The sobs shook my chest and my tears soaked his shirt but Danny just hugged me closer. I clung to him like I would a rock, preventing the thoughts from dragging me away to oblivion. And gradually, the crying stopped. He kept holding me and now I could feel the tension in his arms: he needed JD back as much as I did.

I slowly released my grip and he let me step back. He looked down at me, his jaw set like iron. “I promise you,” he told me, his voice ragged, “I promise you, I will bring him back to you.”

I gulped down the last of the sobs and nodded. I wouldn’t have believed it from anyone else, but I believed it from Danny. And now I became aware that I was standing there in just a thin pink nightshirt, and that I’d been pressed against him like that, with no bra. But it hadn’t been sexual, in the moment. Just caring and very, very protective.

“I have to go,” he said. “We’ve got to find him and start planning a rescue.”

“I’m coming with you,” I told him instantly. There was no way I was staying in JD’s apartment by myself, unable to sleep. I pulled on jeans, sneakers and a sweater and we went.

Even though it was the middle of the night, the men were all still at the base, sitting tense and worried around the briefing room table. I’d braced myself to argue when they told me to go home, but Kian just gave me a little nod of sympathy: he understood why I had to be there.

At that moment, Kian’s laptop screen lit up with an incoming video call. The caller ID said Lily. A woman with olive skin and long dark hair appeared, her face lit by the glow of computer screens. “We found him,” she said.

Everyone leaned forward. “Where?” asked Kian.

“Siberia.”

13. Danny

13

DANNY

What?!

The woman on screen brought up some photos and narrated over them. “We used traffic cameras to track the SUV with JD in it to this military base just outside Berlin. Ten minutes later, a helicopter flew him to this place.”

She showed us an ugly, concrete structure built into the side of a cliff, with sloping walls and no windows. “It used to be a gulag, back in the Soviet era,” she told us. “These days, the Germans use it as a black site.”

“What’s a black site?” asked Erin.

I grimaced and turned to her. I’d forgotten that she didn’t live in our world. “Sometimes, the intelligence services catch terror suspects, and they want to question them in a way that’s not legal in their own country—”

“Call it what it is,” growled Cal. “They want to torture them.”