“Ma’am?” A tentative voice sounded from the door of her room.
Ella turned and saw a woman standing there, hands folded in front of her, dark auburn hair in a severe bun, the lace apron she wore confirming she was a maid. “Yes?”
“Do you need anything?” the maid asked, and Ella swore she heard another question in the woman’s voice.
Where did she start? A broken laugh escaped Ella. “No. I’m good.”
The woman nodded and without warning grabbed Ella by the arms.
Ella tried to pivot, but the woman was stronger than she looked. Soldier strong.
Surely they wouldn’t…
Oh God, what had Endgame done? Ella could only pray they weren’t coming for Dresden. Or worse, herself.
Ella twisted and backed away. “Who sent you?” she asked, her voice nearly silent for fear of rousing other staff or, worse, Dresden.
The maid’s head rose swiftly. She was caught and knew it. “Jude,” she admitted with a small grimace.
Damn it! Damn Jude and his interference!
“Listen to me,” Ella hissed. “Dresden will kill you if he discovers what you’re doing here. I can’t believe Jude attempted this!”
The woman shrugged as if Ella’s words didn’t matter a whit. She pulled a square of fabric from a pocket in her maid outfit and shoved the fabric into Ella’s face.
Ella’s vision swam immediately and she sagged, the bitterness of defeat nearly as heavy as the sweet taste of the drug coating her damaged tongue. For the second time within the span of a few days, she’d been taken. Damn it.
Ella lost her ability to fight, her limbs going numb even as her vision cleared. She wondered who the woman was to Jude even as she cursed the wayward thought in the middle of this clusterfuck of a situation. She had to be here. She had to be accessible to Dresden, or everything she’d sacrificed would be for naught.
And now there was Anna Beth Caine…
She tried to plead with her eyes for the woman to leave and let her be, but the woman was a force.
In less than a minute, Ella was wrapped in the duvet cover and shoved into a laundry cart. She was growing more and more tired, realizing that whatever she’d been given was meant to paralyze and eventually knock out the recipient.
Jude had warned her, and as the maid-slash-operative working for or with Jude dumped the contents of the laundry cart into the chute, Ella wondered where the hell she was headed.
Because none of this was good.
Not at all.
Chapter 12
Jude wanted to rip Horace Dresden into tiny pieces, rebuild him, and do it all over again. The right side of Ella’s face was bruised. Once he’d cleaned her up, he realized nothing was broken. He’d checked her over completely, not sure she hadn’t been tortured. The rest of her body appeared untouched. She’d taken a punch from a man around Jude’s size. Dresden. Jude knew it, and he wanted to kill that motherfucker.
Once the laundry truck Georgia had used to spirit Ella away from Dresden’s had arrived at the airfield, Jude had loaded Ella onto the small charter plane they’d then taken to Moldova. From there, he loaded her onto another larger charter, and they’d flown to the States. Each charter had owed Jude a favor, and he’d called them in with zero hesitation. He hadn’t wanted anyone to know his plans, so he’d not involved Vivi or his other Endgame teammates.
Had they been there, Jude could have taken his shot at Dresden. Without their involvement, he couldn’t risk busting in there like a one-man army. That could result in damage to Ella. So he’d made the decision to sneak her out, knowing she wouldn’t go without being disabled. Georgia had signed on with Jude. She’d also owed him a favor or two. When she dropped Ella off, she’d complained about his woman’s right hook and even had a shiner to match the one coloring Ella’s face. Georgia had assured him she hadn’t harmed Ella too much, that the mark on Ella’s face wasn’t from her.
He didn’t know if Dresden would be able to track them, but he knew once the bastard realized Ella was gone, he’d guess Jude had her and was taking her to the United States.
She’d roused once on the flight from outside Atlanta to the abandoned airstrip in Texas. Jude had knocked her back out, feeling only fleeting remorse when her confused gaze had met his and then gone blank as she fell back into the arms of Morpheus. Then he’d driven eight hours through Texas to the mountains of New Mexico.
He pushed off the doorjamb and entered the massive bedroom, moving to the side of the bed she lay on—the bed he’d had handcrafted when he’d had this cabin built almost two years ago. This had been designed to be his escape. He’d brought her here because no one but his tia Rosa knew about this place. They were as safe as he could make them because the only other person who knew about his home away from home was dead.
He’d purchased the land under a shell corporation Micah had helped him set up for them both. Micah had built in Alaska. Jude had built in the Cimarron Range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. He’d hunted these woods with his great-uncle as a child. Some of Jude’s happiest memories had been created in these mountains.
And now she was here.
It had snowed last night—not the light, fluffy stuff, but the heavy, wet snow of a fall storm—and Jude had had a bitch of a time getting the dilapidated Range Rover up the pass to his home. Once he’d gotten them there safely, he’d taken Ella inside, removed everything but her bra and panties, and placed her in the huge California king-size bed made entirely of the
