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Inhaling, I refocus—get O back, then drag Ariah’s ass back here kicking and screaming if I have to. Once I’m composed, I walk to the desk and sit down.
I try several variations of a password I think he’d use, but none of them work. “For fuck’s sake,” I shout into the empty room. I know this has to be some combination of Ariah’s name, but it’s not her birthday or the day she moved to Edgewood. Frustrated, I video call the idiot I know has the answers.
“Did you find anything?” Lev answers on the first ring, not bothering with a hello.
“Hi to you too, asshole,” I quip. We’re all short on patience. It’s been almost a week, and we still haven’t found a lead on Owen’s location. “I can’t get into his computer.”
Lev nods. “Password?”
“Yup.”
He looks something up and then tells me what to input. The computer opens to his home screen. “5An2G3!,” I mutter mostly to myself, but it’s loud enough for him to hear.
“The day he realized he loves her,” Lev chokes out.
My anger is renewed at the sight of moisture building in his eyes, but he blinks them back. “We’re going to string Sam up next to anyone who did this once we get O back. She’ll suffer a fate worse than whoever’s behind this,” I promise.
Sam was supposed to be our friend, but at some point, that changed. I know she’s been plotting—we all knew, especially after the kidnapping. None of us recognized just how vile she’d become. Stuck and rotten, sure, but partnering with a raving lunatic to force us to marry her—that wasn’t on my bingo card this year.
“I know,” he begins, clearing his throat. “I’ve been digging into the Davenport family, and I think we might’ve gotten it wrong. We looked at her father but never really at her mother.”
“Another fucking misdirect,” I snap, trying and failing to reign in my discontentment with how much the Fraternitas royally screwed this up and how well the Filiae Bellonae outwitted us.
“Marcie Davenport is a Walworth—one of the founding families of the Filiae Bellonae,” Lev explains.
I slam my hand against the desk. “How many traitors are among us?” The whole damn town seems to be in on it.
“Enough—more than enough,” Lev mumbles. “We need to know if Owen uploaded anything to the cloud,” he instructs.
When we found his Jeep in a ditch on the side of the road, once we calmed down, we searched for his phone, but like him, it was missing. Rubi’s already off to be restored. He put so much time into customizing it, there’s not a chance we wouldn’t get it fixed.
“Where’s the damn cloud,” I lament, exasperated with the whole damn situation. My frayed patience makes it hard for me to take the time to actually look.
A notification pops up on the screen. “Accept, and I’ll do it,” Lev states.
I want to ask him how it was so easy for him to get into the computer in the first place, but it’d be a stupid question. So, instead, I sit back and watch as Lev hovers over a spot that I’d never notice. “How the hell was I expected to find that?”
“You weren’t,” he teases as he clicks an invisible icon, and Owen’s cloud storage appears. Fucking ass. “Shit!”
“What is it?” I demand, looking around to see what might be the issue.
“Live retinal scan,” he grumbles. “I forgot this part. We won’t get past it without destroying everything on his cloud.”
Of course. Why would anything go our way? That’d make too much sense. I rub at the tension in the base of my neck. The more setbacks and longer it takes to find Owen and bring Ariah home, the more I can feel myself slipping—devolving into someone I fought hard to no longer be.
“Hey,” Lev barks. “We’ll get them both back. Remember what you just told me.”
I hear him, but I don’t respond.
“Answer me,” he demands, and I level my cold, amber eyes on him.
“I fucking heard you. I remember.”
“Then grab O’s laptop and meet me at my house. I’m going to call the guys so we can plan our next steps,” he orders, then ends the call before I can respond.
Closing the laptop, I turn the chair and take in the painting of Ariah—his avenging angel and our everything. Lev’s right. We’re going to get them back. Then together, we’ll burn Sam’s world to the ground.
Once I have Owen’s computer and start my car, I pull out my phone and bring up the app. I stare at the blinking dot before I throw my car into drive and peel out of the driveway.
