Do you need company?
Zayden
Yeah. I’ll come pick you up.
That tells me nothing. Zayden had told me he’d handed Samantha off tosome guy, in between all the screaming, but he was also too incoherent to be much help after that.
“Shouldn’t you be taking all of this to the authorities?” Anastasia asks me, only to correct herself, “I mean, like the FBI. Not the local police.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they’ll drop everything to investigate some random chick who disappeared with her boyfriend.” I let out a dark laugh. “They won’t find the boyfriend. I made sure of that.” I glance over at the laptop. “Are you done with that? Did you find the snuff porn?”
“You do realize this takes more than five minutes, right?” she asks. “I know they take three seconds on TV, but there’s a reason I told you I’d probably need to stay overnight.”
“It’s been at least twenty minutes,” I say. “Fine, we can chat some more. How’s your family? Do your parents know what illicit things you do in your free time?”
She scoffs at me. “Who do you think taught me?” she counters, then sobers. “Honestly, if you weren’t being so hush-hush, I’d have asked if you wanted my mom to help. She’s got so much more experience than I do.”
“Your parents are cool, but I don’t need any of this getting back tomyparents,” I say. “Bad enough Kratos and Ares know as much as they do.” Our parents are on friendly terms, which is saying something considering Papa manages to piss off most of the people he meets.
We have that in common.
I point to Anastasia’s guitar case. “What about the band stuff? Or did you bring the guitar just for fun?”
“I knew I’d need it to wind down after hanging out with you for a few hours,” she says sweetly, but then she shakes her head. “Nah, my cousin goes here. We’re planning on playing together, seeing if our styles can mesh or if he knows someone who can.”
Her cousin? I try to remember her family tree, but her family is even bigger than mine. I know she’s got way more cousins than I do.
“Yeah, all right.” I try to think of something else to ask her when the laptop pings. I grin. “Oh, look, it didn’t take all night!”
She gives me an exasperated look, but then she clicks around on the screen. The first file she opens looks like a regular-ass spreadsheet, with all the member dues for the year. She closes it and moves on to another file, which has a list of pledges. Then we find the fraternity oath, and their song—they’ve got asong?—as well as other tedious crap.
I growl in frustration. “There’s no fucking way they went through all that effort just to protect these few files.”
Anastasia clicks over to another part of the computer. “Yeah, no, this hard drive is almost full. There’s something we’re not seeing. Hang on. My mom built this nifty program a few years ago that should get me right in.”
She opens up some black menu with white text, and she types more things. I have no clue what she’s doing, but she’s got a look of concentration on her face. A bunch of text does start scrolling then, but when it’s done, Anastasia grins.
“There we go.” She clicks back to the folder screen, and this time, there’s an extra folder visible we hadn’t seen before.
Research.
We open that, and there are hundreds of folders inside it, each one with a year. Anastasia clicks on the current year, and reveals a bunch of video files. She opens a random one.
A video begins to play. There are mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor, and a bunch of guys sitting around. I don’t recognize the space at first, not until I see the hallway with the bookshelf.
That’s the basement to the frat house.
Several guys with paddles step into the frame.
“All of you fuckfaces, strip down to your underwear,”one of the guys says. “Anybody who refuses is out.”
Anastasia and I watch as most of the guys strip down to their underwear. My eyes land on one of them in the corner of the screen.
He only has four fingers on his hand.
I reach into my pocket, only of course I don’t have the charm, they stole it from me, they took this piece of River thatbelongs to me.
“What is this?” Anastasia asks.
