“Katerina didn’t want to be rescued,” Xavier said. “She wanted the ransom money. When I told you we were betrayed, Audrey, I didn’t say the full truth. It was Katerina who betrayed us. She shot Forsythe and Adams before we knew what was happening. She turned her gun on me. Chris and I fired at the same time. We both killed her. Her bullet landed in my shoulder at the same time she took one in the chest and one in the head.” He glared at Mikhail. “Not in the belly. From the look of her, she was at least six months pregnant. Also worth noting, Katerina was only fifteen years old. She was a fucking child.”

Oh good lord. No wonder Xavier was tormented by that op. He’d had to kill a pregnant girl to survive. Fifteen.

Mikhail was slowly dragging her backward, deeper into the woods.

Her heart ached at the nightmare Xavier and Chris had been through, watching the hostage they were trying to rescue kill two team members. Being forced to kill her.

Katerina would have killed Xavier next if they hadn’t.

The truth had probably been buried. Did her oligarch father even know? Would he believe his daughter—a fifteen-year-old child—had planned her own abduction so she could demand a ransom and run off with her lover?

Did he know a man in his own employ was the one who’d taken her?

She assumed not, given that when he’d sent his henchman to exact revenge, he’d sent the true villain who’d seduced, then abducted his daughter.

“This is why the three mercs who were captured said you were unstable. You were more obsessed with taking Xavier and me than in getting out of the forest alive.”

“I wanted Flyte too,” the man said.

“You left the forest immediately, didn’t you?” Audrey said. “You were hiking toward Forks before the helicopters were even in the air.”

“I needed to call my men in the RV to pick me up before the idiots who let men with paint pellets take the lodge reached them first.”

“But there were only three men in the RV,” Xavier said. “Who was the hanged man?”

“He’s the one who stole the master gate key from the camp host and changed the lock while the other three kept the cop busy. He had his own car and met the team in Forks after they’d been kicked out of Mora Campground. They then caused a mudslide to keep the local police busy.”

That was the final piece. After Mikhail killed the rest of his team, he’d had a car no one knew about to move freely about the peninsula.

“And then you waited for ‘your’ body to be found so you could return to the forest and wait for me here?”