CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Striker settled his hand on his sons’ shoulder, giving it a light squeeze. He knew what the young man was feeling and he could remember feeling the same.
“She’ll be safe when this is done. Lacroix is following the plan exactly as we intended. He believes he has the upper hand and will have Jennifer over a barrel.”
“I want to bring her back,” whispered Grayson. His father stared at him. Moose turned, frowning at the young man that was to be his son-in-law.
“What did you say?” he growled.
“She deserves to see his face. She deserves to deliver the final blow and be free of whatever claim he has on her mind, soul, or body. I hate it. I hate that I’m even thinking about it.
But how many of us received wounds, were taken prisoner, saw someone’s face that we just wanted gone? And then we made it happen.”
“She deserves to have this,” nodded Gunner. “I normally would say no fucking way but you’re right. She’s been chasing away the demons from this man for years.”
All of the men looked at Moose, then back at Grayson.
“Brother, you know we will protect her. Nothing will happen to her. Nothing,” said Kai. Grayson looked at Moose. He wouldn’t do it if her father refused.
Moose took out his comms satellite phone.
“Dad? Is everything okay?” asked Jennifer.
“Pack a bag honey. You’re coming to finish this.”
Hours and days later…
Kyle Lacroix understood leverage better than he understood mercy.
Leverage had kept him alive in alleys, back rooms, and border towns where a man’s promise meant less than the knife under his coat.
Now, with every road tightening around him, he needed something powerful enough to draw Jennifer into the open.
Without it, she would let the net close, and he would be finished.
He thought first of money, then secrets, then the few people Jennifer might still risk herself to protect.
Each idea collapsed beneath the same problem: she had learned him too well.
She expected threats against friends, expected forged messages, expected bait.
The only vulnerability that remained was the place where she had disappeared to mend herself—the little convent in the south, and the women who had sheltered her there.
The thought carried him backward to the coarse arithmetic of his youth. Find what a person loved. Put a hand around it. Squeeze only hard enough to make them listen.
He had spent years pretending he had outgrown those instincts, dressing them in better clothes and speaking with polished restraint, but desperation stripped him to the bone. By midnight he had a plan, and by dawn he was moving.
He left northern France beneath a sky the color of old pewter, driving a stolen delivery van whose white panels bore the faded outline of a bakery’s name.
The flat country opened around him in long wet fields, their furrows shining after rain. Poplars stood in disciplined rows beside the road, and distant church spires rose from villages huddled low against the wind.
He avoided the broad routes and their toll cameras, choosing departmental roads that narrowed between hedges and farm walls.
Tractors forced him onto muddy verges. Milk tankers groaned past at dawn.
In hamlets scarcely marked on his map, shutters opened above boulangeries and the smell of warm bread drifted into the cold air, ordinary and almost insulting.
Every face made him brace for recognition.
At a fuel pump outside a village square, an elderly man stared long enough to make Kyle’s hand settle near the pistol beneath his jacket.
Then the man merely pointed to a loose rear lamp and advised him to fix it before the gendarmes noticed.
Kyle thanked him, drove away, and laughed once, sharply, at the windshield.
South of the chalky northern plains, the land began to roll. Fields of wheat gave way to orchards and stands of oak, and the roads threaded through villages built of pale stone.
Moss softened the walls around old cemeteries. Rusted crosses leaned above family plots, and war memorials occupied the center of nearly every square, stern names cut into gray granite.
He slept the first night in the van behind an abandoned mill, where a narrow river moved black beneath bare branches.
Rain tapped the roof in patient fingers.
He dreamed of doors opening and Jennifer standing behind each one, not frightened, not surprised, simply watching him as if she already knew the ending.
By morning, his cash had dwindled to a handful of notes and coins. Food, fuel, false plates, and the small bribes required to keep moving had consumed more than he had admitted. He needed money quickly, but using old contacts would expose his route.
The answer stood beside the next village square: a narrow bank with lace curtains upstairs and only one clerk visible through the glass.
He watched from a café while church bells marked the hour.
Farmers came and went, leaving mud on the tiled floor.
A woman deposited the contents of a shop till, and the clerk disappeared briefly into a rear room.
Kyle let the scene arrange itself in his mind, not as a set of instructions but as a familiar rhythm: entrances, pauses, fear, escape.
Minutes later he entered with his collar raised and his face obscured.
The pistol appeared only long enough to empty the room of argument.
His voice remained low, almost courteous, while the clerk loaded cash into a canvas shopping bag.
No one resisted. The entire robbery lasted less time than the bells had rung.
He fled along a lane roofed with plane trees, the branches whipping shadows across the windshield.
Behind him there were no sirens, only the shrinking steeple and a flock of startled rooks.
The money was less than he had hoped, but the ease of taking it warmed him more than the heater. The old skill had not deserted him.
He changed vehicles near a canal, leaving the bakery van beneath dripping willows and taking a compact gray car from an unlocked farm shed.
For two days he moved through the heart of the country, passing green river valleys, crumbling dovecotes, and manor houses half hidden behind cedar trees. He never entered a town large enough to possess a ring road.
Burgundy received him with long slopes stitched in vines and villages clustered around square bell towers. The stone changed color there, warming from northern gray to honey and rust.
Cellar doors opened onto narrow streets, and hand-painted signs promised wine, cheese, and rooms for the night. Kyle bought none of them; comfort felt too much like delay.
At roadside cafés he kept his back to the wall and listened for his name.
Televisions murmured above counters, cycling through weather, football, and politics.
Once, a news report displayed a blurred image that might have been his, but the patrons continued eating.
No one turned. No one whispered. He began to suspect that the country was not hunting him as fiercely as Jennifer wanted him to believe.
