Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Ansel
Staying out of my head was the hardest thing I’d ever done. All I could do was picture Audrey suffering again. I swear I felt her fear spike at one point. It was faint but sharp at the same time, indescribable.
I’d never felt anything like it, but then again, I’d never had a bond form like this. We may not have bitten each other, but we were bonded in our own way. Something that ran soul-deep.
We’d just made it to the door heading outside when something had me turning around. A feeling of urgency I couldn’t ignore.
“What is it?” Ledger questioned, stopping with me. He’d been almost attuned to me since she’d been gone, as if he’d taken it upon himself to keep me safe, too. Then again, maybe it had been like that for a long time. I’d felt safe with them for longer than I could admit to myself.
We watched as Rydell, Caspian, Kane, Vance, and Cooke rushed out of the clinic. I started to follow, but hesitated.
“Go,” Ledger said. “I’ll stick with Ares. Stay with them.”
With a nod, I was running after them, catching up to Kane. He glanced my way, his face grim. I didn’t even have to question for him to catch me up on what they’d found.
“We found the room, but it’s locked. They think it’s triggered by some kind of remote control. Malik wasn’t about subtlety, he was flashy and smug. He would do something foolproof like this.”
For the second time today, I rushed toward the front conference room. There was still just one man in there now. I would’ve questioned it if he wasn’t moving between computers, talking to himself as he typed freakishly fast, like he had a superpower.
“Sanchez,” Cooke called out. “Rydell found a door. We think it’s remote accessed, there’s no way to get it open in there. We found the indention but nothing more.”
Sanchez’s productivity came to a halt, head tilting to the side as he considered it. “There’s no indention in the door? It just fits perfectly?”
“Yes,” Rydell said firmly. “There was a small groove that felt worn in, and that was it. No light escaped, we were just looking for it or we’d have missed it.
Once we had it pinned down, then you could see this minuscule crack that outlined the door.
It was so perfectly done, as if it was made when they redid the place.
Otherwise, how would it get there without someone knowing that construction was going on? ”
“Because it was never construction,” Sanchez said, slapping his hand down on the table. His face lit up, not with excitement but with understanding. “I need the blueprints right now, old ones, the originals and new, all of it.”
At first, I thought he was talking to one of the guards with us, but apparently, he was talking to himself. He popped his ass right back in that chair and was sliding toward one of the computers.
We all moved silently to stand behind him, watching as he pulled up floorplans. I recognized ARC’s logo. Then the other had to be the former school.
That was fast.
“I knew it,” he said, slapping his hand down on the table again, making me jump. Kane and Caspian noticed, both turning to look at me. Caspian barely stopped himself from moving, body tensing to lock himself in place. I shook my head to tell him I was fine.
A little jumpy, sure, but that was to be expected. We’d been through hell and it was nothing compared to what Audrey was likely enduring.
My nerves were fried, panic was riding me, and my omega mate was gone. Sanchez didn’t even realize what he’d done, so focused on his own virtual world.
“When we were still in the earlier days of understanding the dominant gene with alphas, there were failsafes in place to protect the rest of the population. Especially in places like this where they would be enclosed with the other designations. Not that they were let in often with omegas. But should any alphas present later in life they wanted to be safe. Again, it was early days. The science wasn’t there to back up that it was all genetic.
They were born with markers in their DNA.
Anyway, I digress. They built escape routes in as if the alphas would tear apart everyone and anyone.
Think of it like a secret tunnel leading outside.
Everybody knew they existed. Hell, it was a selling point to most schools like this.
But they were created so the alphas couldn’t force them open. ”
Cooke and Rydell both growled at the insinuation. They always considered dominants as monsters. Rydell had told us as much during therapy.
They were wrong.
He wasn’t terrifying or violent, but this sure made it sound like it. Sometimes you never really knew how deep the fear and ignorance others treated dominant alphas with until you saw it firsthand. Maybe I should have seen it during my time in the cages, but I was trying to survive back then.
I cleared my throat before speaking. “How would they get to it quickly if it was remote accessed?” I could feel everyone’s eyes on me now. My cheeks burned at the attention, but Sanchez shot me a smirk.
