Chapter 11
Skye
By the time we reached the safe flat, I had managed to convince my breathing to return to something resembling normal, but there was nothing I could do about the awareness still clinging to my skin.
The kiss had followed me all the way from Croft House, settling beneath the adrenaline and fear until every time Irish shifted beside me in the SUV I remembered the roughness of his hand against the side of my neck and the way whatever restraint existed between us had disappeared almost instantly.
He had kissed me like a man who had spent days arguing with himself and finally lost, which made his declaration that it could not happen again almost laughable.
I had not believed him when he said it, and judging by the fact that he had left his knee pressed against mine for the entire drive, I wasn't convinced he believed himself either.
Still, Isla was somewhere behind those walls, and no matter how thoroughly Callum O'Brien had complicated my ability to think clearly, I refused to let attraction become another distraction between me and bringing her home.
Storm opened the flat door before Maverick had finished climbing the stairs, apparently having received enough of a report from Raze to know we had confirmed more than a delivery route.
Cipher was already connected to the main screen, Eli beside him with three monitors glowing in the darkened room behind them, while Trigger crossed directly to the table and began unloading photographs and equipment.
Hawkeye disappeared toward the rear room with his crossbow case without drawing attention to himself, leaving Irish and me standing just inside the doorway while everyone else shifted immediately into the practiced rhythm of people who had been through this kind of night before.
I envied that for perhaps half a second.
They knew what to do with fear once it followed them home.
They turned it into maps and photographs and plans.
Mine was still sitting like a stone beneath my ribs.
Storm crossed toward me first. “Was it her?”
I nodded before I trusted myself to speak. “Yes.”
“Certain?”
This time I didn't hesitate. “I saw her face.”
Storm's expression softened, but she did not offer the useless reassurance I had heard from so many people over the last three weeks. Instead, she put one hand briefly against my arm and said, “Then we know where she is.”
“For now.”
Irish's gaze touched me from across the room at the same moment the words left my mouth.
I saw recognition there. He understood exactly why for now mattered after the security response we had triggered, and whatever existed between us disappeared behind the harder expression he wore whenever the mission took over.
Cipher broke the silence. “I want every detail from the moment the van arrived.”
Trigger took one side of the table, Irish the other.
Raze dragged a chair around backward and straddled it while Maverick positioned himself near the screen.
I remained standing for a moment before realizing everyone was waiting for me as much as Irish, because I had been close enough to identify Isla and knew the building better than anyone else in the room.
That realization steadied something inside me.
I pulled off my jacket, folded it over the back of a chair, and sat.
For the next forty minutes, we rebuilt the night piece by piece.
Trigger gave times. Hawkeye called out camera movements from the rear room before returning with his notebook.
Raze described the van. Storm logged security changes.
Irish covered our movement through the trees, leaving out exactly how close we had been behind the oak and everything that happened afterward.
I did the same. Nobody needed to know what his hand had felt like around my waist while a guard passed within feet of us, and they certainly did not need a detailed explanation of what happened once we were back inside the SUV.
Judging by the way Raze's mouth twitched every time he looked between us, he already knew enough.
Cipher eventually froze a frame from the long-range camera Hawkeye had mounted near the service road. “This is the window?”
“Yes.”
The image was grainy, the angle poor, and most of the upper floor disappeared behind branches. Cipher advanced several frames until a figure appeared between the slats of the blind.
My stomach turned over.
“Stop.”
He did.
Isla's face occupied barely a fraction of the screen, blurred enough that someone who had never met her could reasonably question the identification.
I couldn't. The shape of her jaw was thinner than it should have been, and her hair hung farther around her face than she normally wore it, but I knew the slight tilt of her head and the way one shoulder sat fractionally lower than the other after a cycling accident years ago.
I had sat beside that woman through bad clients, worse dates, influenza, business loans, two office moves, a burst pipe that destroyed half our fabric library, and enough takeaway dinners to qualify as a nutritional crisis.
A few weeks behind a locked door could not make her a stranger to me.
“That's Isla.”
Cipher enlarged the image.
The quality deteriorated.
“I can run facial comparison against public photographs.”
