2. De-Escalating Privileges

“Overkill, don’t you think?”Bellamy asked as a black van pulled up to the front of the building. He was casting his eyes over the group of people Isobel’s father had stuck them with for the day. “Your dad still hasn’t come to see you himself, but you need three stylists, a manager, a manager’s assistant, and—what are you?” He aimed the question at a man Isobel didn’t recognise.

“Driver,” the man grunted, rounding the van.

“More like parole officer.” Bellamy sniffed, yanking open the van door and motioning Isobel inside.

They had spoken the night before as Bellamy stretched out on the long chaise they had moved up against the window, as far away from the bed as they could shove it, heaping it with blankets to make it more comfortable. As it turned out, Bellamy was quite the spoiled little rich boy and he complained endlessly about his new arrangement, though he refused to take her bed and displace her to the chaise.

As they had whispered to each other in the darkness, they had decided that the best plan would be to wait until they were rushing between appointments to try and get their hands on a new phone.

Easier said than done, apparently.

Cooper’s team watched them like circling hawks, never leaving them alone or allowing Bellamy to sneak off while she was busy with her appointments. One of Cooper’s assistants even stood inside the room with Isobel for her laser hair removal session.

The next day was the same, with Isobel shuffled from appointment to appointment, both of them monitored constantly.

The days dragged into weeks, with Isobel’s strength decreasing at an alarming rate. She was unable to explain why she was suddenly so weak, why she seemed to need more than the pills, more than a single surrogate, more than the combination her father kept declaring to be overkill.

She couldn’t explain why none of it was working, and if Teak was trying to contact her through her father, she wasn’t hearing about it.

Isobel slumpeddown on her stool, her throat coated in acid and her stomach roiling, even though she had already thrown up that morning.

“Everyone is always talking about how strong your mate must be.” Bellamy was hunched over at the breakfast bar, flicking through his phone with a severe frown—he liked to make sure it still wasn’t connected every morning. “They say that’s how you survived after the Vermont attack, and it’s why you need so many Alpha surrogates. I always thought it was stupid. I thought you didn’t need them, you were just taking advantage—and they were too.” He pushed his phone away in disgust, leaning back and cutting her a sideways look. “Seemed like such a brilliant stunt. Too insane to be true. Television gold.”

Neither of them had touched the breakfast Cooper had ordered up to the apartment.

“You should eat,” Bellamy prompted when she didn’t respond to him. His voice was almost gentle, though the severe frown still twisted his lips.

“Not hungry.” Isobel stared down at her plate with a sniffle, which quickly turned into a sneeze, and then another, and then another.

She swiped a tissue—she had taken to carrying boxes of them around—and blew her swollen nose. Her throat tickled with the action, causing her to descend into a coughing fit, which then set her head pounding in a vicious staccato. Shoving her food away, she slumped forward onto folded arms with a pained groan.

She was so tired.

Adam Bellamy was at a loss.

The Sigma wasn’t in a good way, and he was growing increasingly uncomfortable in the penthouse apartment. Her father had slammed her up against the wall and almost choked her when she refused to go to her breast augmentation appointment. They had been fighting about surgery often, and it always ended in a bruised Sigma with murder flashing in those weird eyes of hers as she flounced off to her room, refusing to let her massive Alpha father stamp the fight out of her.

Except for the rare occasion when she seemed too weak, too sick, and the fire in her was extinguished.

Those nights broke his heart because he could see how it must have been for her before Ironside taught her to fight back. He thought of the Sigma he met in their first year, the one who could barely meet his eyes, and something sickening clenched inside his chest.

He never considered himself very soft or emotional, but it was hard to hear her crying into her pillow, rasping and gasping for breath because her throat was already swollen, and Braun had made it worse by grabbing her too tightly.

And then there was that Sigma power.

At first, Adam didn’t understand what was happening when she would stumble and groan without Braun ever laying a hand on her. He didn’t understand why he had to carry her back to her room after Braun stalked away, leaving her depleted and crumpled on the ground without so much as touching her, like their argument had emotionally drained her to the point of collapsing.

He didn’t understand why it took so long for her to open her eyes again, and why she sometimes shook so hard he could see her blankets trembling.

Until one night, when she began to suck away all of his confusion and concern, still bleary-eyed and groaning in pain, hugging her arms around her chest as he laid her down. She didn’t even seem to be aware of what she was doing; she was so out of it.

He finally understood that night.

