Wu pulls me down with a hiss. “Stay down or we’ll be seen.”
I squat back down with Wu and Gareth, my blood hot and boiling. I raise the binoculars to my face and aim them at the window of the lodge again. I see her sweet mouth part in a pained cry as he pulls her hair again, and then I feel Wu’s fingers digging into my arm.
“Wait,” Wu says, but I don’t want to wait. It was hard enough to sit still on the plane to Poland, hard enough to keep myself sane on the drive into Carpathia—all hills and horse tracks in the Jeep we’d rented, to avoid Carpathia’s fledgling and as yet ineffectual border control. It was hard to take the time to survey the lodge, hard to pick our way though the steep rocks and thick trees to scale the first fence, hard to stop and wait every time the drones flew overhead. And the very minute we were able to surveil the lodge itself, I see Greer being manhandled by that monster?
I don’t have very much wait left in me.
Thankfully, Melwas releases Greer, and I can breathe again, think again.
“There’s a service entrance on the bottom level, on the side closest to us,” Gareth says. “Just a lock, no guard.”
“There might be cameras or motion sensors,” Wu says.
“So we go when something else is moving up there,” I say, swinging my binoculars down to the road. “The break-in at his house should be happening any moment.” Gareth had arranged the ruse on our way here, a decoy burglary at his presidential palace in the Carpathian capital, a couple hours’ drive from here. We hoped it would be enough to lure Melwas away, or at least some of his security team.
A noise from Gareth has me pointing my binoculars back at the house, and I see the light to a room downstairs flip on. Melwas and Greer are alone, and he’s stripping off his jacket.
“Bastard,” I swear. I’ll kill him, I swear I’ll kill him if he actually attempts to rape her.
Rape.
God, that word. It hung like a fog over the Carpathian mountains during the war, this ever-constant violation ripping through the towns and villages Melwas claimed. The faces of those women—some of them barely budded past childhood—dirty and tear-stained and blank. We’d go in and get them medical help, assure them they were safe, but they still shied away from us, flinched at our male voices. Ash and I had made sexual assault a key issue during the campaign for exactly that reason. For all the women we were too late for.
I won’t be too late for Greer.
Greer’s face is almost as blank as the ones I remember from the war. She has her forehead pressed to the glass and I see her taking slow, deliberate breaths, as if she has to remind herself how to breathe, how to keep her body working.
And then he touches her again, one hand on her throat and the other hand on her cunt. He squeezes and a tear slips out from under those long, dark lashes of hers.
I’m to my feet before Wu can stop me, moving out of the cover of trees to the lodge, and I’m almost to the service door before he catches up to me. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demands in a low voice. “What happened to the plan?”
“Fuck the plan,” I snarl. “I’m going in there before he hurts her.”
“Getting killed isn’t going to help—”
“Boys,” Gareth’s voice comes in over the earpiece. “Melwas is leaving.”
“What?” I ask.
“He’s leaving the room. They bound her with tape and gagged her and turned off the lights. Now he’s going upstairs with his men…it looks like they’re going out the front door. They must have heard about our little diversion back at the capital.”
We hear a car engine start, then a second, then a third, the cracking of tires over branches and gravel.
“How many men are left that you can see?” I ask Gareth.
“One by the front door,” she replies. “And I think one stayed outside Mrs. Colchester’s room.”
Wu looks at me. “Two? Could we be that lucky?”
“If he thinks the perimeter has enough security…if he thinks there’s no way we’d know about this place…” I close my eyes for second, thinking. “I can handle two men. You two stay out here, out of sight. If you don’t hear from me, or if the First Lady and I aren’t out within an hour, then you’ll know you need to re-evaluate the plan.”
“Just like old times, eh?” Wu says as he hands me a handgun. The cool weight of it in my hand is both familiar and strange, a familiarity that belonged to another man, another life. And for a moment, I wonder if Greer’s captivity is my karma. If happiness will always be denied me for all the terrible things I’ve done, all the lives I took in the name of war or freedom or loyalty.
“Just like old times,” I say as I tuck the handgun away and Wu hands me a rifle. I level it at the door’s lock and shoot.
I took out the first man by the front door as silently as possible, a silent, choking struggle until he went limp in my arms. I didn’t kill him, even though there was a part of me that itched to, that itched to kill anyone who had any part in this plan to hurt Greer. I didn’t stop myself because I knew it was wrong, though, I stopped myself because Ash wouldn’t want it. Not only would it be worse for us if we were caught, but Ash hated taking lives. Hated it.
And I hated the feeling after, the guilt, the post-battle misery, and I had no urge to experience that feeling again after all these years. So I simply choked the man until he was unconscious and bound and gagged him with the zip-ties and tape I had with me for just that purpose.