Chapter 10
10
D amien leads me into Sebastian’s domain, a room filled with wall-to-wall high-tech equipment, screens flashing with code and maps. The hum of servers fills the air, the sterile, almost clinical room reminding me of?—
No. I push the memories down to focus on Sebastian’s broad back. He leans over a desk littered with computer parts, his fingers flying across a keyboard.
He glances over his shoulder at us, then lowers his eyes when he spots me. “Hey, what can I do for you two?”
Damien’s hand rests on the small of my back, lending me strength. “Seven thought that if he could give you details about the places where he was held, you could use the information to locate them.”
Sebastian spins all the way around, his scarred face twisting with disbelief. “Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?”
Damien growls, and his cousin spins back to his desk. “Sorry, trauma. I get it. What details do you remember?”
Damien leads me over to a spare chair and sits, drawing me down onto his lap and tugging the blanket up.
I weave our fingers together, and my throat clicks when I swallow. “T-the first place… the scientist’s lab…” Shuddering, I squeeze Damien’s hand tighter. “It was underground, with narrow windows near the ceiling covered in bars. The air always smelled like chemicals and bleach.”
Sebastian types, pulling up a program I don’t recognize. “Good. What else? Any sounds from outside? Weather conditions? Landmarks?”
“Trains. And it never got warm, not even in summer.” As the memories resurface, I curl into Damien. “Across the street was a red brick building with a green metal roof. The sign had the letters E-S-T-O-R on it.”
That sign had been a beacon of hope for me. So many times, I wondered what the business was and if the people inside ever wondered what happened in the building across the street.
“Perfect.” Sebastian works his magic, satellite images and street maps flashing across the screen as he narrows down locations.
Awe fills me at the information pulled up by swift taps of his fingertips.
“What else?” Sebastian asks. “I need everything you remember, no matter how small. Tell me about your cell.”
I shiver as the memories threaten to drag me under, but I force the words out. “It was small. Concrete. A cot bolted to the wall. The door…the door was metal. With a slot at the bottom for food. I never saw any other Omegas…”
Echoes of the isolation, the hopeless despair, creep up my spine, and I hold Damien’s hand with both of mine now, needing him to anchor me. I’m not there. I’m safe.
Sebastian works, his fingers flying over the keys, eyes darting across the screens, in his element, a master of his craft.
“You’re very good at this,” I venture, sounding small in the humming electricity of the room.
Sebastian pauses, a flicker of surprise crossing his scarred face. “It’s what I do.”
I chew on my lip. The memories of the lab, the Doctor, the experiments, they all churn in my mind, a nauseating kaleidoscope. It takes effort to sift through them, searching for anything that might help.
A name surfaces through the haze. “Daltrev. I saw it on one of the machines. A registration sticker or something similar.”
Sebastian’s fingers pause on the keyboard. “Are you certain?”
A chill runs down my spine. “Yes. I’m sure.”
He turns back to the screen, typing away. Images and articles flash by, too quickly for me to follow.
Then he stops, a grim smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Dr. Elias Daltrev. Fired from several testing facilities for using illegal human test subjects before the drugs he developed were approved for human trial.”
An image appears on the screen of an older man with wispy brown hair in a white lab coat. I flinch back, heart pounding as an involuntary whimper escapes me.
“Take it off the screen,” Damien snaps, covering my eyes.
“Sorry.” The click of keys fills the room. “It’s gone.”
Damien’s hand drops from my eyes to cup the back of my neck. “If you decide it’s too much for you to face him, it’s okay. I can give you a souvenir instead. To show you he’s dead.”
“No.” I turn my head to breathe him in, comforting myself with his pheromones. “I want to see the life leaving him for myself.”
“Okay.” He massages my tense muscles. “Whatever you want, sweetheart.”
I rub my wrist over the barcode tattoo. Once the Doctor is dead, I want this gone, too. I want to erase as many reminders of him from my body as possible.
Damien draws my hand to his mouth, kissing the tattoo. “We’ll laser it off or cover it up. Whichever you prefer.”
My brow furrows. “What would I cover it with?”
A slow smile spreads over his lips. “I have an idea. I’ll show you when we return to our suite.”
Curious, my eyes rake over him. While we now sleep together in the same bed, or sometimes under it, our therapist recommended we hold off on more intimacy until I was in a better head space, despite my request this past week for leniency. Which means I haven’t seen Damien naked.
