Page 107 of Velvet Vaughn

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Got it.” Tyler’s voice cracked triumphantly through the speaker. “Property’s registered to a shell called Meramec Holdings LLC, which traces back through two more shells to Curtis. Satellite imaging shows a cabin with a dock out back and one gravel access road in from Route 100. I’m sending the coordinates to your dash now.”

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.”