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“Sorry, man,” the guy splutters. “I didn’t mean—”
“You didn’t think,” Cayde snaps, letting go of his hair with a jerk and stepping back. Every inch of him is coiled muscle, like a snake ready to strike, and I’m worried he’ll snap before Jaxon does.
“We have questions about where she is,” Jaxon says, his cold dark gaze sweeping over the room. “And we’re not leaving here until we have some answers.”
“What makes you think we know?” The greying man stands up, and I see the patch over his chest that says, President. This is the man in charge, the one we need to be talking to.
“Athena got a threatening letter recently,” Cayde says, coming to rejoin us and leaving his target. For a second, it looks like the man with the bloodied nose is going to get up, but Cayde shoots him a withering glare. “Don’t fucking move.”
“My nose—”
“I don’t give a fuck about your nose! Athena got a letter recently threatening her, and it implicated that the Sons were the threat.” Cayde’s eyes narrow. “She’s had a girl stalking her for weeks on top of that, a scrappy little thing who scratched her up good during a fight. And tonight, she was abducted.”
The president frowns. “We haven’t had orders to abduct a girl. So I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but someone is playing you. I definitely can’t imagine why we’d get orders to fuck with your girl, seeing as, like you said, our orders come from right above you. Your fathers.”
“That’s not good enough.” Jaxon glares around the room. “If you don’t have anything to do with it, then you won’t object to helping us find her.”
There’s a rumble in the room at that, but the president holds up his hand. “I can object because you don’t give us orders, son, not yet. None of you three do. So I’m not risking my men on a wild goose chase to find this girl, not when the orders haven’t come from the top.” He chuckles. “Besides, I’ve heard rumors about what goes on in that house when there’s a girl there. Maybe she just had enough and ran away.”
The fact that that’s occurred to me just makes me even angrier when I hear him say it. I’d already thought of the possibility that Athena faked being kidnapped so that she could get away from us after what happened tonight. But I just don’t quite believe it. It didn’t look like a faked kidnapping scene. It looked real. And I think Athena knows better than to run. She knows that she wouldn’t get far if she did, and the punishment waiting for her when she got back would be severe. That’s why she’s pitting us against each other, why she did what she did with Cayde tonight. She’s trying to find another way out.
She’s too smart to just run.
“You’re going to fucking help us,” Jaxon snarls. “You work for our families. That means you work for us. I don’t care if I have to beat it out of every single one of you. You’re going to tell us something that helps or do something—”
“Jaxon.” I grab his shoulder, pulling him back, and he rounds on me, an inch away from punching me in the jaw.
“What are we going to do against ten of them?” I hiss, looking around the room. The president is watching us warily, and I know he’s the only thing keeping the others in check. “They’re armed. We have one gun in my car and whatever you’ve got on you, which I know is something.”
“A knife,” Jaxon says between clenched teeth. “A fucking big one.”
“A gun that’s not in my hand and a knife. Against ten grown, armed men. It’s not good odds. Maybe they know something they’re not telling, but we need to regroup and come up with a better plan.” I raise my voice, glancing over at Cayde to confirm. “Come on. These men say they had nothing to do with it, so it’s time to move on to finding out who did.”
Cayde doesn’t want to leave any more than Jaxon does. I know we all have the same feeling, that we don’t know where to go from this dead end. But I’m certain we won’t find answers here.
And we can’t help Athena if we’re dead.
