Page 531 of Filthy Elites

“Her tracker,” Evan yells, his eyes almost as panicked as mine.

“Fuck,” Clay hisses, shaking his head and spinning slowly in a circle.

I consider it for a minute, before opening the app on my cell phone that has the ability to show me the location for the trackers all of us have implanted in the skin at the back of our neck. None of them have ever been activated, including Starling’s. I select her icon and change the tracker status to active and wait as a red dot appears on the screen, then I quickly move forward as the app advises the distance to the tracker’s location.

It feels like it takes forever to push our way through the throng and into the hallway that runs along the front of all six houses in the row. According to the map, she’s still in the fourth house, and I angrily barge past people, shoving them out of the way as her location counts down.

Five hundred meters

One hundred meters

Fifty.

Thirty.

Twenty.

When it reaches ten meters, we’re standing outside a row of doors that lead to bedrooms and I see red. Lifting my foot up, I kick in the first door, finding the room empty. I do the same to the second door, not caring about the gasps from the people still partying in the house that are now watching me. It’s empty too. When I reach the third door, I can hear muffled sounds. Wasting no time I kick open the door, only to find Starling on the floor beneath a huge guy. She’s kicking and screaming, frantically trying to push him off her as he rips at her clothes.

Blackness engulfs the edges of my vision and all I see is her face and the terror that’s etched into her beautiful features. I don’t realize I’ve moved until I’ve ripped him away from her, pinning him beneath me as I’m slamming my fist into his face over and over.

“Sebastian.”

The sound of her voice pulls me from my murderous rage and I stop, my knuckles split and covered in a mixture of his blood and my own. His face is a mess, his hands lifted, trying to protect himself from my fists.

“Sebastian,” she calls again, her voice cracking.

Pushing off him, I turn toward her, moving a step closer, watching her intently, not wanting to scare her. Scrambling off the floor she runs to me, launching herself into my arms as gulping, broken sobs burst from her shaking body.

The next hour is a blur. Starling refuses to release me, even as the police take her statement and she tells them how he dragged her into his bedroom and attempted to rape her using the party noise to cover the sounds of her screams.

The moment I tell them who I am, the police barely question why Chase Lawrence’s face looks like hamburger meat. With Starling’s statement, the bruise on her cheek from where he hit her and the video from the camera he’d set up to record him raping my girl, it’s a pretty open and shut case for the cops who haul him away handcuffed to the stretcher in the back of an ambulance.

Sammy, Evan, Clay and Hunter are all standing around us, watching as Starling clings to me. “Let’s go home,” I whisper into her neck, supporting her weight with my hands beneath her ass as I stand up and carry her out of the now-empty house.

The others follow us out, but no one speaks as we make our way back to the carts. I climb into ours with Evan and Hunter, While Clay gets into Sammy’s with her.

“Bring her back to ours, she can stay the night in case Starling needs her,” I tell Clay, who nods.

No one speaks as we drive back to the house until I unlock the front door and step inside. “Little bird, do you want Sammy to help you get cleaned up?” I ask.

“No,” Starling says, her face buried in my shoulder.

“Will you let me help you?” I ask quietly.

I feel rather than see her nod, glancing at the others before I slowly climb the stairs to the third floor. Pushing the door open to my room, I carry her straight into the bathroom and turn on the shower.

“I need to put you down so you can shower, okay?”

“No, don’t leave me,” she begs.

“I’ll stay in here if that’s what you want.”

“Get in with me.”

Nodding, I lower her to the floor and carefully help her remove her clothes. “Get rid of them, I never want to see them again,” she says, her lower lip trembling.

My own clothes are covered in blood so I quickly strip and then throw both her and my clothes onto the landing to deal with later, before rushing back to her.

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