I’ve dreamt of it, though, and now I want to discover what secrets hide beneath his layers of clothing. Does he have a tattoo? Would mine match?
Sebastian clears his throat. “You guys can moon at each other in your own space. This one is mine.”
As I turn back toward Sebastian, a small, framed photograph on his desk catches my eye, buried amidst the chaos of computer parts.
The photograph shows an attractive blond Omega, taken from an angle that implies a computer screen.
“Is he your boyfriend?” The question slips out before I can stop it.
Sebastian startles, his hand darting out to slap the photo face-down on the desk, and a flush creeps up his neck, staining his cheeks. “No, it’s not— He’s not?—”
“Aww, don’t be shy, Sebastian,” Damien drawls, his deep voice vibrating through me. “Go ahead, tell Seven about your little infatuation.”
Sebastian shoots him a glare, but Damien smirks, enjoying teasing his cousin.
“That,” Damien says, pointing at the overturned photograph, “is Sebastian’s favorite cam boy.”
My eyebrows shoot up, surprise overriding any sense of privacy. “A cam boy?”
“It’s not like that,” Sebastian grits out, his face now a deep shade of red. “I just admire his confidence.”
Damien snorts. “Admire? Is that what we’re calling it now? I seem to recall you almost cost Caleb’s husband his life because you were too busy drooling over your pretty boy to trace a death threat from his computer.”
A heavy silence falls over the room. Sebastian’s jaw clenches, his hands curling into fists at his sides. For a moment, I think he might lash out at Damien.
Instead, he takes a deep breath and relaxes his posture. “It was a mistake I won’t let happen again.”
The warning in his tone dares Damien to push further.
My Alpha backs off, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, no judgment here. We’ve all got our weaknesses. Just make sure this one doesn’t interfere with the current mission.”
Sebastian nods curtly.
The conversation leaves me feeling like an intruder in a family matter, and I shift with discomfort.
Sebastian returns to his searching, muttering under his breath about nosy and intrusive cousins until he straightens with a shout that startles me. “Got it! This must be the lab where Seven was held.”
I lean in closer, my heart pounding as I take in the grainy image on the screen. It’s a nondescript building, surrounded by a high fence and what looks like a security checkpoint at the entrance.
Sebastian zooms in, and a red brick building with a green roof comes into view. He drops to street level, and a rusty sign announces: Construction Machinery Restoration. It appears abandoned, the windows and door boarded up. So there was no one ever there who could have saved me.
“That’s it,” I whisper, trembling. “That’s the Doctor’s lab.”
Sebastian’s jaw clenches tight. “It appears like it’s heavily guarded. We’re going to need some serious firepower to get in there.”
“We have firepower.” Damien studies the screen, committing it to memory. “Get the building plans from the city.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job.” Sebastian glares at Damien before he turns to me, eyes fixed on my chin. “What do you remember about the other locations?”
I take a deep breath, trying to steady my nerves after being brought face to face with the place that stole my humanity. Like with the lab, I describe what I remember from the other locations where I was held between sales and the houses where my owners lived.
As Sebastian listens, his fingers fly over the keyboard with a speed and precision that’s mesmerizing.
“There.” He points to the screen. “That’s one of the estates. And a quick dip into the finances shows shipping records for groceries and the electrical use doesn’t match a single occupant household reported to the county, even one that doesn’t care about their carbon footprint.”
I lean in closer, squinting at the grainy satellite image. The Victorian estate is something out of a Gothic novel, all towering spires and dark, foreboding walls. The sight of it sends a shiver down my spine, memories of the holding cells in the basement surging forth.
A shot of a man in a blue suit overlays the estate. “That’s my second owner.” I shudder in disgust, though seeing him doesn’t give me the same instinctive reaction of fear that seeing the Doctor did. “He had five Omegas he was breeding.”
A muscle in Sebastian’s jaw ticks. “And here’s the other one.”
He pulls up another image. “The owner’s financial records show large cash withdrawals. One of them corresponds with when you would have been auctioned off the third time, with a smaller reimbursement when he sent you back.”
My heart races as I take in the sprawling mansion set amidst manicured gardens and rolling hills. To the public, it’s a place where the wealthy elite go to play, not a secret prison for tortured Omegas.
But I know better.
“I remember that place.” My body trembles as I trace the outline of the buildings on the screen. “They used to…air us out in the garden.”