“You’re a smart omega. It wouldn’t be remote. Not like they assumed,” he said, gesturing to the others. “They didn’t keep the control in the same room.”
“Not exactly efficient,” Kane said, shaking his head. “Why set it up like that?”
“They’d put it in a room that the students couldn’t access. It’s not meant for anyone outside of faculty to know about. The location anyway, everyone obviously knew it existed. It ended up making it a ‘sacrifice-one-for-the-many’ type of thing.”
“We scoured the other rooms in the clinic already,” Caspian argued. “Including the treatment rooms, storage, intake, all of it.”
“Yes, but I would suggest checking this one,” Sanchez said, pointing at the blueprints. It was labeled as the Dean’s office on the old map, but was now a break room for the staff. Definitely a room none of us would have access to.
But Malik would. An easy coffee break location. If he timed it right, it’d be empty.
Like when they forced us all into the dining hall or we were asleep.
“Let’s go,” Rydell said, already running out of the room. Out the door. I started to follow. but stopped to turn back to Sanchez. “What exactly are we looking for?”
“See, you’re always the one with the right questions, aren’t you?
” Sanchez said with a wink. “It depends. Sometimes there are floor panels. It would be in the corner of the room somewhere people aren’t gonna step on often, or inlaid into the molding.
Rip pictures off the walls and look behind them, the works.
You’ll know when you see it. It’s going to be a whole lot more obvious than that door, I promise. ”
“There’s enough of us, we’ll find it fast,” Vance said. “Let’s go.”
He led the rest of us out. Rydell and Caspian were already walking ahead of us. There were some shouts of protest from the nurses that could see us from the lobby as we kicked open the door. They no longer got a say in where we went.
We didn’t bother looking for keys. It would have been a waste of time when we had alphas like Cooke and Rydell on our side.
Oddly, Cooke and Vance didn’t scare me like most alphas. Maybe it was Rydell’s quick acceptance or the fact Ares vouched for them. Either way, it was a relief not to be crawling out of my skin.
My focus was on my mate. Where it should be.
“Sanchez said to check the corner floor tiles, behind paintings. It should be obvious,” I called out to the others before they could tear into the furniture.
“I’m going to stand by the door in Malik’s office. Vance has me on comms,” Cooke said as he gave us a nod and walked out.
While the others went for the back of the room where most of the art rested on the walls, I started here, walking the perimeter of the room with careful steps. I might not weigh as much as an alpha, but if it was here even I should be able to trigger it.
The fire might work against us. We were operating on the old floor plans, but as far as we were told, there wasn’t much left of the old school before it was rebuilt.
Though, I was starting to think there was more to that story than they were telling us. That door seemed older, not something they’d put back in when ARC took over.
Could this have been going on long before Malik? Was he just part of a long line of sketchy staff that risked others’ lives for money and status?
That was the same kind of corruption that landed me in the middle of that fighting ring.
I felt like I was standing in the eye of the storm as I moved to the center of the room, a flurry of movement around me as furniture was shoved aside and art tossed to the ground.
Constant words barked out. “Nothing here. Keep looking.”
They were moving the big shelves, the furniture. I was eyeing the paintings like Sanchez had suggested. Everything in here was clean, almost symmetrical.
I moved out of the main room and toward the locker room. Rydell was in here now, working on the lockers. He gripped the metal edges, wrenching them from the walls.
Not wanting to be in the way, I walked past him into the final room. It was dorm-style with rows of beds. It must have been a place for the nurses to crash when they worked late shifts.
My eyes slowly drifted over the space, looking for anything that didn’t quite fit. There were more paintings here, windows perfectly aligned, blinds pulled down to block out the light… and then my eyes landed on a small metal door.
It looked like a fuse box, but that didn’t make sense for a building of this size. It would take far too much power to run. There would likely be a whole fuse panel, something in the basement or a maintenance room, not a dorm or a classroom.
“Did you find something?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin as Kane walked closer.
