Chapter 278 Leo's Compensation
ADRIANA
He went upstairs and I stood in the corridor and thought about Lana, whether she was still crying, if anyone had thought to feed her. Was she in the dark or somewhere with light? Did she understand on some infant level that the arms she needed weren’t there?
I pressed both hands flat against the wall for three seconds and breathed and then straightened and went to the back exit to wait.
Hazel was already there. She looked at me with the quiet efficiency she brought to moments when there was nothing useful to say. She’d arranged two vehicles already, ours and a second one with guards, enough that if this was a setup we had the numbers to manage it.
Elijah came back at a near-jog, which told me he’d run on the stairs. The doctor was going to have opinions in the morning.
“Leo’s handling it,” he said. “I told him you had a lead and we were following it and to keep the party moving until we got back.”
“How did he react?”
“He nodded and turned back to the guests.” Elijah looked at me. “He’s your son.”
We loaded into the car. The man was in the back between two guards, wrists secured, looking out the window with a lost look. I sat in the front with Elijah driving and Hazel in the back beside the prisoner.
“You owe Leo money, by the way,” Elijah said, pulling out of the service road.
I turned to look at him. “What?”
“I may have told him that you would give him whatever he asked for in exchange for managing the party for the rest of the night.”
I stared at him. “You told him that.”
“He needed an incentive. He’d had an emotional day.”
“He would have done it without the incentive. He would have done it because he understood what was at stake.”
“Yes,” Elijah said. “But now he’ll also do it cheerfully.” He kept his eyes on the road. “And it’s coming out of your account.”
“It is absolutely not—”
From the back seat, Hazel made a sound that was definitively a suppressed laugh.
“Whose side are you on?” I said.
She pointed at me without turning her head.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Still comes out of your account,” Elijah said.
I faced forward and said nothing else about it because arguing about Leo’s compensation on the way to find Lana was clearly not where my energy should be, but I filed it under things we would be returning to at a later date.
The roads changed as we drove. The pack gave way to the outer territories and the outer territories to the stretch of land between our borders and the wolves’ territory. A wide, contested, largely uninhabited expanse that had existed as a buffer since the land dispute years ago. The dispute had started because the Rogues had taken the wolves’ land during the war and the Alpha at the time had decided that telling the truth would cost more than absorbing the accusation. Ancient politics creating current geography.
No one came here without a reason. Which made it an excellent place to hide something.
Or someone.
“How much further?” I said.
The man in the back seat looked out the window. “Another twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.”
“Closer to twenty or closer to thirty?”
“Depends on the road. The last section isn’t paved.”
Elijah’s jaw tightened slightly beside me. I put my hand on his arm briefly and felt him regulate.
The sun was beginning to come up when we stopped, the sky lightening at the eastern edge, the dark going from black to a deep grey-blue, the first suggestion of morning pressing against the dark from below. It had been four hours since we left the house. I hadn’t realized it had been that long until Hazel checked her phone and told us.
Four hours. Lana had been away from me for most of the night.
We got out of the cars and the guards flanked the prisoner and I came to stand in front of him.
“If you run,” I said, “you won’t get far and it will hurt more than staying.” I took out the knife I’d changed into my belt when I’d gone upstairs. “Walk in front of us. Show us where we’re going. Don’t say anything to anyone inside until I tell you to.”
He nodded.
We moved into the tree line on foot. The forest was thick here, old growth, the kind that hadn’t been managed in years, branches and undergrowth close enough that we had to move in single file in places. Elijah stayed close behind me. The guards spread around us in a loose perimeter.
I could see the cabin through the trees. A structure that had probably been someone’s hunting base at some point, windows dark except for a single light visible through the left side panel. Someone was inside and they were awake.
I grabbed the prisoner’s arm and pulled him back and put the knife against his lower back, low enough that no one watching from the cabin could see it from the angle.
“Is that it?” I said, very quietly.
He nodded.
“How many people are inside?”
“Two. Maybe three.”
“Which is it?”
“Two for certain. Possibly a third who came later.”
“And Lana?”
“She should be inside. That’s where they were keeping her.”
I looked back at Elijah and communicated the information in a look and saw him relay it silently to the guards. They began positioning, moving through the tree line to cover the back and sides of the cabin, slow and quiet, taking longer than urgency wanted but exactly as long as was necessary.
I turned back to the path and kept moving.
My foot caught on a root. I went down on one knee but I caught myself before I hit the ground fully, but for one second my grip on the prisoner loosened and that second was all he needed.
He wrenched free and ran toward the cabin, screaming before he’d taken three steps.
“Greg! Kill the baby and run! We’ve been made!”
The word kill hit me like a physical thing and I was already moving before I’d processed it. Elijah was already past me, the guards already converging from three directions on a cabin that had just gone from a light in one window to a light in every window and the sound of movement inside.