Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
No answer.
Lark steps into the room, her face pale. “She went to her place. With Juno. To grab some of her stuff—”
The front door bursts open.
Juno stumbles in, blood on her temple, one heel missing. She’s gasping for breath.
“Oh my god. What happened?” I ask, already moving toward her. “Where’s River?”
“They took her,” Juno sobs.
“What?” Arrow’s beside her in an instant, helping her to the couch.
“She—she was locking her door, and I was heading back to the car to grab something. Two guys. Masks. They grabbed her and threw her into a van. I—I tried to stop them. One hit me.”
Arrow swears and pulls her closer, inspecting the wound. “You need a hospital.”
“I’m fine,” she gasps. “We need to find her.”
“Where?” I choke out. My hands are already shaking as I pull out my phone and text the team.
ME: RIVER TAKEN. MOBILIZE NOW.
Knight calls me immediately. “We’re already en route. Poe’s on the line too.”
“Good. We’re going to find her.”
Juno grips my wrist. “They said something... about ‘finishing what Regent started.’”
Every nerve in my body goes cold.
I meet Arrow’s gaze. “This is it. Whoever Regent is... they’re making their move.”
Knight rushes through the front door. “We’ll find her,” Knight says, his voice like steel. “We’ve got Poe tracking all van routes within a five-mile radius of her place.”
I nod, but it feels like my body is moving without me. All I can see is River—taken. Terrified. Alone.
I won’t stop until I bring her back.
And whoever took her?
They’ll wish they hadn’t.
FORTY-ONE
RIVER
Pain. That’s the first thing I register.
A dull throb behind my eyes, like I was yanked out of deep sleep too fast. My mouth is dry, cottony. My wrists ache.
The air is cold. Metallic. Smells like mildew and rust.
Where am I?
My eyes flutter open, but it takes a moment to focus. The room is dimly lit. Concrete floors. Exposed pipes. Cinderblock walls. A single flickering overhead bulb that buzzes like it's seen better days.
I'm tied to a chair.
Panic slams into me, sudden and sharp.
“Hello?” My voice is hoarse. “Is anyone there?”
No answer.
I flex my hands, testing the zip ties around my wrists. Too tight. My ankles are bound too, but not to the chair legs. At least that means if I can tip the thing over, I might be able to drag myself somewhere. Anywhere.
I blink again, and my memory starts to fill in the blanks.
Juno.
The apartment.
The masked men.
Oh God.
Juno. I hope she’s okay.
And Gage—please, please let Gage be okay.
Tears sting the backs of my eyes, but I force them down. I won’t cry. Not here. Not when whoever brought me here clearly wants me scared.
That’s not happening.
I take another deep breath, trying to calm the racing of my heart. But something doesn’t add up.
Why me?
Why now?
If this was Cathedral—if this was Regent—why wait until now to take me?
Unless… it’s something I know.
Or something I have.
My mind flashes to the hard drive.
The folders I found. The fragments of code. The suspicious admin names.
I might have been walking around with a ticking bomb in my possession this entire time and never knew it.
“Think, River,” I whisper to myself. “Think.”
A metal door groans open to my left.
I snap my head in that direction, heart pounding.
Footsteps. Slow, steady, deliberate.
A figure steps into the light.
Not masked this time.
Helena.
My chest seizes.
Helena. My HR rep. The woman who’s been “on my side” since day one.
She smiles. But it’s not the warm kind I’ve seen in team meetings. It’s empty. A hollow mask.
“Well,” she says softly, her heels echoing as she walks toward me, “you’re more trouble than I expected.”
My blood turns to ice. “Why?”
“Because,” she says, stopping just in front of me, crouching to my level, “you had to keep poking around. And now you’ve seen things you shouldn’t have.”
“You’re Regent,” I whisper.
Her smile widens. “Good girl.”
A wave of nausea hits me.
She stands again, pacing slowly. “I’ll admit, I underestimated you. I thought you were just another sad little coder with a dead-end job and a broken heart. But no—you’re smart. Smarter than most of them. Smarter than Andrew. Smarter than those idiotic developers who thought they could go against me.”
Oh God.
“You killed them?” I breathe.
She shrugs. “Cathedral has… rules. They thought they could sell code to a competing gaming company. Delve Gaming has been after our code for years. Video games are a multi-billion dollar industry. But I don’t have to tell you that.”
I shiver. “So you killed them?”
Her gaze sharpens. “I won’t have everything I’ve started come crashing down.”
“But you’re a silly HR rep.”
Helena laughs even louder. “Oh, honey, not even close. I use the disguise of HR to learn everything I can about my employees. We noticed last year some of our code leaked, and at first we thought it was you. Or Mason. We even thought it might have been Gage.”
“It was Shawn?”
She nods. “Yes, I confronted him. I tried to be nice at first, but Shawn was an idiot. He tried to undermine everything I had worked so hard to achieve.”