Her father was drowning her in his negative emotional shit, somehow forcing it on her.

Adam had thought Sigmas were powerless—or else useless—because they never seemed to help anyone out. He didn’t realise it affected them so badly. He probably should have.

“Shut up,” she groaned, swatting her hand out behind her.

“What?” He swallowed, pulled from his thoughts. He glanced behind them at the empty dining table. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Notttyou,” she slurred, closing her eyes. “Talking to Grandpa. Just need a little … nap …”

Adam straightened in his stool, his eyes sweeping the room properly.

Grandpa?

Shit.

Was she losing it now?

The sliding door swooped open, the delicate mottled glass shivering in its frame as Braun stepped into the room.

Adam slipped off his seat, looping an arm around Isobel and quickly picking her up, just so that Braun wouldn’t touch her. It wasn’t that he liked the girl or anything—he enjoyed having his balls attached to his body. He just didn’t particularly enjoy giant Alphas tossing around tiny Sigmas.

Adam’s father was an asshole, sure, but he didn’t beat Adam’s little brother or sister just because he was three times their size. His father believed in fair fights.

Adam also believed in fair fights. That was why he had left her alone after realising she wasn’t going to stand up for herself or fight back. He had assumed, with her being the only other Icon kid, that she would be competing directly with him.

But she never gave a shit about him.

“She’s sick,” Adam explained as Braun just stood there with thick arms crossed and a brow twitching up in silent question. “I was going to take her back to her room.”

Isobel’s head lolled on his shoulder, a small noise slipping out of her lips. “Shut,” she mumbled, probably still trying to tell her imaginary grandpa to shut up.

Braun fell to the side a step, almost giving Adam room to pass him and escape … but not quite.

“Your father wants me to send him more footage for your content team to post.” Braun sounded annoyed. “Apparently, several hours a day isn’t enough. He needs variety.”

“If you hadn’t made it a condition that he deactivate my phone plan, I’d be able to post endless content,” Adam returned dryly. “It would be quite varied.”

Braun didn’t seem amused, his expression remaining unchanged, his arms still tightly crossed. Eventually, he reached for his phone, holding it up to start recording without a word of warning. Adam’s posture stiffened, but he worked to smooth the frown from his features, schooling his expression into a careful, blank mask.

“Carter is sick,” he explained to the camera, holding the Sigma just a little further away from his body. She was light as air. He was pretty sure she had lost weight.

Fuck. The fucking Alphas were probably going to see this video.

He really liked his balls attached to his body.

Usually, the content they uploaded was just Adam singing while Carter danced. Sometimes, she attempted to teach him her dance routines, and sometimes, he convinced her to sing with him. They got along, and that surprised him, but still … they trained hard all night in the dining room so that they wouldn’t have to interact in front of the camera.

It was too difficult to force a smile and a good attitude with Cooper and his assistants checking on them every five minutes. It was much easier to be panting from exertion, frowning in concentration, or wincing from overextending.

But this … this was different.

“She’s, ah, not doing great,” he continued, summoning a drawn expression to his features and drooping his shoulders with an exhausted sigh. “She’s used to more than one surrogate. We’ve been trying to hide how tired she is from you guys, but …”

Please let those crazy assholes see this.

He couldn’t say too much in front of Braun, or the giant Alpha would just turn around and take out all his anger on Carter.

Braun circled his finger in the air, annoyance in his brown eyes, telling Adam to wrap up the sob story and move on to a different topic.

“Anyway.” Adam swallowed, forcing a tremulous smile. “We’ve been having some trouble connecting—” He paused there deliberately, pretending to adjust Carter in his arms. “—with the latest song we’ve been practicing. I don’t think it’s for us. She’s probably faking this to get out of it. I should go put her to bed. I don’t think her vitamins are working.”

Please be watching. Please read between the lines.

He didn’t know why the Alphas magically worked for her unformed bond, but it was clear they did. They did, and he didn’t, but Braun acted like the side-effects were something he dealt with every day, something he had seen a million times before, and he was utterly unconcerned.

Carter had been concerned since the very first day of the break. She had known this would happen. She had tried to hide it, tried to brush off her own strange behaviour and explain away her own inexplicable panic, but he had seen it. And now he knew it was justified. She had known the pills wouldn’t work for her. She had known that Adam wouldn’t work for her.

If he could just get the attention of the Alphas, somehow, maybe Carter could go back to being normal.