“You don't need to.”
“I do if we're building something authorities can't dismiss.”
That pulled me back from the edge of impatience. I looked at him, then nodded. “Fine.”
Eli started the comparison while Cipher moved to another camera angle. A staff member appeared behind Isla less than three seconds later, and even through the poor image I could see the immediate change in her posture.
Isla recoiled only slightly when the staff member appeared behind her, but the movement was enough to tell me she expected whatever came next.
My hands curled against the edge of the table before I consciously realized I was doing it, and Irish's attention shifted toward me immediately.
He had developed an infuriating ability to notice every reaction I would rather have kept to myself.
“Skye.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you aren't.”
I turned toward him. “Do you want me to lie?”
“No.”
“Then I'm not fine.”
His expression did not change, but something gentler entered his eyes.
“I can still work.”
“I know.”
The answer mattered more than it should have. He did not tell me to sit out the rest of the briefing or decide that emotion made me incapable. He simply acknowledged it and moved on.
Cipher changed the image again. “Here's the part I don't like.”
“Only one part?” Raze muttered.
Storm elbowed him without looking away.
Cipher displayed the timeline from the moment Skye—me—had moved toward the west wing. “Security increased twenty-eight seconds after you left the observation point. One guard came from the rear entrance. The second originated from here.”
A red marker appeared near the west side of the building.
I leaned closer.
“That's not on the current plan.”
“No,” Cipher said. “Which means either they have another exterior door we haven't identified or somebody crossed through the concealed section and exited from a service point not shown on the drawings.”
I opened the archived plan on my tablet. “There used to be a laundry entrance along that wall.”
Irish moved closer, standing beside my chair.
“Used to?”
“The 1968 renovation sealed it.”
“Supposedly,” Maverick said.
I looked at the old photograph again and found myself lingering on the word supposedly, a distinction that had become increasingly useless where Croft House was concerned.
“If the original opening still exists,” I said, “they may have disguised it from the outside rather than actually sealing it.”
Hawkeye leaned over the plan. “Can we reach it unseen?”
“Not from the route we used tonight.”
“Another route?”
I enlarged the grounds. “Possibly through the old kitchen garden. There should be a low wall running parallel to the western boundary, but I don't know whether it survived the landscaping.”
Maverick pulled out his phone. “I can find out by morning.”
“Morning is too late.”
Every head turned toward me.
Irish's expression hardened slightly. “Skye.”
“No.” I pushed my chair back and stood. “They know something happened tonight. Maybe they didn't see us clearly, but their security changed, and Isla disappeared from that window the second someone entered the room. We wait until morning and they could move her before sunrise.”
“We don't know that.”
“We know they transport residents in medical vans.”
“Aye.”
“We know one of those vans is sitting on the property.”
“It left thirty-one minutes ago,” Cipher said.
I looked toward the screen.
“What?”
“Hawkeye's exterior camera caught it departing after we pulled out.”
My pulse jumped. “Was Isla in it?”
“We don't know.”
“Then why are we sitting here?”
I reached for my jacket.
Irish stepped between me and the door.
He did not touch me.
That somehow made the barrier more infuriating.
“Move.”
“No.”
“Callum.”
“We don't know who was in that van.”
“Exactly.”
“And charging back there because you don't know isn't a plan.”
“Standing here isn't one either.”
His jaw tightened. “Nobody said we're standing here.”
“What are we doing, then?”
He glanced toward Cipher. “Show her.”
Cipher opened a different window.
Three live feeds appeared across the screen, one from a road camera, another from a motorway junction, and the third from a petrol station. The same medical van appeared in each image, proving the team had never stopped tracking it after we left Croft House.
I stared at the screen.
“You're tracking it.”
“Aye,” Irish said. “Hawkeye tagged it before the delivery team went inside.”
I looked at Hawkeye.
The prospect shrugged slightly. “Magnetic GPS unit.”
“You could have told me that in the car.”
Irish's voice stayed level. “You were busy telling Maverick to turn around.”
Heat rose beneath my skin. “And then?”
Raze coughed into one hand.
Storm glared at him.