Page 25 of Monochrome (ORCA #4)

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

JULIUS

“Cal, lock down the house. Keep the twins inside.” I practically screamed the words into the phone as Ethan and I tore from the room, completely ignoring the concerned questions coming from the board members who had spilled out into the hall behind us.

“Jules. What the fuck is going on? Felix just said the same thing. Jack and I are on our way, but the twins are at the park with Athina.”

“Fuck.” Several people in the hall jumped at my shouted expletive.

“You and Jack need to get there. Now!”

“Okay. Okay, yeah. We’re going, but you need to tell me what’s going on.” I heard a car door slam and an engine turn over on his end of the call.

I started to reply, but Cal cut me off.

“Wait. Athina’s here.” On the other end of the line, I heard frantic wailing, and even though I couldn’t make out her words over the phone or through her tears, I already knew what had happened.

The twins were gone.

Taken.

“Jules, fuck. The twins. They’re fucking gone.”

“I know. Go to the park. See if you can find anything. Get Felix to hack into whatever he can. We have to find them, Cal. We have to.” Tears blurred my vision, but I blinked them away.

I had to get Ethan and myself home in one piece, and there was no way in hell he could get behind the wheel.

The drive out to the estate felt like it took forever, at the same time, it felt like it passed in the blink of an eye.

One second, I was buckling Ethan into the passenger’s seat of his SUV and flooring it out of the parking garage, and the next, we were pulling up in front of the house.

We hadn’t said anything on the drive, and when I threw the car into park, and Ethan spoke for the first time, he sounded as completely wrecked as I felt.

“We have to find them. She trusted me, Jules. She fucking trusted me. And they’re gone. Oh my god. They’re gone.” The last words came out on a choked sob, and I bolted from the car, rounding the hood to fling Ethan’s door open and pull him into my arms.

“I know, E, but we are going to get them back. If we have to burn the city to the ground, we will find them and bring them home. I promise.”

He held the fabric of my shirt in a death grip, his desperate tears soaking into my shirt, and I did everything I could to choke back the matching sobs that wanted to rip from my chest. The pain coming from Ethan’s side of the bond was so profound it threatened to bring me to my knees, but I knew I had to be strong for both of us until the twins were safely back in our arms.

Because I loved those babies as much as Ethan did.

Lily and Jude were ours, and whoever had dared to take them from us would suffer.

I would make sure of it.

I held Ethan until his tears stopped, though I could still feel his despair through our bond, and it broke my heart.

“Jules?” Cal’s voice cut through the silence.

“We heard the car pull up. Are you guys okay?”

I wanted to turn around and ask my brother how he could even ask that question, but I heard the note of sadness in his voice too.

Lily and Jude had wrapped my brothers and their mates around their little fingers too.

“Yeah. We’re okay.”

Cal could read between the lines to understand that okay was completely relative in this case.

Neither of us was physically hurt, but that was the extent of our okay.

“We’re all waiting whenever you’re ready.” I heard his steps start back toward the house, but then he stopped.

“We’re going to get them back, and if I have to, I’ll kill this motherfucker myself.”

And I knew he would.

Ethan had pulled himself together while Cal and I spoke, and I looked down into his beautiful face.

“Are you ready?”

He nodded.

“I know what we need to do.”

“Good.”

As Cal had promised, all my brothers and two of my cousins and their mates were gathered in the kitchen.

Chairs had been dragged in from the dining room, and despite the crowd, the room was practically silent except for Athina’s quiet sobs.

A mug full of tea sat untouched in front of her, and she was a mess.

The second she saw Ethan, her tears started afresh.

“I’m so sorry, Ethan. I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. I’m so sorry.” Her words were almost unintelligible through her sobs, and Dimitri wrapped an arm around her and rubbed her shoulders, trying to comfort her with whispered words in a language I didn’t know.

Two chairs next to each other had been left vacant, and I steered Ethan toward them.

When we were both seated, I took his hand and held it tight.

I wasn’t sure it would help, but I needed to know what had happened.

“Athina, no one blames you.” My words made her sob harder.

“Can you tell us what happened?”

