“Thugs, in other words.” With a shrug, I cut off whatever else he was going to say. That was just Saul, thinking the fashion commentary was more of an insult than comparing me to a chainik, a professional bully. I knew what I was. It would be rather futile to get pissed off when someone pointed it out. Plus, Saul was more than on the shady side himself when it came to “physical persuasion.” He simply concealed his a little better than I did. Maybe it was all about fashion sense. “Where’d they go?”

“That’s where it gets weirder.” Saul’s gaze was frank on mine. “Lukas . . . If this is Lukas, he wasn’t the victim of an ordinary child abduction. At least not ordinary in any sense I’ve seen before. They came to the mall in two vans, not a bus. I followed them about two and a half hours west to their school. Hell, if you could call it that. It was more like a compound, a fucking miniscule military base.” While my appetite had long disappeared, his was still in full force. Efficiently rolling another fajita, he made quick work of half of it in two bites. “I looked it over all I could, which wasn’t much. They got a gate straight out of Dade Correctional and a wall that would put that one in China to shame. The president should have their security.”

What did that mean? What did all of this mean? “Government?” I couldn’t imagine how the hell the government could be involved in Lukas’s disappearance. That made no sense whatsoever.

“That’s what I thought at first, but . . .” The waitress chose that moment to come back for a second round of water and flirting. The black scowl and flash of bared teeth I turned on her had her rethinking that in a hurry. Saul watched her go with a wistful glint in his eyes, but he knew better than to complain. Knowing how pivotal a moment this was for me and how unexpected, he also knew I was hanging on to my control by a fast-unraveling thread. “Keep it together,” he ordered quietly. “We might finally be there, so don’t lose it, okay? Stay with me.”

If anything was ever easier said than done . . . Never mind the world had disappeared beneath my feet and left me in dizzying free fall. Swallowing against the chunk of dry ice burning in my throat, I consciously unclenched my fingers on both hands and uncurled my fists. Placing my hands flat on the table beside my plate, I sucked in a deep breath and said calmly, “I’m okay.” At his skeptical snort, I qualified, “Really. I’m okay as I’m going to be. So, let’s get on with it. Not the government? How do you know?” It wouldn’t be long before the shock wore off and reality set in. Reality didn’t have a history of playing well with others.

Saul went on to tell me just what he had found out. He’d run a title check on the land where the compound resided. There was a series of dummy corporations, but Saul had cut his teeth on that kind of duplicity. It’d slowed him down, but it hadn’t stopped him. At the end he’d run into a company he simply couldn’t crack, but it wasn’t federal. That didn’t mean there might not be federal ties, but the organization was privately owned. Although he couldn’t find out what the organization was, he could find out everything that it wasn’t. They weren’t owned by the government and no one in the business world had any idea they existed. They had no stocks; they weren’t insured; they had no accounts with any bank in this country. And as far as Saul could determine, they didn’t pay taxes. So either the government didn’t know they existed, or they turned a blind eye for some reason.

It didn’t make any goddamn sense, none of it. And the more Saul talked, the less sense it made. A compound in the boonies, a school that wasn’t a school, security that back in the old days would’ve made the KGB say, “Damn, where you been shopping?”

Eventually Saul ran out of things to say, and in many ways I was as lost as I’d ever been. Bits and pieces made up a jigsaw puzzle designed by a schizophrenic. I wasn’t missing a few pieces; I was missing an entire frame of reference. I wasn’t sure I was any closer to knowing what had happened to Lukas, save for one small difference.

Now I could ask him.

It happened Christmas Day.

It was the same Christmas Day that was captured in that goddamn photograph—people all eggnog and smiles, never seeing that the moon was tumbling from the sky; unaware that the sun had gone black and the earth itself trembled under their feet, hungry to devour them. I guess that’s how people made it through life . . . by the God-given grace of ignorance. If you knew what was coming, I had my doubts you’d stick around this vale of tears to experience it firsthand.

If ignorance is bliss, I was the happiest dumb fuck around that day.

Christmas for a kid was always the best day of the year. It was even better than Halloween. Yeah, okay, Halloween did have costumes and pounds of tooth-rotting candy, but at fourteen, I’d been far too old for that; not that Lukas and I’d ever had much of an opportunity for trick-or-treating. Our home, the one we’d lived in all our lives, wasn’t the kind that rubbed shoulders with its stuccoed neighbors. The nearest house to us was at least a half mile away. You could say we lived in a gated community, only the gate started at our driveway. There was a modest wall of crushed coquina shell that while nearly indestructible was easily scaled. How’d I know? I’d done it many a night, just for the hell of it. I’d also gotten my ass busted each time I was caught. The true security lay in the most up-to-date system on the market—two German shepherds and a few rotating “friends” of my father’s. He had a lot of friends, Anatoly. All that wasn’t as easy to get around as the wall. No, not easy.

But not impossible.

We’d spent most of the day with the new horses, riding them inside the walls, which was a good ten or twelve acres. It sounded like quite a bit when you said it, but on horseback it may as well have been the corral at a pony ride. We wanted to run flat out, gallop as long as the horses would go. We wanted to hit the beach and kick up clouds of sand and water. It wasn’t an extraordinary request. I was good on a horse, thanks to lessons, and Lukas may as well have been born on one. He was a throwback to our Steppe days, our father liked to say; our own little Cossack. On most days the Cossack and I would’ve gotten our way.

That day was the exception. Anatoly’s annual Christmas party was in full swing before noon and would most likely last until past midnight. People would come and go all day. Thoroughly vetted at the front gate, they’d wine, dine, and suck up to the almighty Korsak with all the lip-smacking capability in them.

With the festivities, no one had the time to take us out and keep an eye on us—as if we needed that. It was the typical sneering complaint of the average teenager. And for all that went on in my father’s business, I was still as average as they came. Unforgivably stupid would be another label that fit to a T. Life can be like that, for an adult or a kid. You look away from the road for one moment, one reckless, idiotic moment, and your car is careening directly into Hell. It could be that you go over a cliff or ram a school bus full of children. It might even be convincing your little brother that sneaking your horses out of the back gate for a ride is the best idea since peanut butter and Playboy.

The wall hadn’t been much of a challenge for me, and it wasn’t one at all for the horses. They sailed over it, flowing smoothly as a quicksilver shot of mercury. We’d gone to the far back wall and escaped unnoticed. It was an innate skill. Lock a punk-ass teenager in Fort Knox and given enough time he’d find his way out to the nearest trouble. It was what we were bred for.

“Just like Zorro,” Lukas had said, beaming, his hands entangled in mane.