Braun rolled his eyes at Adam’s explanation for the camera, but he moved out of the way, following to capture what appeared to be a tender moment as Adam lowered Carter into her bed. He didn’t feel particularly tender, but he still pulled the covers up to her chin and stood there staring down at her in fake contemplation until Braun left.

Cian pulledhis phone from his pocket half a second before it vibrated, already tapping his brother’s shoulder to silence the TV in the living room.

He knew what the notification was.

He always knew when it was her. Isobel. Or him. Bellamy. He never thought he would ever spend so much mental energy keeping tabs on Adam fucking Bellamy, but there he was, with social media alerts set up and every psychic bone in his body attached to the thought of them.

Every single day, he pulled the Eight of Swords, which depicted a kneeling, blindfolded woman with a ring of swords piercing the dirt around her. No matter which deck he used, it was always the same card, and while sometimes the illustration was different, he always felt the same cold sensation when he touched the silky surface of the cards.

Logan hit the Mute button, startling their dad and stepmother, but all three of them stayed silent as Cian clicked on the new notification. Elijah had somehow managed to set up alerts to all their phones whenever Bellamy or Isobel—or whoever was controlling their accounts—posted. They were even getting google alerts for any news articles mentioning them.

“What the fuck?” Cian spluttered, unfurling from the couch in a sharp twitch of movement, both hands gripping his phone tightly as he turned it sideways, enlarging the video to take up the whole screen.

The Beta boy clearly had a death wish, because he was touching Isobel. Even when they danced together, they were very careful not to touch. Cian had seen all the comments on their videos asking if Bellamy was a “real” surrogate or a publicity stunt, because he didn’t seem very close to Isobel.

Perhaps one of their fathers had forced this little scene on them to quell the rumours.

“Carter is sick.” Bellamy’s posh accent filled Cian’s tiny family living room. Logan jumped up, peering at Cian’s phone. Cian could see his parents trading a guarded look from his periphery.

They were all careful not to ask about Isobel, especially after Cian spent the first two weeks back in his settlement exercising excessively, snapping at every unfortunate soul who looked his way and snarling “do something”at anyone who would answer his calls. He watched as Bellamy’s eyes flicked over the camera to whoever was holding it, suddenly switching topics.

Cian’s teeth pressed together as the Beta adjusted Isobel in his arms, and then began carrying her down a hallway. He laid her in a bed, and Cian drank in every minute detail, because it was the first look he had gotten of anything other than the same room they always streamed from every night.

He didn’t even realise there was a low rumbling sound emitting from his chest until Logan took a furtive step away from him.

“I have to go work out,” he gritted, feeling the rage, frustration, and agony swirl up inside him as it did every night.

“Cian.” Hanale Ashford edged toward him, catching his arm.

Cian quickly jerked away from the older man, shocking both of them.

His father held up rough, golden-skinned palms, his expression twitching to cover up the hurt that had briefly flashed over his handsome features. “I think you need to tell us what’s going on,” he urged quietly, in that accented voice that had always calmed Cian when he was little. It was deep, musical, and relaxed, some words pronounced longer and softer.

Hanale reached out again, and this time Cian allowed his father’s hand to cup his shoulder. The smaller man had to reach up while Cian stared down, fury vibrating through muscles that seemed to have grown and hardened in the month he had been home. It was hardly surprising since all he had done was work out, act like a brute, and slink off to get a new tattoo whenever he could.

There was no flicker of fear in his father’s bright blue eyes, only concern. “Talk to me, son. I may not be Kalen West or Mikel Easton, but I’m still your father. We would do anything for you.”

Hanna Ashford rose from the couch, regathering her long, white-blonde ponytail before slipping to his side and wrapping her slender arms around his waist.

She wasn’t his biological mother, but she was … everything. They were his family. They meant everything to him.

But he couldn’t tell them this.

They still thought Ironside had some good in it—that it was a shining beacon of hope for people in the settlements. They didn’t know it was a rotten seed sprouting corrupt roots that dug deep and poisoned the very foundation of their society, sucking the nutrients from the soil, turning it into a husk of dust to feed the visage of vibrant leaves and gilded fruit that flourished on the surface. They didn’t know that all the glittering little stars on camera were just glittering little lambs being herded right into a factory to be sliced, diced, and packaged up real nice.

Ironside wasn’t a guiding light in the darkness of poverty, as they had all been taught to believe.

It was their singular downfall.

His parents had sent him there to get him away from the seedy officials who were hunting down rare Alphas for their child trafficking ring. He wasn’t about to tell them they had handed him over to seedy officials hunting down rare Alphas to inject into their adult trafficking ring.

