12
It was a difficult journey for Jake to make across the country. He traveled on little sleep, and he was full of worry for Josie and the baby. To top it off, he wasn’t able to control his shifting the way he normally could. He felt the urge to run to Josie and rescue her from her father, and he fought with himself to suppress the werewolf inside of him. It left him exhausted by the time they arrived near Caster’s estate.
While Bill had helped by taking care of all the details, ensuring that Lucy had enough help and security at the site and making all the travel arrangements, Jake was busy fighting his own urges. He felt completely useless and wondered what help he was going to be to Josie once he got a chance to rescue her.
“Save your energy, son,” Bill said with a warning look. “If this Caster guy is as bad as you say he is, you’re going to need your strength.” They were on their last flight toward their final destination, and it couldn’t finish fast enough.
“You forgot his small army,” Jake said, rubbing his temples. He never lost control like this, and he worried that the pressure of saving Josie from her own father was going to prove to be too much. It wasn’t so much the pressure of saving her; he could do that easily. But when it came to Caster, the one man he hadn’t been able to read correctly in the past, he found himself feeling anxious at how the man might try to trap him. He was conniving and would stop at nothing.
“Caster’s unpredictable,” Jake continued. “There’s nothing that he’s not capable of. If he wants something, he’s going to get it. And he doesn’t just storm in and get it. He’s patient. He’ll plant a seed for a tree, wait for it to grow, mature, and then he’ll cut it down, carve a stake out, and stab you with it.”
Bill raised his eyebrows. “That’s a crazy man.”
“You’re underestimating him,” Jake said, giving him a sidelong glance.
Bill was quiet for a moment as he thought about Jake’s words. Then he looked at him again. “How much do you love her?”
“What?” Jake looked at him in surprise. Bill wasn’t usually into talking about sensitive subjects. He was vocal enough about Lucy, and he showed affection for her when they were together, which was surprising enough for Jake. But he wasn’t prepared for Bill to start questioning him about his own love life, too.
“I like her a lot,” he mumbled, avoiding Bill’s gaze.
“I didn’t ask if you like her as a friend,” Bill clarified. “Even I ‘like her a lot.’” He gave him a look that would have made Jake shrink in his seat if he wasn’t the man he was.
Jake thought long and hard before answering him this time. “I like her. I just don’t know if I can trust her.” He chose his words carefully and looked at Bill to gauge his reaction.
Bill wore a frown and looked away. When he looked back at Jack, he looked stern. “That girl doesn’t have a real father to look after her best interests. So, for that reason, I want you to answer to me as if I’m her father. Because damned if she isn’t like a daughter to me.”
Jake sat up a little straighter at that and looked at Bill seriously. If Josie could make that kind of impression on the older man in such a short amount of time, that had to mean something. It had taken Bill a long time to open up to Jake when they had first met.
That could be partially due to the fact that both Bill and Jake had a tendency to keep their communication to a minimum. But Jake noticed that ever since Bill had become more open about his relationship with Lucy, he’d become far more talkative. So had Jake, for that matter. Since Josie had come into his life, he’d felt more whole than he ever had before.
But that didn’t mean anything if she was just a means to lure him to her father’s estate with a master plan of trapping him. If Caster truly had sent Josie to him to make Jake come to him, he would have to operate under that understanding in order to function. It was the only way this would work.
“I can see that. You were more of a father to her than her own in the short time you spent with her,” Jake said sincerely. “From what little I knew about Caster, and what Josie revealed to me, which was almost nothing, she wasn’t exactly a Daddy’s girl.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Bill warned, pointing a finger in Jake’s face. “I need to know what your true intentions are with Josie. You got her pregnant, and now you say that you like her a lot? That’s not enough.”
Jake swallowed. This was getting uncomfortable, fast. “Look, I’m on the way to get her away from Caster. Doesn’t that prove anything to you?”
“Yeah,” Bill snorted. “It proves that you’re a military junkie who was trained for this type of stuff and you’re getting your fix finally after several years. That’s all that proves. What are your feelings for Josie? That’s what I want to know. Anyone can see you’re more than capable of rescuing her and an entire army on your own. But why?”
Jake didn’t say anything at first. He knew whatever he would tell him would make little sense, but he tried anyway.