She pulled her sleeve over her hand and used it to wipe away some of her tears as she tried to catch her breath enough to tell us what happened.

“The park has that big pirate ship, and there is a section where they can go inside the bottom of the ship, but the entrance is on the opposite side, backed up to the forest.” She stopped to sniffle.

“I don’t like it when they go over there by themselves, but they were pretending to be sea panda pirates and forgot the rule. I immediately went to remind them they needed to play on the other side of the ship, but they weren’t there.” She sobbed and took a few seconds to compose herself again before continuing.

“We had played hide and seek earlier, and I thought maybe they’d changed the game and hadn’t told me. I checked all their usual hiding spots, but they weren’t there either. I didn’t hear them scream. I swear, I looked everywhere. I yelled their names, but they were gone.” She dissolved into tears again.

“I’m so sorry.” Her brother wrapped her up in his arms again.

“Athina, it’s not your fault. It can happen just that fast. When I was kidnapped, it happened in a minute, and they drugged me so I couldn’t scream. The woods would have been the perfect escape route, and I have a feeling that if this fucker wanted them, he would have stopped at nothing to take them, even if that meant hurting you or someone else to get to them, and we are all glad you are safe and okay.”

Nero put his hand on Felix’s shoulder as he, no doubt, relived the moment after he’d found out Felix had been taken.

“Ethan, the decision on how we move forward is yours, but I want you to know that no matter what you decide, we will bring the twins home. Lily and Jude are part of this family, and we will move heaven and earth to keep them safe.” Nero’s tone was solemn and serious, and I knew he understood how Ethan and I were feeling because he’d been through it.

Ethan’s phone chimed in his pocket, and he reached to pull it out.

Before he could do more than set it face up on the kitchen table, Felix spoke.

“It’s another email from your sister’s account.” After the first email had come through, Felix cloned Ethan’s email account and had been monitoring it around the clock.

“Open it.” Ethan shoved his phone away like it was going to bite him, and it skittered to a halt in the middle of the table.

Felix went quiet as he read the email.

“It’s a ransom demand. This asshole wants the painting for the twins.”

“He can have it.” Everyone turned to look at Quin, who rarely spoke up during our strategy sessions.

“We’ll deal with any fallout from it being a fake later. The twins are the priority. Period.”

Around the room, almost everyone nodded, but Nero held up a hand.

“Felix, what are the terms?”

“There’s nothing. This is all it says, ‘Ethan, I’m willing to make a trade. Your little brats for what I want. Assuming you’ve been able to acquire it. I’ll be awaiting your response.’”

“Tell him I have it. That we’ll make the trade.” Ethan’s tone was resolved, and Felix immediately started typing.

“Wait. Let’s see if he’ll bite on agreeing to the handoff on our terms,” Jack cut in.

“We want to control as many of the variables as possible.”

Felix looked up from his laptop.

“Okay. What are you thinking?”

“We want to control the meeting location if we can.” Jack turned his attention to Nero.

“Does your family control any warehouse spaces or remote locations?”

“No. Our grandmother used to have a space, but she sold it.”

“I do.” Everyone turned to look at Quin again.

“I have a warehouse out near Sea-Tac. The proximity to the airport makes it easy to prepare air-freight cargo shipments when I have pieces going out.”

“Give me the details.” Quin relayed the information, and Felix typed.

“Sent.”

The room went silent as we waited for a response.

Cal growled. “I fucking hate waiting.”

Jack reached for his hand.

“We know, sweetheart.”

Cal usually lived by the motto, shoot first, ask questions later, and I knew it had to be killing him that he couldn’t jump in and do something right away.

Honestly, it was killing me too.

Silence descended on the room again, and when Ethan’s phone chimed in the middle of the table, more than one of us jumped.

“We have a response.” Felix clicked the wireless mouse next to his laptop.

“‘I’m not an idiot. I’ll send you the meeting details tomorrow morning.’”

“Well, fuck. There goes that plan.” Hadrian cracked his knuckles.

“What do we do now? And I swear, if any one of you says wait , I’ll murder you myself.”

Marcus cleared his throat.

He’d been quiet the entire time, focused intently on something on his laptop.