Though he supposed the Stone Dahlia was more than that, perhaps that wasn’t a point in its favour.

“It’s Iso—Carter,” he managed to get out, still staring into his father’s eyes.

To their credit, they didn’t react. Even Logan, who was perched up on the couch, blinking widened sapphire eyes like a stunned bird.

They obviously knew this was about Isobel.

Cian froze whenever an Ironside rerun came on and Isobel appeared on the screen. He shushed them, turned up the volume, paused at critical moments to furiously text the other Alphas about how Ironside was twisting a narrative on Isobel—something he hadn’t cared so much about when she was there within grabbing distance because that was just what Ironside did. Now, he became irrationally furious about it. He also irrationally barked at anyone who tried to change the channel while he was clearly busy on his phone.

He had entirely commandeered the ancient family laptop to search every gossip site for sightings of her zipping between appointments and ducking into high-end fashion boutiques, or briskly walking down the street with one of those reusable, takeaway coffee cups approximately the size of her head cradled protectively in her grip. Cooper and an entire team of assistants were usually hurrying behind her, Bellamy walking a little off to the side like he was considering jumping into a passing car—or in front of one.

They didn’t paint a particularly happy pair, but there had been a few sneaky videos taken of what appeared to be Bellamy standing close and comforting her while she spoke lowly and rapidly to him, his hand half-raised like he might squeeze her arm or something. In those videos, she was looking at him like she trusted him, as though she could actually stand him.

It made Cian want to pull out the Beta’s intestines and use them to spell out Look at her and die in the dirt.

“Did something happen?” his father prompted, appearing a little alarmed.

They had apparently been waiting for him to continue, and instead, he had gone off on an internal rant about Bellamy.

That … also happened often.

“She almost died.” Cian decided to tell them part of the truth. “The shooter had her cornered.”

His parents shared a quick, heavy look. There was no surprise in it. Only dread.

“Did you have something to do with the shooter …” Logan was the one with the guts to ask the question, though it took him two attempts. “Were you there when the shooter died?”

Nobody said Crowe’s name anymore. He was the shooter now.

“Not exactly.” Cian could feel his phone vibrating in his pocket. One of the Alphas was likely calling to discuss Bellamy’s latest post. He searched for something to say that would explain away his insane personality shift. “We’ve grown close,” he settled on. “She’s a good friend. That asshole was going to hurt her, and it’s not her fault that he’s gone, but I’m worried it’ll be twisted that way.”

“We’re worried about you,” Hanna said gently, stepping back from him and dropping her arms to her sides. “Did you have something to do with it, Cian? You can trust us. We’ll do everything in our power to protect you.”

“Just like I’ve always done,” his father added, squeezing Cian’s shoulder and lowering his brows, reminding him …

Hanale had always protected him—as far as he knew, anyway.

Now it was Cian’s turn to protect them.

“I didn’t kill Crowe,” he reassured them with a sigh. “I promise. This isn’t about him, it’s about Isobel. I just feel like I should be with her, protecting her. That’s what surrogates do—that’s what friends do.”

Logan pushed between their father and stepmother, pulling Cian into a rough hug. “He’s in loooveeee,” the idiot crooned, lightening the mood instantly and drawing a snort from Cian as the hug turned into a brief scuffle before Cian pushed his little brother back onto the couch.

“You’re an idiot,” Cian muttered, turning his attention back to his parents. “Everything is fine. I promise. I’m fine. I need to go work out, though. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Hanale Ashford suckedin a heavy breath of air that filled his chest, shoving his hands into his pockets and spinning on his heel as soon as the door to the house closed. He fixed his attention on his younger son, cocking a brow.

“Well?” he asked. “Anything?”

“Just these,” Logan muttered, tilting his head, dirty blond hair brushing into his eyes as he turned the little case of contacts over in his fingers. “Why were these in Cian’s pocket?”

Hanna stumbled, catching herself against the side of Logan’s chair. She plucked the case from his grip, swallowing dryly, and then swallowing again.

Hanale was numb with shock.

There was no way.

Impossible.

“And you’re sure you searched everywhere else?” Hanale pressed, his attention boring into Logan’s nonplussed eyes.

“Sure I’m sure.” Logan shrugged, glancing between them. “We share a room—there’s only so much he can hide. What’s the big deal? Even Alphas need glasses sometimes.”

