15. Santorini
Santorini
Nikolai
MacLeod’s Aegean looks like something built for people who believe sunlight is a birthright.
Whitewashed buildings step down the cliffside in clean terraces, their blue shutters thrown open to a sea so bright it seems impossible after our recent crossing.
Bougainvillea climbs the walls in violent pink bursts. Stone paths curve between suites, courtyards, and shaded seating areas arranged to face the caldera, where the Aegean glitters beneath the early sun with no memory of what it carried us through.
It is beautiful.
That makes it worse.
I stand near the upper terrace while the rescued women are brought inside one by one, wrapped in blankets and wearing borrowed flip-flops, blinking against the daylight.
Behind them, the sea stretches open and harmless.
In their eyes, it is still a route. A threat.
A place men use to make people disappear.
Beauty does not erase what happened. It only proves how easily horror can travel beside it.
Brian MacLeod bought this property as a luxury retreat.
Victor turned it into a temporary safe house before the paint had fully cured.
Secure gates. Private road. Fast access from the marina.
Multiple exits. No neighboring buildings close enough for easy surveillance.
A view that should be for tourists and honeymooners, not women learning how to breathe without permission.
Steve coordinates the arrival with Crew and Jax, placing security before comfort because comfort is worthless if the perimeter fails. Cole checks the lower access road.
Dimitry speaks quietly with the women who understand Arabic, keeping his hands visible and his body angled away unless they choose to approach him.
Janice is already working. She should be sitting down. She is stubborn.
Her movements are careful in a way that tells me she’s hurt, though she’s doing an excellent job pretending otherwise. Her face has the pale determination of a woman who has decided pain is an administrative inconvenience.
Liberty is beside her, jaw set, passing supplies, recording names, and keeping the women talking softly while Jan checks pulses, hydration, pupils, breathing, bruising, and shock response.
They move with care.
No sudden touches. No orders barked across the room. Every blanket offered before it is placed. Every question asked in a voice low enough not to corner anyone.
Solace notices.
Naturally.
She stands just inside the main room with my jacket still around her shoulders, watching Jan kneel beside the youngest woman from the container.
Solace’s hair is tangled from salt and wind, her face drawn with exhaustion, but her attention remains on everyone else.
Even now, she tracks who is trembling, who will not drink, who keeps looking toward the doors.
I know that look.
A person who has been rescued but has not yet stopped rescuing others.
I cross to the table and pick up a bottle of water. When I bring it to her, she looks surprised, as if basic needs have become something other people get first.
“For you,” I say.
She takes it slowly. “I’m fine.”
“No.”
Her mouth opens, perhaps to argue.
I hold her gaze.
After a second, she drinks.
Small victory.
Across the room, Janice glances over and gives me a brief nod before returning to her patient.
Approval, or warning.
With Steve’s wife, perhaps both.
Solace lowers the bottle. “I should help.”
“You already did.”
“There are still women missing.”
“Yes.”
Her fingers tighten around the plastic.
I do not soften the truth. She would hear the lie inside it if I tried.
“But these women are here,” I say. “They need you alive more than they need you moving.”
She looks toward the terrace, where the sun has climbed high enough to turn the white walls almost blinding.
After the port, after the container, after a locked room with no handle on the inside, this place must feel unreal.
It feels unreal to me, and I have slept in worse places than most men survive.
Steve’s voice cuts through my earpiece.
“Perimeter secure.”
Crew answers from below.
“Boat’s hidden. No tail.”
For the first time since Mytilene, the air inside the property changes.
Not safe. Not yet. But less hunted.
Solace closes her eyes briefly as the sounds of the room settle around us, women breathing, water bottles opening, Jan’s calm voice, Liberty’s pen moving across paper.
When she opens them again, she looks at me.
“Is this what safe looks like?”
I glance at the blue sea, the white walls, the armed men at every entrance, and the women shaking beneath clean blankets.
“No,” I say. “This is what the work looks like before safe.”
MacLeod’s Aegean, Santorini, Greece. 0700 hours
Breakfast is laid out across the long table on the shaded terrace because Janice insists the women need food before showers, sleep, or questions.
She is correct.
There is bread still warm from a local bakery, thick Greek yogurt, honey, boiled eggs, fruit, olives, soft cheese, grilled vegetables, rice, lentils, tea, coffee, and pitchers of water and fruit juice lined in neat rows.