The scent of roses and the splash of the fountains had always made it especially cruel when they put us back in our cages.
Damien growls in the back of his throat. “They’ll pay, Seven. Every one of them.”
I swallow the lump forming in my throat. It’s still hard for me to believe this is happening. After all this time, I might get the justice I’ve been denied for so long.
Over the next hour, Sebastian tracks down auction houses and holding pens, adding their locations on an ever-expanding map. It boggles my mind to see how far I traveled, yet also how close I always stayed to where they kidnapped me from.
“I have bots tracing the money trail now. Hopefully, we’ll find more buyers and the shell companies they run all of this through.” Sebastian’s brow furrows in concentration. “It appears a series of shell corporations funded the lab, so I’m tracing that, too. No reason not to shut down whoever financed those experiments.”
Data floods the screens, and I don’t understand even half of the information. “So, what happens now? How are we going to take them down?”
Damien’s foot taps, bouncing me in his lap. “We’ll need to hit them all at once. Every location Sebastian identifies, every facility connected to his previous owners. We can’t leave any chance for escape or warning.”
I try to imagine what kind of planning that will take and shiver. “When?”
“As soon as possible.” Sebastian’s fingers fly across the keyboard. “We need to move before they relocate and cover their tracks.”
My mind races. This is really happening.
“I want the Doctor now ,” Damien growls. “He’s isolated enough that we can pull him without alerting the others. And we won’t have to organize a big team.”
Sebastian frowns. “We should wait?—”
“No.” The single word ends the argument.
His lips flatten into an unhappy line. “I’ll pull Milo into a strategy meeting.”
I release Damien’s hand to twist the blanket. “What do you need me to do?”
Damien tilts my chin toward him. “Nothing until we have the Doctor, okay? We’ll take it from here.”
I gulp, relieved I won’t be expected to return to those places, but also guilty for leaving them to do all the work.
“Hey, don’t give me that look,” Damien murmurs. “This is the stuff our family thrives on.”
My brow puckers in confusion. “Taking down human traffickers?”
His thumb sweeps across my bottom lip. “Destroying anyone who goes against our family.”
Breath catching, my eyes drop to his mouth, and his nostrils flare in response. I sway forward, wanting a reminder of his kiss, wanting to experience the pleasure of his hands on me again, and not only in comfort.
“We’re going to need more firepower than we have for an operation of this scale,” Sebastian says, interrupting the moment. “I’m reaching out to Avery.”
I straighten away from Damien’s tempting lips. “Who’s Avery?”
“He took over gun-running when our family went more legit,” Sebastian explains as he picks up a burner phone from the clutter on his desk.
I turn back to Damien. “Legit?”
“You don’t think billionaire playboys usually have this kind of setup in their homes, do you?” He sweeps a hand around the room. “We have family in the mafia, though we do more business in stolen artwork, illegal cheeses, strip clubs, and gambling these days. We let Avery take over the less savory aspects of our business.”
“Oh.” I take in the room with fresh eyes. “So, all this is built from blood money?”
“No, but also yes. It involves a whole story about our great grandfather losing our fortune, and how the older generations made it back.” His knuckle strokes over my cheek. “Does that worry you?”
I shake my head. “No, it relieves me to know you guys aren’t just playing superhero and actually know what you’re doing.”
He barks out a laugh. “Glad it can ease your worry.”
I frown. “If you’re trying to distance yourselves from your family’s past, will contacting this Avery person be dangerous?”
Sebastian pauses with a smirk. “Depends who you ask.”
“Avery can be unpredictable, but we can’t take down these bastards with a few handguns,” Damien explains. “We need serious artillery.”
“And he’ll help just to hold a favor owed over Raphael’s head,” Sebastian adds.
“Why?”
Damien shrugs. “Let’s just say they dated for a while, and it didn’t end well. Avery’s got a bit of a temper, and Raphael… well, he’s not the easiest person to get along with.”
I curl into Damien as I process this new information. The thought of being caught in the middle of a lovers’ quarrel churns my stomach.
Sebastian’s phone lights up, and he checks the message. “Avery wants a meeting in person to discuss things.”
“Of course he does.” Damien nudges me off his lap and stands. “We’ll leave the planning to you. Seven and I have other plans for the night.”
I look at him in surprise. “We do?”
Taking my hand, he draws me toward the door. “We do.”
My pulse kicks as we leave the dark room. I hope those plans are what I think they are.