I did as he asked. The link routed us to a picture from the archives of a small courthouse on the outskirts of Chicago. The tiny article had a dozen other pictures of other couples that had been married by the justice of the peace that month. Viola and the man with her were labeled as the new Mr. and Mrs. Jane and John Smith. Obviously, fake names had been used.
“Hang on,” Nico said from behind us. “Use that name and check hospitals in the area. That baby looks like it’s less than a month old.”
We did and found a birth certificate for a baby boy named Maxwell Donnelly. Based on the dates, he’d be around twenty-one years old now—if he was still alive.
“She’s got a fucking son,” Luis breathed. “I did not peg her as the maternal type.”
“Can you use that name and those fake names to try and find anything in The Monroe Groups servers? Can you even get into them?” Nico asked Luis.
“Uh, well. I can give it a shot. I can hack into anything, in theory. Their stuff has pretty much been abandoned as the executives, and anyone associated has fled prosecution. So, network security is probably at its lowest it ever has been.”
Luis worked for an hour, meticulously combing through file after file. Finally, he found a file of legal documents. Viola had gotten pregnant by a man named Claude Donnelly. They’d had what appeared to be a shotgun wedding forced by Viola’s parents. The baby was born, but three years later, the two divorced. Looked like the Donnelly guy remarried and had a few other kids.
“This document here shows that when Maxwell Donnelly was eighteen, his father and stepmother died in a car crash. Maxwell took custody of his half-siblings. Hang on… there’s a driver’s license photo of this kid.”
Luis clicked on the tiny thumbnail picture, and it swelled to fill the screen. Nico stiffened beside me.
“Oh my God,” Sinthy hissed from behind us. “It’s him.”
The ‘him’ was Maxwell Donnelly. The young man who’d tried to break through her wards. The one who had been experimented on and tortured to create a witch the royals could control. The realization dawned on each of us, filling us with equal parts disbelief and disgust.
“Her own child?” Donatello whispered in disbelief. “Her own baby boy and she treated him like a lab rat?”
Nico pointed at the soulless eyes of sixteen-year-old Viola Monroe. “This bitch probably found out about the kid’s paternal family background. Once she knew her ex-husband’s family were witches in the distant past, she kidnapped them and forced Maxwell and his half-siblings into the experiments. That’s got to be what happened.”
Viola was a different kind of monster. To do that to the child she carried in her womb showed exactly how hell-bent she was on success. All she cared about was her family’s power and the destruction of any and all supernatural creatures. I could imagine her finding out her son’s great-great-great-great grandmother was a witch and any love for him vanishing in an instant. That’s how insane the woman was.
“Well, shit,” I breathed. “There went that plan. The only person she might have had an emotional attachment to is being experimented on like a guinea pig. She can’t love him. No one could and still do what she’s doing to him. If she doesn’t give a damn about her own son, then she doesn’t give a damn about anyone. She’s a sociopath, clear and simple.”
The air in the room seemed to go cold as we all resigned ourselves to defeat. We had nothing to hold over Viola. No loved ones, not nothing. I said as much, but Sinthy paced the room, a contemplative look on her face.
“Hang on,” she finally said. “We may still have something we can use.”
“What?” Nico asked. “She doesn’t care about anyone.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Sinthy said. She pointed at the computer. “That boy is the culmination of who knows how many failed experiments. If she sent him into the field to break the wards, that means he has to be the best thing she and her scientists have come up with. They may have been working on this for decades. That kid, that…” She shook her head, trying tofind the right word. “Thatforcedwitch is like a billion-dollar weapon. She will value that if nothing more.”
I sighed in resignation. “I don’t think that’s enough to get her to fold. Let’s say we kidnap him. Then what? Do you really think she’d give up this crusade and turn herself in to get him back?” I pointed at the computer screen. “She’s tortured him for years, ruined his life. Her own child. She’s not human.”
My hand curled instinctively around my belly. I couldn’t feel the new life growing in me yet. Didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl, but I already knew that I loved my child. I would die to protect the child inside me. The thought that Viola could be so cruel and heartless as to take the one thing she should have loved unconditionally and twist it, break it until it was almost unrecognizable, was one of the worst atrocities I could think of.
“I agree with Maddy,” Donatello said. “Viola is not sane enough to be reasoned with. Taking the boy would enrage her but not bring her to heel. It may even make matters worse. She could even put out more unhinged videos telling her followers to attack shifters.”
“Wait,” Nico said. “This is the first breakthrough we’ve had. I think we need to give this a shot. Viola can’t do much more to us. Thousands of zealots have surrounded my pack lands. Most shifters are in hiding, and there’s a bounty on Maddy’s head. How much worse can it really get?”
Donatello sucked at his teeth for a second before inclining his head toward Nico. “You also have a good point. But I still fear that, as unpredictable as Viola is, there could still be trump cards up her sleeve.”
“That’s true, but honestly, we’re running out of time,” Felipe said. “I’m with Nico. We gotta take what we can get, right?”
Diego and Luis share a look before nodding to each other. Luis looked at the group. “Yup. We say go with Nico’s plan.”
Sinthy grinned. “I think this is a good plan. As Felipe said, time sort of feels like it’s getting short somehow. This is our chance.”
That was it. Donatello and I had been outvoted. They had a good argument. It all made sense, but something about it made me uneasy. Part of me truly thought that when Viola found out her own son had been taken, she’d simply shrug and go about her day. How did you reason with, or even threaten, a person who was a monster?
“Sinthy, I think you and I should go and get this guy,” Nico said. “We use the tracker you put on him, teleport to his location, and take him. We’ll leave some kind of message for Viola. If she wants him back, she’ll have to call off the manhunt on Maddy and turn herself in.”
The group continued with their discussions and plans, even going so far as to decide that if Viola contacts us and decides she doesn’t want to end things our way, we’ll give her a location to have some final all-out war if she is so dead set on it. Everything they talked about made sense, but part of me thought it all seemed too easy. I shot a glance across the room at Donatello, and he gave me a pained look. He had the same misgivings I did about the miracle plan the others had formulated. What I was really worried about was that Nico and the others were grasping at straws to end this as quickly as possible without truly thinking things through.
