Chapter Twenty-Five
Anja glanced at the screen to see a new pin light up on the map. “Send me the overhead imagery too. Recent as you can get it. I need to know what we’re walking into before we get there.”
“Okay, I’ve got satellite from three days ago. Sending now.”
The image loaded on her phone, propped against the dash where Remi could see it too.
It was a modest cabin set back from the shore with a single gravel drive curving up from the tree line.
A detached shed sat near the water’s edge, and there was enough clearance around the structure that anyone approaching from the front would be visible from nearly a hundred yards away before they ever reached the door.
“We don’t go up that drive,” Remi decided. She trusted his expertise, having no doubt he’d carried out this kind of approach before, in places considerably worse than a Missouri lake shore. “There’s tree cover running along the east side, thick enough to mask movement almost to the house.”
“Agreed.” Anja eased the Escalade off the county road onto a rutted turnoff half a mile out that was more a deer path than an actual road. She tucked the vehicle behind a stand of cedars where it wouldn’t be visible from the water or the drive. “We go in on foot from here.”
They geared up in the shade of the trees, Remi wincing when the Kevlar vest cinched against his bandaged ribs, though he never slowed. He strapped his sidearm into its holster and fitted his comm piece into his ear.
“You good?” she asked, watching him test his range of motion.
“I’m upright and armed. That’s the bar today.” He flashed a tight smile that didn’t quite mask the strain underneath it. “Don’t worry about me. Let’s get him out.”
Anja fitted her own vest and checked her weapon.
Beneath the focus and the training that had carried her through years of homicide work and CObrA Securities missions, fear kept trying to claw its way to the surface.
She tamped it back down. There would be time to feel all of it later, once Leo was breathing and whole in front of her again, and not one second before.
“Comm check.”
“Reading you clear.” Remi’s voice came through her earpiece. “I’ll take the front. If anyone is guarding the door, I can put him down quickly.”
“I’m going in through the roof.” Anja studied the cabin through a gap in the trees.
A dormer window jutted from what had to be an attic space, a sturdy oak growing close enough to the eastern wall that its branches nearly brushed the shingles.
“That tree gives me a clear line to the attic window. If they’ve got eyes on the ground floor and the front door, nobody’s watching the roof. ”
“You’re climbing a tree in a Kevlar vest?”
“I’ve done stranger things this week.” She managed the faintest smile, though it cost her more than she wanted to admit. “Give me four minutes to get into position once you’ve cleared the front. Then we go.”
Remi nodded once, and a look passed between them that didn’t need words. It was the understanding of two people who’d decided they’d do whatever it took, pay whatever the cost, to get Leo out of that house alive.
They split off through the trees, Remi angling toward the front of the cabin while Anja circled wide toward the oak, keeping to the shadow of the tree line until she reached the base of the trunk.
She hauled herself up branch by branch, working toward the point where the canopy brushed the roof.
“Contact,” Remi murmured, barely audible. “One man, front door, alert but not expecting company.”
Silence stretched taut, and then a sharp exhale was followed by the muffled sound of something heavy settling to the ground.
“Down,” Remi reported. “Tied and gagged. Moving to the secondary position.”
Anja eased herself along the thickest branch until it groaned faintly beneath her weight, close enough now to the dormer window that she could see the dust coating the glass.
The latch on the inside hung loose. Hallelujah.
She braced one boot against the trunk, reached across the gap, and pried the window open with gentle pressure until it gave.
“I’m in position,” she murmured. “Going through the attic now.”
“Copy. On your mark.”
The attic swallowed her in dust and gloom the second she dropped through the window, old insulation crunching beneath her boots.
Forgotten boxes sat scattered beneath a single bare bulb.
Anja walked straight into a thick cobweb and stumbled back, batting at the silken threads.
Once she cleared them off, she scanned the floor for the access hatch and found a square panel set into the ceiling of what had to be the cabin’s main room below.
Through the gap where the hatch didn’t quite seal flush, she caught the murmur of voices, enough that she could make out fragments without straining: “cooperative . . . just a few more hours . . .”
Her pulse hammered against her ribs, every instinct screaming to move faster, but she forced herself to listen for the pattern of footsteps below, mapping where each man stood before she committed to anything.
“At least two additional hostiles inside,” she breathed into the comm. “I don’t have eyes on Leo yet.”
“I’m at the north window,” Remi murmured back. “I’ve got a partial view. He’s on the floor, corner of the room, hands bound. Alive.”
The single word slammed into her, relief and terror tangled together so tightly she couldn’t separate them. It took everything she had to steady herself. “On my mark.” She eased the hatch open another inch, gauging the drop below, the distance, the angle.
“Copy.”
She counted three heartbeats, widened the gap in the floor enough to fit through, and dropped.
The fall lasted less than a second, but it felt suspended and weightless.
The room rushed up to meet her in a blur of motion.
She hit the floor already moving, weapon up, catching the nearer guard mid-turn with an expression of pure, uncomprehending shock before her strike caught him across the temple hard enough to drop him where he stood.
The second man spun toward the sound, hand diving for his own weapon.
Anja closed the distance before he cleared the holster, driving her shoulder into his chest and following it with a blow that folded him over the arm of a chair, unconscious before he hit the floor. She zip-tied them both.
Two down. Five seconds. She hadn’t even broken a sweat.