“I’ve been looking for something to stand out, and I just found this fuse box.” I reached out and tugged on the door. “It doesn’t make sense to be here.”
Of course, it didn’t budge.
“Let me try,” Kane offered as he moved closer.
He was no longer careful around me, making sure he didn’t touch me like before, and I appreciated that.
The brush of his arm against mine felt comforting.
It grounded me in the moment, even as my heart was beating out of my chest, my nerves so fried I felt like I could pass out, my pulse thundering until I was dizzy.
Kane grunted as he tugged on it. He wasn’t exactly small for a beta but he wasn’t doing any better than I was. With a wink, he cupped his mouth and yelled out to the others. “Hey, we need some muscle in here.”
Rydell stormed through the door in seconds. He was covered in a sheen of sweat and grime, small debris sticking in his dark hair. His eyes were sharp, landing right on us, then the metal panel.
“Fuse box,” he said. “No fucking way.”
“I doubt there’s any kind of breaker behind it, but it’s welded shut,” I supplied as we stepped out of the way.
Rydell gripped the edges and with a hard tug, his muscles straining, it ripped off. The force of it nearly had him stumbling back. I reached out on instinct, steadying him.
Again, I shocked myself. They were right, we were a pack now. My omega accepted that.
“They definitely sealed it,” he said, holding up the jagged metal in his hands before tossing it aside.
“And definitely not a fuse,” I agreed.
“Of course. Why would the nurses ever mess with this?” Kane said.
Where the fuses should’ve been was just a single lever. Maybe we should have worried it was something more important, hell, that it could put us in darkness if it truly was a power switch of some kind.
Yet, I still reached out for it before anyone else could. My fingers locked around the top before I yanked it down as hard as I could.
“Whatever you did, it worked!” Vance yelled from the other room loud enough we could hear him.
Then we were moving, running back to the office. All I could feel was hope and relief. We were about to see our mate.
Until I saw the tiny, dirty, and glaringly empty, room.
Audrey’s scent was so powerful in the space it nearly knocked me over. A sob escaped me as I looked at the conditions she was left in and the fact she was gone. Rydell had one long growl echoing out of him while Caspian and Kane moved around us as if searching for a clue.
A single door was on the other side, standing open to reveal a tunnel.
“This is where they took her out.”
“When you saw Malik, you didn’t see her, right?” Cooke asked me.
“There were two guards with him, but there was no Audrey. I would’ve felt her. I would have known.”
“No, her scent is strong here, but not as strong as it would be if she had just left twenty minutes ago. Malik might’ve left a different way, but Audrey left here.”
Dread pooled in my stomach, making bile rise. I had to breathe through it before I threw up on the floor.
“Clothes,” Kane said, his voice cracking. “A pile of them, all standard ARC uniforms.”
“So, this was his holding room,” Vance surmised, his voice shaking with fury as he stepped out of the cell and back into the infirmary. I could hear his voice echoing out, likely calling in the cavalry now.
“We were too late,” I said, tears flowing freely down my cheeks now. Caspian pulled me into his arms, but I could feel his own tears dripping onto my shirt.
Our pack was barely holding on by a thread. Rydell was already moving, stomping into the small hallway where her scent had faded into.
He looked back once and gestured for the rest of us. “Come on. We need to stick together.”
Caspian practically dragged me down that hallway. It felt wrong here. The way the cement enclosed us was too tight of a fit. Rydell had to be scraping his arms raw as he ran through here.
The tunnel felt like it dragged on forever. It was colder in here and sloped downward before we were walking at an incline again.
Then we were at the exit, fresh air blowing, stealing the last of Audrey’s scent, and sending a shiver down my spine.
The moment we stepped outside, bright flashlights had us freezing.
“Where the fuck did you guys come from?”
I didn’t expect the Chief to be the one waiting on the other side with his men. I guess they were checking every inch of this place.
“We got in the room. Her scent was strong, but fading. She’s already gone.”
The Chief sighed. “No sign of her out here. No one has passed through and no cars have left.”
Rydell dropped to his knees and I watched the strongest alpha I’d ever known break down into tears.