“Because he doesn’t need glasses,” Hanna whispered.

“That you know of,” Logan quipped.

Hanale shook his head, falling into an armchair, the shock beginning to settle with a heavy finality into his bones. His son had a mate.

His son was hiding a mate.

There was something else going on here, and it wasn’t anything good. He could feel it in his bones.

“How is she still alive?” he husked, his wide eyes crawling to the muted television, expecting to see the Sigma herself. Perhaps in an old episode, perhaps with Cian. “So far away from him?”

“It is her, isn’t it?” Hanna’s attention tracked his, also settling on the screen, which was still playing the movie they had been watching earlier. “He’s suddenly … obsessed. Aggressive. Loses control over anything to do with her.”

Hanale nodded but then frowned, switching his attention down to the contact case in his lap. “Their eyes don’t match.”

“You think Cian is mated to—” Logan began to splutter, but Hanna quickly wrapped her hand around his mouth, silencing him.

It didn’t feel like a safe topic to talk about in such certain terms. Not out loud.

“She could be wearing contacts?” Hanna whispered, pulling Logan against her chest for a quick, reassuring hug. Almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she was shaking her head. “No, I remember, they tested her.”

“We need to keep this between us,” Hanale decided, slipping the case into his pocket. He was talking to Logan, who took a moment to think about it before pulling in a deep breath and nodding.

“Okay.”

Elijah was still waitingfor Cian to pick up the damn phone. He leaned back, lifting his gaze from the screen for a moment to stretch out his neck. The other Alphas were all silent, waiting on the call.

Likely seething quietly.

Or some, not so quietly.

Oscar’s breath was sawing in and out, muted thuds echoing through Elijah’s laptop speakers. With no other way to channel his aggression in the settlement, Mikel had sent him a punching bag.

And then another.

And then another.

Theodore and Moses were also pulling in air a little too heavily, each inhale and exhale too deep and measured, like they were practising breathing exercises as they jogged somewhere—probably wherever they could find a bit of privacy, or just away from the watchful eyes of their father.

“Cian’s calling back.” Elijah’s attention snapped down as his phone vibrated. He routed the call to his laptop and added Cian to the group.

“Everyone here?” Cian asked immediately. He also sounded out of breath.

“Everyone’s here,” Kalen answered. “You somewhere private, Cian?”

“Private as it gets,” Cian muttered. “There’s an abandoned house at the end of the row. Damn roof caved in.”

“Good,” Kalen said. “Go ahead, Elijah.”

“Everyone put headphones in or turn me on speaker. I’m going to share my screen.” Elijah stretched out his stiff fingers, his vision turning momentarily blurry before he skimmed the video to the first point of interest. “I think the first thing we should know is that Bellamy wasn’t expecting to be recorded.”

Elijah circled his curser around the brief, perplexed widening of Bellamy’s eyes, the subtle shift in his posture as he held Isobel a little further away from his body. It was all done in the blink of an eye. “His father must not be happy with the level of attention Bellamy is—or isn’t—getting from this gig.”

Not one of the Alphas spoke.

Even Elijah could feel the slight vibration in the back of his throat when he spoke. The curl of fire through his body at the image of someone else’s hands on Isobel.

He pushed it all down, dismissing it as an inconvenient side effect of the bond.

And then he wound the video back a few seconds, pausing it in the brief flash of footage before Bellamy rearranged himself and Isobel.

Oscar let out a deep, rattling sound and Theodore snarled out a curse.

“Protective,” Gabriel noted, his voice breaking as though the word had been too bitter to speak.

“Yes,” Elijah said.

Bellamy was holding Isobel against his chest, his posture tight and wary.

He was protecting her from?—

“Braun Carter has a reckoning coming,” Mikel spoke lowly, the words utterly calm and unbothered, making the threat he had issued all the more sinister.

“Wait,” Theodore snapped, still breathing heavily, just as Elijah was about to skip to the next part of the video. “Is that a bruise on her neck?”

“Could be shadow.” Moses didn’t even sound like he believed himself.

“It’s not enough to use as proof,” Elijah said, skimming ahead in the video. “Teak said we would need irrefutable evidence of abuse. Without it, the other officials are blocking her from interfering. Now … here.” He pressed Play on the video.

“Anyway …” Bellamy visibly swallowed in the recording, a tremulous smile hooking his lips. “We’ve been having some trouble connecting—” Bellamy paused to adjust Isobel, and Elijah punched a key to stop the video again.

