Page 28 of Jace

“I don’t want her ‘assets,’ I want my sister! Where the hell are you taking her? Sloane? Sloane!”

And with that, I was carried out in a series of rocking movements that made my gut twist, then even that faded away. All there was, was nothing.

Chapter Nine

Jace

Time had stopped, there was only one endless moment of fucking waiting, my hands clenched tight into fists. No one came in or out of my office and there was only this suffocating fucking silence, so maybe that was why I heard her.

I jerked upright, as sure as if someone had shot a thousand volts of electricity through me, because I could hear her as if she were standing in the same room with me. “Jace…” But I knew she wasn’t. Her voice, my name, it was choked out, as if between gritted teeth, the voice of pain. My omega was hurting—no, in agony.

My omega…

I could feel her consciousness snuffing out like a blown candle and knew who would be doing that. There was only one organisation in the whole city who’d see an omega and think sedating her into oblivion was the right way to go. I shoved that thought aside as I got to my feet, striding to the door before throwing it open.

“Get a car ready!” I snarled, at who, I didn’t know. People jumped to their feet though, ready to do my bidding. “We’re going to the Dawn Agency.”

“I hate to throw a spanner in the works,” Ryder said, stalking over to fall in step beside me, “but we’re not the only skin in this game.”

“What’s happened?” I demanded as we hustled down the corridors before pushing out the double emergency doors and taking the stairs down to the underground garage. It was only a couple of floors, and the stairs were quicker than the elevator.

“Snake just went mobile,” Ryder said. “I’ve long had a suspicion that he has contacts in the Dawn Agency. That place is corrupt as fuck, makes Desparion look like a kindergarten picnic. You can feel her?”

“Yep. They’ve got her, Ryder.” I stopped, and it felt like the world stopped with me when I did. I stared at the man I considered my brother, my heart smashing inside my chest. “They’ve drugged her, have to have taken her to the Dawn Agency.”

“Figured as much. The guys have been on high alert since she left. They’re ready to roll.”

We slammed out the next double emergency doors into the wet parking garage, where two blacked out SUVs waited, along with the rest of the team.

“We both know those centres are run by dodgy arseholes who want nothing more than to eliminate alphas and omega from society, take whatever hard-earned cash they have, and funnel it off somewhere,” Ryder said, a familiar rage simmering in his voice.

The SUV doors were flung open, and we piled inside. As the door slammed on us, we rolled out.

“What’s the deal?” Dane demanded from the front, throwing a glance over his shoulder at me.

“She’s been taken,” I said.

“Centre?” he asked.

He didn’t question how I knew. I’d been going nuts ever since Sloane had left. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that we had already begun to bond. I nodded.

“Fuck,” Dane muttered.

Betas, they dealt with the emergence of alphas and omegas in their midst through the Dawn Agency or the Agency for Alpha Control. If you were smart, you avoided them, and I’d hoped Sloane was. The Dawn Agency was corrupt as fuck, but at least they offered a pretence of being civilised. Alpha Control was more about rounding ’em up and throwing ’em into the zone. Dane and I had battled it out on the streets until we were finally caught and tossed into the zone without a care. Ryder had come from money, a pretty future mapped out for him before he late-bloomed as an alpha. So yeah, your life was fucked-up if you didn’t reveal as a beta, and for some, the transition was harder than others

“When was the last time you tried her sister?” I asked Ryder.

“An hour ago,” he said, already fishing in his pocket and dragging out his phone. “Maybe the little brat will be up for talking now.”

He thumbed his phone and hit a button before switching it to speaker mode.

It picked up on the first ring, and a hysterical “Ryder!” came down the line.

“I’m here, Emma,” he said, his voice the calm, smooth one that insisted everything was going to be just fine. I’d seen him use that voice on lowlifes to get information from them right before he coldly put a bullet between their eyes.

Hard to believe Ryder was a born to rule prick who’d once attended a prestigious school.

“They took her!” Emma wailed into the phone. I might have laughed at the notion of Ryder needing to up his game if I hadn’t been so fucking wired myself.

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