Nothing complicated. Nothing heavy enough to upset empty stomachs.
Enough choice that no one has to ask permission before taking something.
That matters more than most people would understand.
The women sit slowly, uncertain at first, waiting for instructions that do not come. Liberty helps one of them fill a plate. Jan stays close, watching hands, color, breathing, the way each woman drinks and swallows.
Steve stands near the terrace entrance with his phone against his ear, speaking quietly to Victor, while Jax and Cole keep the outer paths covered. Crew has disappeared toward the lower gate.
Solace moves among the women as if she has known them for years instead of hours.
She translates when she can, gestures when she cannot, pours tea, breaks bread, and places honey beside a woman whose hands shake too badly to reach for it herself.
One of the younger women catches her wrist and holds on.
Solace stops immediately, lowers herself into the chair beside her, and listens while the woman speaks in broken pieces.
She gives everything.
Attention.
Warmth.
Patience.
The last of whatever strength survived the port.
She keeps nothing back.
I do not understand people like that.
In my world, giving everything gets people killed. You ration energy. Information. Trust. You do not leave the gate open unless you want enemies inside the wire.
Solace appears to have no gate.
That should make her careless.
It does not.
It makes her dangerous in a way I am not used to measuring.
Steve ends his call and crosses the terrace.
“Victor’s pulling everything Grayson recovered from the tracker data. Routes, pings, repeated stops.”
I look away from Solace.
“There may be a warehouse on Santorini.”
Steve’s attention sharpens.
“You know it?”
“Years ago.” I set my untouched coffee down. “Old smuggling route. Eastern side of the island, near an access road used for service deliveries and private transfers. It was used to hold women before they were moved to yachts.”
His jaw tightens.
“Still active?”
“I don’t know.”
“But possible.”
“Yes.”
Steve looks toward the sea, then back at me.
“Give Victor the location.”
“I will.”
Steve doesn’t ask how I know. HAVEN has my file, and Dimitry has already told them enough about the years I’ve spent tracking routes like this. He only asks the question that matters.
Across the table, Solace looks up.
She has heard enough to understand.
As expected.
Her hand remains wrapped around the younger woman’s, but her eyes find mine, sharp despite exhaustion.
“There are more women,” she says.
I do not lie to her.
“Possibly.”
She starts to rise.
I stop her with one look.
“Eat first.”
Her chin lifts.
“Nikolai.”
“Eat,” I repeat. “Then shower. Then sleep.”
“I’m not fragile.”
“No,” I say. “You are depleted.”
Steve’s mouth twitches like he knows better than to step into this.
Solace glares at me, then sits back down and reaches for a piece of bread with the air of a woman declaring war through carbohydrates.
Good.
Anger is useful.
Across the terrace, sunlight flashes off the white walls and turns the sea almost silver. The women begin eating. Slowly. Carefully. As if their bodies need convincing that no one will take the food away.
Solace stays with them, sharing tea, touching hands, listening.
Always listening.
I give Steve the warehouse coordinates.
Then I watch Solace give away another piece of herself and wonder how much one woman can offer before nothing remains.
MacLeod’s Aegean, Santorini, Greece. 0730 hours
Solace catches me watching her from the edge of the terrace.
She doesn’t look away. Most people do.
Instead, she picks up a plate and begins filling it from the breakfast table. Bread. Eggs. Olives. Cheese. Fruit. Yogurt with honey spooned over the top. Too much food for herself, which tells me immediately it isn’t for her.
I narrow my eyes. She notices.
“You can sit down, you know,” she says, carrying the plate toward me. “The guards aren’t coming here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” she agrees, stopping close enough to hand me the plate. “But I know you haven’t eaten since before Mytilene, and unless Russian men are powered entirely by suspicion, you need breakfast.”
Steve, traitor that he is, looks amused from the other end of the terrace.
I take the plate because refusing would create a scene, and I do not create scenes over bread.
“Sitting makes me vulnerable,” I say.
Solace’s mouth curves, tired but sharp. “Being human makes you vulnerable. Sit anyway.”
I look at the chair. Then at her.
She lifts her eyebrows.
I sit.
Her smile is small, but the victory in it is disproportionate.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For proving you’re not furniture.”
“I am difficult to move.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
I pick up a piece of bread and eat because she is watching me with the grim focus of a woman who has decided my calorie intake is now a humanitarian priority.