“Anja!” Remi’s alarmed voice cracked sharp through the comm. “Curtis has a gun. He’s reaching for Leo.”
She whirled around, weapon raised, and found Curtis Lennox hauling Leo upright in front of him, one arm locked hard around Leo’s throat, a pistol barrel digging into Leo’s temple.
Leo’s face had gone gray beneath the dried blood and bruising, his eyes finding hers across the room with an expression she never wanted to see on him again as long as she lived.
“Well.” Curtis’s voice had none of its usual warmth left in it. “You, my dear, are a bit of a surprise.”
“Let him go, Curtis.” Anja kept her weapon trained, her voice steadier than she felt. Every muscle in her body screamed at the sight of that gun biting into Leo’s skin. “It’s over. You know that.”
“I know nothing of the kind.” His grip tightened, and Leo hissed. “I’m going to walk out that door, and you’re going to let me, or I put a bullet in the only thing in this room I actually love. Your choice, Anja. I promise you, I’ll make it.”
“You won’t.” She held his eyes, refusing to let a single flicker of doubt show through. “You’ve spent years building something you were too careful and controlled to ever risk on a moment like this one. You don’t throw everything away on a bullet you can’t take back.”
“Even careful men run out of options eventually.” He shrugged. “Watch me.”
“Curtis.” Leo’s voice came out rough, barely more than a whisper, but it cut through the standoff all the same. “Don’t.”
For one endless second, nobody moved, the whole room balanced on whatever Curtis chose to do next. Anja’s finger stayed against the trigger guard, every instinct in her screaming for a shot she didn’t dare take with Leo’s head in the line of fire.
Then Curtis began backing toward the door, dragging Leo with him, his eyes locked on Anja the entire time. She matched his movement step for step, weapon never wavering, not daring to close the distance, not with that pistol pressed against Leo’s head.
He hit the threshold and shoved through it backward. As soon as his shoulders cleared the doorframe, he collided hard with something solid.
Remi.
The gun went off wild, the shot burying itself in the wall as Remi’s hand clamped down over Curtis’s wrist and wrenched the weapon free in one brutal motion, followed half a second later by a vicious elbow strike to his head. Curtis collapsed onto the porch boards in a heap.
“Clear.” Remi’s breath was ragged with exertion.
Leo’s knees buckled the instant Curtis’s arm fell away from his throat, and he crumpled to the floor before Anja had even made it halfway across the room. He landed hard on his side, chest heaving, blood and bruises stark against the morning light spilling through the windows.
“Leo.” She dropped to her knees beside him, hands hovering over his battered face, terrified to touch and more terrified not to. “Talk to me. Look at me.”
His glassy, unfocused eyes found hers, and his split lip pulled into something that wanted badly to be a grin and mostly failed.
“You came in through the ceiling.” His voice came out wrecked, disbelieving, threaded with humor even now. “Who does that?”
A laugh tore out of her before she could stop it, half sob and entirely involuntary. She dropped her forehead against his, both shaking and breathing as if they’d just run a marathon instead of surviving the worst day of either of their lives.
“You’re an idiot for walking in there alone,” she managed, her voice cracking around the words as she took out a knife and cut through the bindings around his red, abraded wrists.
“I know.” He shook his hands to wake them. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just be alive.” She pulled back far enough to look at him properly, every bruise and cut, the dried blood crusted along his jaw and arm. He’d almost certainly torn Remi’s stitch job. She fought the urge to gather him up and never let go. “Can you move? We need to get you out of here.”
“I think so.” He shifted, wincing hard, and she helped him upright, bracing him against her shoulder while he found his balance.
Behind them, near the doorway, Remi slid down the wall to sit heavily on the floor, one hand pressed to his side, his pale face slick with sweat despite the cool morning air drifting in through the open door.
“Remi.” Alarm spiked through Anja’s chest all over again. “Are you hit?”
“No.” He waved her off with visible effort. “Just tapped out. Turns out disarming a homicidal maniac twelve hours after getting stabbed takes a bit more out of a guy than the doctor probably would’ve recommended.” He managed a faint, exhausted grin. “I’m okay. Just need a minute.”
“Take your time.” Anja kept one arm braced under Leo’s shoulder, easing him toward the doorway, her eyes flicking constantly between the two men, unwilling to fully release the tension coiled through her body until both were safely away from this cabin and the lake outside it.
They’d made it three steps toward the porch when a roar sounded behind them, low and furious and unholy. Anja spun in time to see Curtis stirring on the porch boards, one hand fumbling beneath his jacket.
A second weapon.
“Curtis!” Anja’s shout tore out of her as her weapon swung back around, but he’d found his feet and leveled the pistol. Curtis’s face was a bloody pulp and his eyes, wild and cornered and entirely finished with restraint, locked onto Leo with unmistakable intent.
“No!”
Her body moved on pure instinct. She threw herself across Leo’s battered frame and drove them both off the porch to land on the hard ground as a gunshot split the air.
She braced for the impact, for the tearing pain, for whatever came next in a life that might end right here, right now, on a stranger’s property beside a lake she’d never wanted to see again.
It never came.
Instead, Curtis Lennox tumbled backward off the porch steps and into the grass below, his sightless eyes staring at nothing.
Anja looked up, heart slamming, and found Remi still slumped against the doorframe, his own weapon raised, his hand shaking with the effort of having lifted it at all, but his eyes fixed and certain on the man he’d just killed.