He sat down across from her. “I will do everything I can. I promise you that. But Erin, you need to understand that the Theo I bring back might not be the one who left.”
“You find his body. Bring it to me and TJ and I…we’ll find his soul.”
Because she was the keeper of his brother’s soul, his natural mate, his other half.
Mia was his. How horrible that he’d figured that out only after he’d lost her.
Erin sat up suddenly. “What did you say about assets?”
“Uh, I said I had to look at all my assets.”
“Because sometimes the most important asset of all is the one that seems to have no value.” She stood, her eyes bright. “Oh, Case, I think I just figured out how to find Theo. It’s a long shot, but…you’re right. We have an asset we didn’t realize we had. We have Avery.”
He wasn’t sure how Liam’s wife fit into this. Avery was awesome. She was kind and funny, but she certainly wasn’t an operative. She’d become Serena Dean-Miles’s assistant. Serena was an author and Avery helped organize her business. They went to romance conventions together. “Avery’s good at social media. You think we can trick him into friending me on Facebook?”
Erin’s eyes rolled. “You should be happy you’re so attractive. I need to call Avery. She has a friend who might be able to help us. Sometimes we don’t see the patterns. We don’t see that the path is right in front of us if we just have a little patience. And our last piece is in place. Hutch is there.”
She wasn’t making a ton of sense. “Hutch being kidnapped is a good thing? Erin, she’s going to wipe his memory.”
“Not if she wants his skills, she won’t. She wants a hacker. It’s not the same. His skill isn’t muscle memory, it’s all brain power. If she screws with his mind, she loses the reason she took him in the first place. They’ll be looking for somewhere safe to hide.”
He still wasn’t following her, but if she was right and they could get a message to Hutch… “We could send a message of where to meet us and maybe Hutch could convince them. The intel we discovered pointed us to somewhere in Asia.”
“They won’t stay there long. She needs someplace quiet, someplace to continue her experiments. She needs an ally.”
“A clinic like her sister’s?” Hope’s first experiments had been conducted at her sister Faith’s clinic in Africa. It was where Theo and Erin had fallen in love. “Faith had no idea what her sister was doing.”
“But what if she found someone who didn’t mind, someone who would trade her clinic for cash, protection. Someone already based in Africa. We can’t fool her with a start-up clinic. She would be wary of that. But a clinic that had been around for a while, a clinic led by a woman with a past. It wouldn’t matter that she’s trying to right her wrongs. Someone like Hope would look at this woman on paper and see opportunity if given the right push.”
It clicked into place. “Stephanie. You want to use the woman who was driving the car that killed Avery’s first husband and child?”
He knew the story. Avery had been young when she’d lost her daughter and husband to a teen who’d had some beer and gotten behind the wheel. Though her blood alcohol level had been below the legal limit, they’d been in New York and Stephanie had been underage. The law was clear. Any alcohol in a minor was considered a DUI. Stephanie had gone into a deep depression and it had only been Avery’s grace that had saved her. Avery had told him once that she figured Stephanie owed her a good life for the ones Avery had lost. Avery had been the one to pay for Stephanie’s medical degree, to send her off to Africa to do good work.
At the time he’d been floored by how far Avery had gone to forgive the girl who’d harmed her. Now his heart seized because Avery’s grace, her belief in forgiveness might save them all.
“We’ll herd them to Stephanie’s clinic. We’ll go on the Deep Web and start some rumors. Little things at first,” he said. “We’ll have to be patient. Hutch will find us and then we’ll be waiting for Theo.”
“And we’ll bring him home,” Erin said with quiet will.
And they would bring him home.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Long after Erin had talked to Ian, had brought Avery into their circle and formed their plans, after Erin had finally fallen asleep, Case sat up. He sat in his brother’s chair, his mind whirling. The sun was coming up over the horizon but he was staring at his phone.
Mia hadn’t called. Mia could be miles from him by now. He wanted to think that she was in Austin, but he couldn’t be certain. No one would tell him a thing, and according to Riley Lawless, she probably wouldn’t answer her phone if she saw it was him.
Would she listen to a voice mail?
It worked for Theo. Somehow his brother was still giving him advice, still leading the way when it came to this type of thing. When it came to loving someone.