was somehow able to call him.
He reached for his old firefighter’s backpack under the seat, the worn canvas rough against his fingers. The bag had survived a dozen fire seasons. Now it carried clothes hastily grabbed from the rental and the detritus of a life upended in hours.
His fingers closed around the charger cable, then brushed a familiar worn spine.
He pulled it free without thinking and found himself holding Grace’s battered copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, its pages yellowed and dog-eared, full of her highlighted passages and scribbled margin notes, little glimpses into a woman who’d never really existed.
The first time he’d seen it, she’d been on her front porch in Montana, reading it aloud to Oliver while he colored at her feet.
The setting sun had pulled copper tones from her long brown hair, and Magnus had stood there like an idiot, mesmerized by the sound of her voice wrapping around Dumas’s words about justice and revenge.
She’d looked up and smiled, and his entire world had tilted off its axis.
He’d found the book in Oliver’s bag the morning after she’d vanished. Like she’d forgotten it in her rush to disappear. Or like she’d left it behind on purpose, one more artifact of a woman who’d never really existed.
He’d continued reading it to Oliver after she’d left, just a few pages at a time, like drawing out the story could somehow make her presence stay with them longer, a pathetic hope that maybe her leaving it meant something. That maybe she’d come back for it.
For them.
His hand tightened on the spine, ready to shove it back into the bag before anyone noticed his moment of weakness. Before he had to acknowledge that he’d been carrying her ghost around for ten months like a lovesick teenager.
But he was a fraction of a second too slow.
He glanced up and locked eyes with Grace.
She’d turned to grab something from her bag across the aisle and frozen mid-reach, her gaze locked on the book in his hands. Whatever she’d been holding in place all day just collapsed. The armor, the clipped answers, the rigid spine—all of it gone in a single unguarded heartbeat.
She looked devastated. Her chopped, bleached hair made her pale pallor stand out. Knuckles white on her laptop, throat working like she was trying to swallow glass.
And then she saw him watching her, and the shutters slammed back down. But not fast enough. It lasted maybe a second. But it was enough to knock something loose in his chest that he’d been trying very hard to keep bolted down.
What was that?
She was the one who’d left. She was the one who’d walked away from their—whatever it had been. Their lie. Their fantasy. Their two-month glimpse of a life Magnus had never dared to want.
She had no right to look wounded by the sight of a book she’d abandoned along with everything else.
Magnus shoved the paperback back into his duffel with unnecessary force, the worn pages protesting the rough treatment. He yanked the zipper closed hard enough that it caught on the fabric, requiring him to work it free with angry, jerky movements that drew Astryde’s attention.
His sister’s sharp gaze flicked between him and Grace, cataloging the tension, the charged silence, the way Grace had turned back to face forward with her shoulders locked tight. Astryde had spent years reading crime scenes and suspect behavior. She’d definitely noticed their little moment.
Great. Just what Magnus needed, his sister’s investigative instincts focused on his pathetic inability to let go of a woman who’d played him for a fool.
He finally found the charging cable and plugged in his phone. The screen lit up with a photo of Oliver from last week, grinning as he held up a fish that was almost larger than him. Magnus’s throat closed up.
Oliver had to be okay. Had to be scared but safe, waiting for Magnus to come get him like he always did when nightmares or skinned knees or broken toys needed fixing. That’s what dads did. They fixed things. They kept their kids safe.
They didn’t let their children get kidnapped by arms dealers because they’d been too slow to see the danger coming.
Magnus leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes, trying to push away the image of Oliver’s terrified face and the sound of his voice screaming “Dad” over and over until the van had sped off and taken Magnus’s entire world with it.
But closing his eyes only made it worse. Made him see Grace’s face when she’d spotted the book. That flash of pain that suggested maybe, just maybe, the way she’d left him had cost her something too.
Which was impossible. She’d chosen to leave. She’d made that decision with the same cold calculation she apparently brought to everything else in her life. You didn’t get to walk away and then act wounded when the people you’d abandoned moved on.
Except Magnus hadn’t moved on.
The book in his bag proved that. The way his heart had stuttered when he’d seen her in the bakery proved that. The fact that some traitorous part of him wanted to cross the aisle and demand answers—not about Oliver or Lars or the mission, but about them—proved that.
Magnus must have slept, because the next thing he registered was the shift in engine pitch and the horizon tilting outside the window. He blinked against the light and found O’ahu filling the glass — volcanic ridges sharp against the sky, green valleys carved between razor-edge peaks.
From up here, it looked like paradise. Nothing like the war zone Grace’s intelligence had painted.
They banked away from the populated coastline, away from Pearl Harbor’s white memorial slash against dark water, heading toward the far western reach of the North Shore where the Waianae Mountains met the sea.
Grace didn’t move. She sat frozen, still staring at her computer, though Magnus doubted she was actually seeing whatever was on the screen. Her fingers had stopped their constant movement across the keyboard.
Heath, the pilot from the Stryker Hawaii team, spoke through the intercom. “Beginning our descent. Buckle up.”
Normal words for an abnormal situation. Like they were tourists, not a desperate family about to attempt a treasonous infiltration with a ninety-hour countdown timer on a child’s life.
Below, the mountains gave way to a narrow coastal plain, and Magnus could see their destination — Dillingham Airfield, a single runway flanked by overgrown sugarcane fields and the skeletal remains of old plantation buildings. No control tower. No terminal. Just asphalt and privacy.
Thank God the new Stryker facility was done enough for them to use. Even better, it was completely off the books and under so much secrecy that they’d be invisible to anyone looking for them.
The jet touched down with barely a bump and taxied toward a hangar that looked like it hadn’t seen maintenance since the plantation days, its weathered walls giving no hint of what lay beneath.
From the airfield, they loaded into two unmarked SUVs and drove ten minutes down a narrow road canopied by ironwood trees. The road dead-ended at a gate set into a wall of dense tropical landscaping. The privacy money bought and nobody questioned, on this stretch of coast.
The gate opened without anyone touching a button.
Beyond it, a sprawling estate sat on a manicured bluff above the beach. White walls, deep lanais, and an infinity pool catching the last of the afternoon light. It looked like every other tech billionaire’s Hawaiian getaway.
Heath tapped something on his phone, and the garage door built into the hillside began to slide open. “Welcome to the ghost house. From this point on, you don’t exist.”