CHAPTER 68
Special K
A group of men rush toward us, their reflective all-black uniforms making it too easy for us to see them with our night vision tech.
One. Five. Nine. Twelve—more than we expected outside. When one of them starts spraying bullets wildly, the rest join in.
But we rule the night. We take out all of them from a safe distance. Every man drops dead.
It’s like shooting Russian fish in a barrel.
There’s movement inside, so we make our way toward the McMansion, spreading out to cover more ground. I know we’d prefer to avoid any more surprises, if at all possible, but that’s not always the way operations unfold.
I’m just glad I’m here with the best of the best—my own brothers.
A high-pitched female yelp cuts through the night air. Not a full scream. I run in through the unlocked glass doors leading from the pool area and back patio, slipping inside and hanging back in the shadows.
It’s a stupid move, I know, and I’m never the kind to make stupid mistakes in small-scale insertion and extraction operations. But in the heat of the moment, I thought the yelp came from Frankie.
Stupid, and wrong.
That wasn’t Frankie. I see a panicked older woman run through the darkened room toward the same doors I entered. I let her go. She’s unarmed and crying.
“Bro.” I hear Cal’s soft voice in my comms earpiece at the exact same time there’s a soft thud followed by a guttural grunt off to my left.
Cal’s just shot a man with his sound-suppressed pistol. I watch my brother collect the man’s comms. “I almost broke a nail saving your ass. You know how important my nails are to me.”
In my night vision goggles, I can see that this place is an imitation castle.
Literally. It’s been built by someone with a hard-on for Vlad the Impaler.
I forget what the blueprints called this area of the house—a great room?
Whatever its name, it looks like Nosferatu’s rumpus room.
The whole place is right out of a Dracula movie.
But there’s no sign of Frankie. She could be anywhere.
My heart slams against my ribs. I do my best to tamper down the thought that I’m too late. That’s she’s already dead. That I should’ve broken out of that jail and tracked her. That I should never have let her out of my sight.
And to think—my knee-jerk reaction was to assume the worst of Frankie. I thought she used me and threw me away, like Harper did. The truth is that my head has been so far up my ass that I couldn’t see that she left because she thought it would protect me and my family.
Frankie’s not Harper. Harper’s only priority is herself.
Frankie’s the real deal—loving and smart and insanely beautiful. She’s the only woman for me. She’s the only woman I’ll ever want.
I may not know where she is, but I do know who she’s with.
Cal tells us to split up to search for Frankie. I step into what is clearly the central hallway on the main floor. I make my way about halfway down. That’s when I decide to draw him out. I speak his name aloud.
“Nikolai Koslov.”
I don’t shout the words. My voice doesn’t bounce off the fake castle walls. But it’s loud enough to attract attention, and I immediately hear the sound of military boots on the stone floors. The footsteps are headed my way.
“Nice one, little brother,” Evander complains in my earpiece.
“How many Russians can one Lake Tahoe mansion hold, anyway?” Finn complains.
“Time to find Frankie,” I say, just as an entire team of heavily armed commandos come around the corner and right at me.
“Welp, it’s holy racket time, Declan,” Finn says in our shared comms.
Declan’s voice whoops and hollers in my ear. “Finally! I thought you were never going to ask! Hold on to your balls, boys!”
Declan barely finishes his sentence when a huge explosion rocks the building, and the entire castle jumps like there’s just been a major earthquake.