“Look, I know I mentioned Sylvia in passing when I was talking to you and Lucy about Caster. How she tricked me into thinking she was with me and she was in love with me. She worked for Caster. She didn’t feel anything for me. She was married with a family. I was her day job. She pretended to love me for a paycheck. And Caster made her do that job for a year before he had her try to trap me. He waited for a year!” Jake shook his head in disbelief. It had been years, and he still couldn’t wrap his mind around how diabolical Caster really was.
“Now, think about how scared Josie must be,” Bill said quietly. “You are talking about a woman who went to college to pursue a degree that she obviously excels in—Caster couldn’t have put that light in her eye about architecture. That comes natural to her. She left home to come work for you for a reason. She must have found out that her father was after you, and since you were hiring, she came to you for protection.”
Jake hadn’t thought about it like that before, but he dismissed the idea. It was too convenient that she would have come when he needed to hire someone. He knew there was some truth to Bill’s words deep down, but he couldn’t make sense of it right now. He would rescue Josie, but then she would answer his questions, and he wasn’t going to stand for any more half-truths.
“I’ll protect her,” Jake said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to trust her,” he finished stubbornly.
Bill stared at him for a moment before looking away. “Fair enough,” he replied. “You don’t have to trust her, but I don’t have to be on your side in this either. You’ve got a tough case to prove, and I, for one, am not rooting for you to win.”
To be perfectly honest, Jake wasn’t rooting for himself to win, either. He was hoping Josie was as innocent as she was the night he’d met her. That, he would never doubt. It was the motives and Caster that made him suspicious and on edge. He couldn’t take any chances or turn his back on the man. He’d been burned once -- he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, not when there were even more lives on the line.
***
After Bill had secured a rental car, he and Jake had wasted no time driving by Caster’s sprawling estate. “It’s bigger than I remember it being,” Jake mumbled, looking through his military grade binoculars. “He’s definitely expanded it.” He passed them off to Bill, who was sitting behind the wheel.
Bill took a look at the land and gave a low whistle. “That must have cost him a pretty penny. How many people do you think work on the property?”
Jake was thoughtful. “I’d say…roughly speaking, about 25-30 to take care of the place, easily.”
“No, that seems too big—even for this place.”
“Well, they wouldn’t all work one shift. At this time, I’d say only a handful of people are on call in case he needs something. One cook, one housekeeper. Obviously, no one to do the landscaping. But then he beefs up on security at night. He’s as paranoid as they come. Probably more so since he was in the military for so long.”
Bill set the binoculars down. “How long do we sit here before we make our move?” He looked ready to kick the doors down.
“Easy,” Jake warned. “This guy is heavily armed, and like I said, he has a number of guards who do surveillance all night.”
Bill slumped in his seat slightly. “We didn’t even bring one weapon.”
“You forget, I have special abilities. And besides, we don’t need to use weapons. We need to use our heads to defeat him. He can be killed or captured after this, whatever. But there’s still a lot hanging over my head because of how he used me. I can’t afford for him to die—not yet and not like this. That would just make me look guiltier than I already do.”
“The man is a coward,” Bill growled. “Using every person that crosses his path for his own gain. It’s disgusting.”
Jake nodded silently. He wondered which room was Josie’s. The main house would probably be where her room was. Possibly in the back. “Drive around that side,” he pointed to the right. “I want to go back there behind the woods and see if we can figure out which room is Josie’s.”
Bill looked at him curiously, “You know for sure it’s back there, or are you going on a hunch?”
“I’m just guessing. These other two parts are newer additions. They weren’t there before.”
Bill nodded. “Alright, let’s look.” He drove around the bend, keeping his distance from the main house as he did.
Jake slipped out of the car and shifted, enabling him to move with a speed and agility that he wouldn’t have otherwise. Peering between the brushes, he couldn’t get a good look and decided to move closer. Staying in the shadows, he got closer and closer to the house until he was right up against the wall. He could see a guard just ahead, lounging against the wall, chatting with someone on the phone. Good. Distracted guards were the best kind of guards.
Jake crept closer and closer until he was mere feet from the guard. The man chose that moment to throw his head back and laugh at the person on the other line. Jake froze in place. If he moved an inch, the man would see him out of his peripheral vision.
It was another several seconds before the man was getting off the phone, presumably to make his rounds. He waited until the man hung up before grabbing his neck from behind and squeezing the pressure points to put him to sleep. The man slumped, and Jake dragged his body up to a standing position, propping him up with a potted plant from behind him. If anyone happened by, they would see him standing there, and it would buy him some time while he snuck into the house.
