Chapter Seventy-Three

“What do you want to do?” Dane’s boss asked after dropping a bomb.

Both Thorne and Lena were looking at Dane, and he wasn’t sure how to answer.

He’d always turned to Thorne for instruction. Hell, the guy’s title was supervisor. Why wasn’t he supervising them?

“If you want to wait until I get back,” Thorne said, “I can tell the rest of the team to hold off. But if they get assigned other cases, it might be a while until we can all get back together.”

“We don’t have a while,” Dane complained. “Viktor isn’t going to believe Lena when we keep coming up with excuses for not locating this fictitious Masters person. He’s going to get suspicious, and that will put the whole mission in danger.”

“Then you want to proceed with just the two of you?” Thorne asked.

It sucked that Thorne was being summoned back to Washington, D.C. at the worst possible time. But for him to refuse would mean he’d have to explain. And if he told the truth, their mission would be over before it began.

He had to report to his boss to keep everyone from noticing all of them were hunting down an off-limits Viktor Kulakov.

“Can you give us a moment?” Dane asked Thorne as he put his hand on Lena’s elbow and led her out onto their balcony.

“What are we going to do?” she asked as soon as they were alone.

He eased out a long breath. “We have two choices. We can either hold off until Thorne comes back, and risk having someone else called away, or we can try to extract her with just the two of us.”

It wasn’t fair to put the burden on Lena, but this was her child. And if he made the decision and it went badly—which there was every possibility of happening—he didn’t want to be the one to have made the call.

Lena had the most to lose. It had to be her choice.

“I can’t take much more of this,” she said, her voice strained. “I just want to get on with it.”

He smiled at her strength. Or maybe it was impatience. Regardless, he felt the same way and agreed with her decision.

He nodded. “Okay. Then let’s go.”