“That was for us,” he said. “I’m sure of it. Nobody can get an answer from Isobel or Bellamy, and it’s obvious someone is controlling their social media. You’ve seen how many people are shadowing her to her appointments. They haven’t just cut her off from contacting anyone. They’ve cut him off too.”

Kalen grunted a sound of agreement. “That much is pretty obvious. Why go to the trouble of trying to mention it, and so subtly?”

“Because of the next part.” Elijah shifted the video marker ahead and hit Play again.

“I should go put her to bed,”Bellamy was saying. “I don’t think her vitamins are working.”

“See the way he looks over the camera?” Elijah asked.

“And the weird emphasis on ‘vitamins’,” Gabriel added.

“Didn’t hear any emphasis,” Kilian said.

“He stared really hard at the camera when he said it.” Niko seemed to be pacing, if the soft shuffling sound in the background of his call was anything to go by.

“You think he’s trying to say she needs more surrogates?” Kilian asked.

“No.” Kalen’s voice rumbled with alarm. “The surrogate pills.”

“That’s what I think,” Elijah confirmed. “I think Braun has been feeding her the pills to sustain her with Bellamy as surrogate, and I think Bellamy is trying to say they aren’t working.”

“So she’s not just sleeping. She’s not sick, and she’s not even unconscious because of something her father has done.” Oscar sounded very still all of a sudden.

“It’s because she’s away from us.” Theodore’s tone was rough.

“I’ll try Teak again,” Elijah promised.

“No, I will,” Gabriel groused. “You need to come out of there and eat at some point. Or sleep. Or shower.”

“Can’t,” Elijah murmured, glancing toward Gabriel’s icon on the call. “Almost in.”

He had already turned off his screen sharing, exited out of the video, and returning to his previous task. Everyone stayed on the line, and they would remain that way until they hung up themselves. He was busy now.

“You’ve been saying that for three days,” Gabriel pointed out.

“This shit doesn’t happen overni—finally!” Elijah straightened his posture, a bead of sweat forming on his brow as he loomed closer to one of his screens. He had stolen as much equipment from Ironside as he could fit into his luggage—opting to leave behind most of his belongings to make room for it all.

The human driver had attempted to lift Elijah’s suitcase from the storage area of the bus, but he wasn’t even able to drag it an inch from the spot Elijah had slid it into. He had given Elijah an absolutely filthy look as the Alpha picked up the suitcase like it was nothing and stacked it onto the sidewalk, seams threatening to burst and unravel.

“You’re in?” Kalen asked sharply.

“I’ve got my opening,” Elijah said, adrenaline flooding his system, staving off the exhaustion that had been threatening to pull him under. He had barely left his desk since they arrived back at the Piney Woods Settlement.

He spent the first week butchering all the hardware he had stolen to set up a customised hacker suite in the second room of his and Gabriel’s minuscule house. They had both shifted Elijah’s bed into Gabriel’s room, but he had barely used it, and by the third week, he had begun to neglect it completely in favour of short naps on the floor by his desk.

“Where was the weak spot?” Oscar asked, shifting closer to the phone until his gravelled voice rang out clearly.

“The first was Cooper,” Elijah muttered distractedly. “It was easy to hack into his emails and figure out which building they were in. From there, I narrowed down the building’s on-site manager and the off-site security they had on file. I targeted the manager in a phishing attack using the security company’s details. Then I used his credentials to gain access to the building’s security system.”

“So you can view their CCTV?” Oscar asked. “How does that help?”

“That was last week,” Gabriel sounded tired as he chimed in.

Elijah wanted to roll his eyes, but he resisted. It would be a waste of energy.

“And since then?” Mikel asked, sounding apprehensive.

What he had done “since then” was exactly why Elijah hadn’t been keeping them informed. Everything he was doing was illegal … but necessary. Isobel was part of the group now, and they protected each other. That was how it had always been.

“Since then, I’ve been inching my way into the system of the parent security company.” Elijah spoke steadily, refusing to pause for argument. “I’ve been exploiting vulnerabilities and escalating privileges to gain more control. But I’ve had to do it slowly, and I’ve had to clean up after myself. I have an established backdoor now and they haven’t noticed anything. I’ve just gained full access. What do you want to do with it?”

“I want to get the irrefutable evidence Teak asked for,” Kalen said before anyone else could respond. “Access any security cameras inside that apartment, and any devices with recording capabilities. Get eyes everywhere.”

“Done and done.”