Scaling the pillars and the balconies, Jake peered into each window that he thought could possibly be Josie’s bedroom. Her father wouldn’t have put her on the lower floor; he would want her near his own bedroom. Not because he cared about her safety, just of his reputation. Jake came upon her room at last and easily opened the window, but it was empty. He wondered if Caster had a silent alarm on the property. Even if he did, it was still too early to set it. He just hoped he was right and that his opening the window hadn’t tripped any alarm that Caster might have.
Jake looked around his surroundings. This had to be her room. It was wholly female, and it had books about architecture and the like. He found a few books with her name written in them that confirmed it. But the room had obviously been abandoned for a while; it was dusty and dank. So where was Josie? He heard voices coming from down the hall and leaped into action. He slipped out of the window, closed it, and went back down the same way he’d come up.
Dropping to the ground, he raced back to where Bill was still waiting, hidden in the woods. He shifted back quickly before getting in the car. “She’s not here,” Jake said when he was safe.
“What do you mean she’s not in there?” Bill was incredulous. “Do you have any idea where else she could be?”
“Well, maybe they’re keeping her in a different spot for protection. Why would Caster put her in the same room she was in when she’d run away from him not too long ago?”
“True,” Bill muttered. “This guy’s really starting to get on my nerves, and I haven’t even met him yet.”
“Count your blessings,” Jake said dryly.
Bill sighed and drove around to where they had parked the car the first time. They continued to watch the guards and other men come and go for several minutes. Jake was the first to notice that hardly anyone was going into or coming out of the main building where he was. It would certainly explain why there only seemed to be one guard on duty in the back of the building. Instead, they were all coming in and out of one of the newer buildings that sat on the side.
“Hey, what did you do to that guard over there?” Bill asked suddenly.
“Oh, him?” Jake put his binoculars down for a moment. “I just put him to sleep. But I propped him up; no one will even know until much later.”
“How much later?” Bill pressed.
“About six or seven hours. Maybe more if he likes to sleep.”
“So if someone finds him, they’ll know you were here?” Bill asked.
“They might, yeah,” Jake said casually. “But remember, they are expecting me. I’m just going to give them previews here and there to let them know I’m happy they were thinking about me.”
Bill shook his head. “You SEALS guys are something else.”
Jake grinned. “Only the best, hoo-yah!”
“There’s a lot I don’t know about you,” Bill said. “They say you learn a lot about a person once you travel with them. I’d say that’s very accurate.” He reached into the seat behind him and unzipped his luggage. “I almost forgot. Lucy made me take these blueprints for the place. I don’t ask where she gets this stuff anymore.”
“If she was here, I’d give her a big kiss,” Jake said, rubbing his hands together in delight.
“Hey! You keep your mouth to yourself, young man. She’s taken, and you are as good as taken.”
Jake ignored him, unrolling the large tube and trying to smooth it out along the dashboard. “These are the new rooms that were added on,” he said, pointing to the round additions.
They both studied them for a several minutes before Bill spoke up. “Wait a minute. Let me see that side again,” he pulled Jake’s side closer to himself and opened another overhead light to get a better look at the plans in front of them. “Oh, my God,” he breathed. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“What?” Jake looked at the draft and tried to see what Bill was looking at.
“Josie designed this. I know this design. She suggested it to the Gunderson’s when they came in the last time. They really seemed to like the idea after they saw her mock-up of the place.”
“Okay, so what? We both know she’s talented,” Jake tried to suppress the pride that welled up in him when he saw how beautiful her work was.
“So, what you don’t know is that every client she’s had so far, she’s suggested that they put in a secret vault of sorts. And always in an odd-numbered room. She never draws it out on the blueprints, but it has to be there. Here, I mean. She makes a small notation and that always tells me that it’s in there. It’s there, here in the corner.”
Jake looked and saw a curious scribble in the place where Bill was pointing. “So, you’re saying that’s a way to get to her,” he said slowly. His mind was racing, and he again felt like he had to slow down if he wanted to help her. “A trap door. That’s brilliant.”
“She told me that her father wouldn’t allow her to attend college right away for architecture. She rebelled by following one around the property and forcing her ideas on him,” Bill laughed. “And she got her way; look at this!” He held up the papers, pride in his eyes.
“Give me a couple hours, and I’m going to figure out which one she’s in,” Jake said, his eyes narrowing. “If we can access her through the door, we can be in and out in no time.”