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I listen to see if it’s just us in the room, and when I’m met with silence, I try to spring into action, but my limbs don’t move.
Brian must notice my movements. “I wouldn’t try to move if I was you. They gave you the really good shit. You’ll be out of it for a while before you’ll even be able to talk,” he smirks. “Can’t have you spilling any pertinent information before everything is in place.”
I glare at him, but my face doesn’t move. This must be what Sam feels like.
“See, you can’t even lift your brows—it’s like Botox on speed,” he jests, but I don’t find him funny. I want to find him dead at my feet.
Brian picks up the syringe and flicks the side. “Before you go nighty night, I feel I’ve earned the right to be the first to tell you. The chip in your arm will blow the fuck up if all of you don’t do exactly what you’re told.”
He begins to press the needle into my neck before continuing, “And don’t think your little tech guy can help you with this shit. It’s cutting edge, and only Scott, the one who inserted it, and one other person have the key to deactivate it,” he smiles as he pushes the drugs into my system.
I don’t feel when or if he finishes giving me the full dose before my eyes close. My only solace at this moment is that I’m finally going home, and I get to see my angel.
5
LEV
I’m not sure there’s a word to describe the rage boiling in my veins right now. My girl—gone. My brother—captured, and there’s a Benedict Arnold at every fucking corner.
“Fucking Jameson,” Wes shouts, throwing his empty glass against the wall, shattering it into pieces.
We all saw red when Antonio confessed Mr. Jameson’s connection to the Senator. No one expected that. Sure, he’s a stern fucker in Calc. class, but there was never any indication he could be a traitor. Words I feel like we’ve been saying far too often lately.
My fingers fly across the keyboard as I type out a message to Coop and Colt. I need them to do more digging. Working to find everything about the Senator is the only thing keeping me sane. The minute I let my brain process everything, I know I’ll flip my shit.
“We need to bring him in. Now,” Wyatt demands, his anger palpable. I can feel it without looking up.
Sebastian shakes his head, “We can’t do shit until Owen’s back. We don’t know who’s pulling all the strings.”
“It has to be the Senator. Everything’s pointing to him,” Wes interjects.
I pull up what I’ve found on the screen, and they all go silent, allowing me the opportunity to speak. “Senator Baker is definitely involved, and we know for a fact he’s using Sam to worm his way in,” I say, showing them the pictures of Baker and Samantha together. “Based on these pictures, she’s met him multiple times in the weeks since Owen’s kidnapping.”
“Why are we only seeing this now?” Wyatt snaps. “I thought we had eyes on both of them?”
“My guess,” I pause, bringing up another photo, “is now that they have Owen, there’s no need to hide their connection. The Senator thinks he has us exactly where he wants us.”
“How the fuck did we miss this?” Sebastian asks. “And how long have they been working together?”
“Since our dear Samantha turned fifteen. It appears that the Senator has a thing for high school girls—well, at least one high school girl, anyway,” I explain. Once I found out they were meeting, Colt and I started digging into the Senator’s past, and there’s been no evidence of him so much as sniffing around another underage girl before and during his time with Sam.
Sebastian’s blond brows shoot toward his hairline. “Are you saying they’re fucking?”
Wes snorts, “That’s exactly what he’s saying. I don’t know why that would be the most shocking revelation of everything we’ve discovered. How many bored rich girls do we know that sleep with older and sometimes married men? It’s like a right of passage.”
“And how many of those same men prey on them for sport,” Wyatt adds. Both of them make excellent points. Younger girls that lie about their age to bag an older, wealthy tycoon, and older men who seek out naive girls to groom into their perfect playthings.
“It’s not the sleeping together that surprises me—it’s that we never heard anything, not a hint nor a whisper,” Sebastian replies, and I nod in agreement. The fact that not even an inkling that this was going on is more suspicious than their copulatory sessions.
Wes’s face lights with excitement, momentarily ceasing his pacing. “Doesn’t this mean she’s no longer eligible to be our wife? Were they still sleeping together after she was Selected?”
“I wish it were that easy, but even if we could prove they were, which we can’t, with them having Owen, just about everything outlined in the contracts is moot,” Sebastian surmises, making Wes bare his teeth.
“This is such fucking bullshit. I don’t see how the fuck anyone gets to have us by our balls,” Wes mutters. Then, they begin to argue over the semantics of the clusterfuck we’re in.
While they continue to belabor the point, I quickly see if Ariah’s chip signal is back on. I know we’re not supposed to look for her, but how can I not at least try and see if she’s safe? I haven’t slept a night without seeing the heartbreak on her face after Wes essentially told her she wasn’t worthy of us. Those words were worth the punch Wyatt gave him.
“You’re not going to be able to find her,” Wyatt chimes. I open my mouth to argue but stop once I notice the chip’s been deactivated. “The signal went dead this morning. It didn’t even blip on the screen,” he sighs, fisting his hands in his fiery curls before slamming them against the table.
