In the back seat, Simon didn't even flinch. He was staring at his phone, his face illuminated by the pale light of the screen, looking like a man watching his own execution.
"They're live," Simon whispered. His voice was hollow, scraped clean of any emotion except dread. "The streamerPaparazziKingjust posted a view from the driveway. He says he can hear screaming inside."
My stomach turned over, a cold, heavy stone dropping into my gut. The scent in the car was suffocating, burnt sugar from Simon, sharp ozone from Anders, and my own spiced chai scent turning sour and curdled with terror.
"It's the recording," I rumbled, staring out the windshield as the trees whipped past in a dark green blur. "They're playing the audio."
"They're playing her trauma," Anders corrected, his knuckles white on the leather wheel. "Amplified. They want a reaction shot."
I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second. I could imagine it perfectly. The glass house. The acoustics. It would be an echo chamber. We had left her there. We had promised two hours, and we had left her alone in a fishbowl while the world arrived with hammers.
"Faster," I said.
Anders didn't argue. He floored it.
We crested the final rise. The fortress sat on the cliff edge, usually a sleek monument to silence and isolation. Now, it looked like a carcass being picked clean by vultures.
A white van blocked the main gate, parked aggressively sideways. A stack of speakers rigged to its roof was blasting sound toward the house. Even through the closed windows of the SUV, over the roar of our engine and the wind, I could hear it.
"...please! Just let me go! Get off me!"
It was Tessa’s voice. High, broken, eighteen years old.
The sound tore through me like a physical blow. It was the sound of the girl I had failed all those years ago, looped and amplified, echoing off the rocks.
"Move," Anders snarled.
He didn't slow down for the gate. He didn't wait for the van to move. He aimed the massive black grille of the SUV at the gap between the van’s bumper and the stone pillar.
We hit the gravel shoulder, the suspension bottoming out with a bone-jarring crunch. Mud sprayed the windshield. The side mirror clipped the van’s taillight, shattering plastic, but Anders forced the car through, scraping paint, roaring past the blockade.
Three men in dark jackets scrambled out of the way, holding cameras up, flashes popping like strobe lights in the gloom.
"Parasites," Simon hissed, shrinking into his hoodie.
Anders slammed on the brakes in front of the front door, the SUV skidding to a halt on the wet stone. Before the vehicle had even settled, I was moving.
I kicked the door open and bailed out.
The noise was deafening out here. The recording was a wall of sound.
"Look at her! Oh my god, she's leaking!"
My Alpha instincts roared in my chest, a primal demand to silence the threat, to tear the speakers down with my bare hands. But the protective instinct was louder.
Find her.
"Kill the sound!" I shouted at Anders, pointing toward the van at the gate.
"Go!" Anders yelled back, already moving toward the intruders with a look on his face that promised expensive legal violence.
I ran for the front door. It was locked, Anders’ security protocols holding fast, but I had the key. My hands shook as I jammed it into the mechanism, twisting hard.
The door swung open.
I burst into the hallway, Simon right on my heels.
The interior was worse. The glass walls acted as resonance chambers, trapping the audio and bouncing it around until the air itself seemed to vibrate with humiliating laughter.