The suspicion hardened into confidence. He stopped wearing the cap pulled low over his brow.
He asked for coffee in his own voice. In a village market he stood beneath striped awnings while vendors weighed apples and wrapped goat cheese in paper, and when a gendarmerie car rolled slowly past, he did not look away.
Farther south, autumn lingered in the woods, waiting to make an appearance in just a few short weeks. Beech leaves were reading to burn copper along the roadside, and morning mist pooled in hollows where cattle stood like dark stones.
The air smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke. Each ridge revealed another scattering of red roofs, another church, another road unwinding toward the blue distance.
He crossed into rougher country, where extinct volcanic hills rose beyond broad pastures and stone walls divided the land.
The villages seemed carved from the same dark rock as the mountains.
Wind worried the grass on the high plateaus, and isolated chapels crouched beside roads that twisted through forests of pine and chestnut.
Fuel consumed the first bank’s money faster than expected, and the gray car developed a shudder that worsened on climbs. Kyle counted his remaining notes in a lay-by overlooking a valley and felt the first pinch of panic.
The convent was still days away. He needed another reserve, enough to buy silence, transportation, and whatever provisions a siege might demand.
The second bank stood in a market town where the main street curved around a fountain green with age. It was larger than the first but nearly empty in the long quiet after lunch.
Kyle watched a clerk lock the outer cash drawer and saw a manager usher an elderly customer into an office. He interpreted every detail as proof that fortune had chosen his side.
This time he entered without disguising his walk or stooping his shoulders.
His face remained shadowed, but his posture announced command.
A security guard reached toward his belt and froze when Kyle spoke.
The room obeyed him because fear moved faster than courage, and within moments he was gone with a leather satchel heavy against his hip.
A young teller sounded the alarm sooner than he anticipated. Sirens rose while he was still threading the old quarter, and blue lights flashed against shuttered windows behind him.
He abandoned the car in a walnut grove, crossed a drainage ditch on foot, and stole a mud-spattered utility truck from a vineyard. For an hour he drove with his heart battering his ribs, then the road behind him fell silent.
The narrow escape should have frightened him. Instead it fed the dangerous conviction that he could still master events through nerve alone.
He replayed the guard’s hesitation, the manager’s pale face, the clean opening in traffic that had appeared exactly when he needed it. Luck, he told himself, was simply another name for superiority recognized too late.
As he descended toward the south, the climate loosened.
Roofs flattened and brightened to terracotta.
Cypress trees stood like black flames against the hills, and vineyards marched across stony slopes in precise green lines.
Even in the cooler season, herbs released their resinous scent beneath the truck’s tires, mingling with diesel and dust.
He skirted the Cévennes along roads pressed between steep valleys and chestnut forests.
Streams flashed silver below old stone bridges.
Villages clung to hillsides, their houses stacked above one another beneath slate and tile, and laundry stirred from balconies over lanes too narrow for two vehicles to pass.
In the evenings, smoke lay blue across the ravines.
Kyle stopped at a roadside shrine where candles trembled behind glass and spread his map across the hood. The convent lay beyond a final chain of low mountains, isolated among olive terraces and scrub.
He traced the approach with one finger, noting a service lane, a dry streambed, and a wooded rise from which he could watch the compound.
He bought rope, bottled water, canned food, batteries, and a pair of heavy work gloves from shops in separate villages. The purchases looked harmless when divided among different counters.
In the truck he arranged everything with ritual care, placing the pistol within reach and the stolen cash beneath the seat. Preparation steadied him.
During the final night he slept in an olive grove overlooking a dark valley. The trees twisted from the earth like arthritic hands, their pale leaves whispering whenever the wind changed.
Far below, a village bell counted the hours. Kyle pictured the nuns startled from prayer, imagined their obedience, and rehearsed the message that would bring Jennifer running.
At dawn, the southern sky cleared to a hard, flawless blue.
The convent appeared first as a pale seam on a distant hillside, then resolved into a low complex of stone walls, red roofs, and one modest bell tower.
Around it, terraces stepped down through olives and lavender gone gray for the season.
Nothing moved except swallows cutting through the bright air.
He left the truck among pines and approached on foot through the dry streambed.
Needles cushioned his steps. The convent wall rose ahead, patched with lichen and warmed by the sun, and beyond it came the faint clang of a bucket or kitchen pan.
The ordinariness of the sound made his plan feel inevitable.
The service gate stood open. Kyle paused, offended by the carelessness, then entered the courtyard with the pistol low beside his thigh.
A stone well occupied the center. Rosemary overflowed from clay pots along the cloister, and white sheets hung motionless on a line. He expected a cry, a dropped basket, the quick submission of unarmed women.
Instead, men rose from behind the parapet, stepped from the chapel doors, and emerged from the shadowed arcade in disciplined silence.
They wore plain clothes and body armor, rifles already trained on him from every angle.
More appeared above the roofline and along the garden wall until the quiet convent seemed to have produced an army from stone.
Kyle stopped beside the well. For the first time since leaving the north, confidence deserted him completely.
The long roads, the empty villages, the unrecognizing faces, even the easy money—all of it rearranged itself into a corridor he had been permitted to follow.
No one had missed him. They had watched him come.
A woman stepped from the chapel, sunlight catching in her hair as the armed men shifted to make space.
Jennifer wore no habit and carried no weapon that he could see.
She did not look startled to find him there.
She looked prepared, as though she had been waiting at the end of every road he had chosen.
His hatred arrived before fear could silence it.
It sharpened her name in his throat and made his hand tighten around the pistol, though he knew he could not raise it and live.
Jennifer regarded him across the courtyard with the calm he had come to despise most, the calm that denied him power.
For the first time, Kyle understood that he had not brought leverage to the convent. He had delivered himself.