“If we’re assuming this guy is related to AB Holdings Limited, we’ve also got to assume he’s going to use some property that is also affiliated with that shell company, as that is the only entity with local ties to Seattle.”

It was my turn to hold up a hand.

“AB Holdings Limited has ties to Seattle? When did you figure that out?”

“Oh, shit. Sorry. I was able to hack the flight manifest from Amsterdam. The AB Holdings plane was bound for Seattle. When we dug further into it, we discovered that the original address on the articles of incorporation was here in Seattle before being changed to an address in the Cayman Islands.” Felix shrugged.

“At the time, we didn’t think it was important to mention since we already knew whoever was behind AB Holdings was involved in this. That was just another thread that tied the shell company to all of this.”

I nodded.

Felix was right. The fact that AB Holdings had originally been falsely incorporated in Seattle really meant nothing.

“Go on, Marcus. Sorry I interrupted.”

“No problem. We should have shared that detail. Our bad. At any rate, AB Holdings has several physical properties tied to it. Some here and some overseas. We looked into the properties briefly, but they are all warehouses, and at the time, it didn’t seem all that important. It looks like, for a while, they were using the purchase and sale of properties to launder their money. I assume it’s the funds they’ve been embezzling from Grove Core that they were trying to wash. Regardless, as soon as Felix saw the email with the twins’ picture, I pulled up the addresses again and started digging. There are three properties still registered to AB Holdings within a fifty-mile radius of Seattle.”

Nero blew out a heavy breath.

“And if we assume they will use one of those properties, we have less than twenty-four hours to create a plan for each property.”

“So, we split up into recon teams and find out everything we can about each property.” Cal leaned his elbows on the table, a gleam of excitement in his eyes.

Jack beamed at his mate.

“I’m in.”

Murmurs of assent passed around the room, and the recon teams were established.

Cal and Jack were heading up to the warehouse in Everett, Hadrian and Ben were heading south to Tacoma, and Nero and Eli were taking the property located south of the city in the industrial district.

That left the rest of us to start making preparations based on the aerial surveys and street-view shots Marcus and Felix were putting together.

It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something.

“This guy might be an idiot after all,” Felix said, looking up from his laptop to examine the topo map he’d put up on one of the monitors.

We’d moved down to the basement after everyone else had left.

“He’s giving us almost a full day to prep.”

Marcus shook his head.

“That’s because he doesn’t know that we know about AB Holdings. We have the advantage.”

And we were going to make the most of it.

Hadrian and Ben were the last to return hours later, and we spent until almost three o’clock in the morning hashing out logistics for each of the possible AB Holdings locations.

In the back of my mind, I worried that the asshole on the other side of Tessa’s email account would completely flip the script and choose somewhere we hadn’t considered, but when I raised that concern, Cal had been the one to comfort me.

“If we need to pivot, we will. We’ve”—he gestured between himself and Jack—“got a lot of experience improvising in make-or-break situations. We’ll take care of it, and everything will be fine.”

And I’d let myself believe, in that moment, that it all would be.

Ethan and I finally trudged up the stairs at ten after three, leaving Nero, Hadrian, Cal, and Jack talking in the kitchen.

Ben had sacked out on the couch, and Quin and Dimitri had escaped to the studio.

Marcus was still in the basement with Felix, but Eli had left shortly after he and Nero had returned from their recon mission to meet with his boss at SPD so their assets could be mobilized when we got the word.

Instead of heading to our room, Ethan made for the door after ours and sat down heavily on Lily’s bed, grabbing the orca plushie I’d bought for her at the aquarium and holding it to his chest.

I wanted to reassure him, to offer comfort in some way, but the words wouldn’t come.

There was nothing to say, and an eternity of uncertainty spread out between the moment we were in and the moment when we’d get the email with the meeting location, and while we’d all scrambled to do everything we could to prepare, we both knew there was a chance it wouldn’t be enough.

So, we sat on the edge of Lily’s bed in silence, until the edges of dawn started to creep in around the curtains.

Only then did Ethan let me drag him into our room, the orca stuffie sitting vigil on the bedside table while we grabbed a few fitful hours of sleep.