I reached for the doorknob. I took a deep breath. What if she wasn’t in here? What if?—
I pushed open the door.
Lorelei turned from the window, somehow gaunter than she’d looked during The Hunt. Her black gown nearly brushed the floor, exposing just a sliver of her bare feet. Her blonde curls were full and bouncy as she brushed them over her shoulder and placed a delicate hand on her hip.
“Oh, Nova,” she said softly. “What a disappointment you have been.”
48
WES
It all happened within a matter of seconds. My vision went dark. Someone pushed my head down with a grip on the back of my neck. Strong hands pulled my arms behind my back and restrained them.
I was shoved inside a vehicle that started moving immediately.
The first thing I saw when the black bag was pulled off my head was Roman, sitting next to me in the tinted SUV, holding a gun in his lap. We were surrounded by bulky, imposing men, whom I could only assume were also armed.
Through the haze of adrenaline, my only cohesive thought for several seconds was that at least if Roman’s attention was on me, it was away fromher.
I needed to keep it that way.
After I’d made it clear I wasn’t going to speak, Roman’s taunting smile grew. He glanced at his watch. “Nova won’t be awake for another few hours, right?”
My blood boiled inside my veins, but I stared forward, unmoving.
“Her routines have become quite the fascination. I enjoy watching her grocery shop. It’s endearing, the crease between her brows, the way she has to scan and compare every miniscule price tag. It makes it even more satisfying to know she won’t ever have to worry about money or cooking for herself ever again.”
“Roman, I will fucking kill?—”
Three guns pointed at my head—one from the passenger’s seat and two from the seats behind us. Roman didn’t even lift his own gun. He just smiled.
I faced forward again. Several minutes passed before we stopped in front of a massive townhouse in Greenwich Village. It must’ve been a new acquisition of my father’s, seeing as Roman owned nothing of his own.
“Don’t you want to knowhow?” he asked as the men surrounded us on our walk to the service entrance.
I ignored him, quickly scanning our environment once we were inside. The house was quiet. I was shoved forward, quickly ushered downstairs into the cellar.
“Leave us,” Roman said with a wave of his gun, and the men retreated upstairs.
With the barrel on the back of my neck, Roman forced me into the entertainment room, where a fully stocked bar faced seating.
“Sit down.”
I sat down in one of the chairs, and Roman walked to the bar. I knew his security team was likely watching via hidden camera feeds, gathered upstairs, ready to kill for their psychopath boss.
“We’ve built a citywide surveillance network,” Roman said, even though I never fucking asked. “With the marvels of AI combined with our security partnerships and the cloud infrastructure provider we own… camera feeds all over the city work forusnow.”
My stomach soured. I’d always known my father’s ambitions pointed him in this direction, but even five years ago, his influence and technological advancements were nowhere near capable of this level of dystopian control. A lot had changed since then.
“It’s even on my phone now,” Roman said as he poured himself a whiskey. He lifted his phone like he was an attention-starved thirteen-year-old showing me his cool new video game. “I can watch her from anywhere.”
My fists clenched.
Roman returned, placing the whiskey on the glass table in front of us as he took the adjacent leather chair. “Drink, Wes.”
The words seemed to echo against the windowless cellar.
My eyes slowly met his. “No.”
