Page 92 of Her Silver Fox Mountain Men

“What is Elise saying?” he asks with a trembling sigh.

“She’s trying to find out where Igor is taking her. No dice, though.”

“He’s being cagey,” James confirms.

Roman shakes his head slowly. “He doesn’t know about her earpiece, guys. Wait,” he pauses and takes his phone out. I watch with bated breath as he flips through his contacts. “Tori, where are you?”

Last I knew, she was on her way over to the safe house to back Kirby up. As soon as we heard that Elise had been taken, we knew the jig was up. The bait fell through, so there was no point in keeping Tori around and in disguise anymore.

“Listen, I need you to tap into the comms system,” Roman tells Tori. “Do you have your laptop handy?” He closes his eyes for a moment. I can sense his torment. It echoes mine and James’s. “Okay, patch into the GPS locator system. Each of our earpieces is fitted with a tracker.”

“Holy shit, yes,” I gasp, surprised I didn’t remember this fun little fact sooner.

“Do you have her?” Roman asks Tori. “Alright, they’re still moving. Send us the coordinates as they go. We need to catch up with them.”

Lev joins us as we race out of the vault and up the stairs. Roman’s phone keeps pinging with coordinate updates. We rush to James’s SUV and pile in. In the meantime, I listen to Elise’s ragged breath and sobs as she keeps trying to reason with an obviously irate Igor.

“You can’t do this,” she tells him. “They know you took me.”

“They? Who’s they? Those Army Ranger losers you’ve been fucking?”

“The sheriff. Everybody. Even your family. Kara knows what you did.”

“Kara will be lucky if she doesn’t spend the rest of her life eating through a tube,” Igor grumbles. “Now shut the fuck up and sit tight. We’re almost there.”

“Your own sister—”

“I told you to shut up!”

I hear her whimper as he smacks her across the face. My blood boils. The rage is damn near impossible to control, but I take deep breaths to try and calm myself down. As James turns the engine on and shifts it into drive, I can feel the adrenaline and the anger coursing through me, igniting every cell in my body as I brace for what’s to come.

33

Elise

My whole head hurts.

The top of my skull, my cheek, my face, my jaw… all are pulsating with pain but at least I’m alive. Thank heavens I had the presence of mind to turn my earpiece back on.

All I can do now is pray that Oliver, James, and Roman are picking up on my signal.

“What’s your plan, Igor?” I ask, trying to stay calm as I watch the road open up ahead.

We’re out of Rustic now, driving fast around the mountain. I try to register as much detail as possible, my mind frantically working out a way to communicate our whereabouts without Igor or his goons catching on.

“What are we doing out of town? I figured you’d have a safe house somewhere in Rustic. How else were you able to keep an eye on me?”

“Oh, you’re finally putting two and two together,” Igor chuckles.

He sounds nervous. Agitated. Things didn’t work out the way he’d planned, and he reeks of guilt. I can smell it on him. “You didn’t mean to shoot Kara, did you?” I ask.

“That was your fault, Elise. You should’ve just come to me willingly instead of hiding behind my sister’s skirt. Behind your lumberjack dipshits.”

One of the guards is sitting next to me, a gun constantly pointed at my side. Igor is in the passenger seat, rummaging through the files I pulled out of my safety deposit box while Piotr keeps driving faster and faster on a road that wasn’t designed for this kind of speed.

“You might want to slow down,” I tell him. “You’re going to get us all killed.”

He ignores me and continues to speed along the narrow winding road.

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