Page 62

They slipped past him and pressed themselves against the wrought iron bars of the large vehicle gate. Kalen lingered behind, reaching into his jacket again. This time, he pulled out a rolled sheet of glossy stickers—bright, obnoxious things that looked like they belonged in an Ironside gift bag.

He slapped one across the lens of a camera cleverly obscured by the wrought iron pattern of the arch above the pedestrian gate. “Are you ready to play the game?” it read, above a winking emoji face. Rain splattered the sticker, making the face look like it was crying.

He pulled out another sticker, slapping it onto a camera she would never have noticed tucked beneath the lamp post on the other side of the car gate. “You Decide: Winner or Waste?”

Kalen led them into the car park and pushed them all between two supply vans as Oscar and Kilian appeared again, tossing keys to both Mikel and Kalen.

They unlocked the two vans, and Kalen directed everyone toward the van on the left as Mikel climbed into the other one and started the engine.

Isobel resisted, waiting between the vehicles as she caught sight of Bellamy arriving with Sophia, Maya, and Luis.

He was trying to shield them with his arms and jacket.

Sophia appeared gaunt and thin, but her skin was no longer drawn and sallow; it had a healthy golden-brown tone, and her buzz cut was evened out to a half inch of dark brown hair.

They were all trying to protect their few bags from getting wet.

Kalen helped them stuff the bags into Mikel’s van.

Bellamy handed her a clear plastic folder with handwritten pages inside. “Our statements. We don’t mind if you read them.”

“Thanks,” she told him, tucking the folder under her arm as he helped Luis into the van after Maya.

Then she turned to Sophia. “If you wanted to see me so bad, you could have just asked ,” she joked, because it’s what Sophia would have said. “You didn’t have to gatecrash our jailbreak.”

Sophia made a quiet, husky scoffing sound, which crackled and cut off at the end.

She could manage a few words here and there, but she didn’t waste them.

Instead, she signed two of the messages she had learned over video chat with Isobel.

Fuck you.

Love you.

Isobel signed both sentiments back to her, and then Kalen opened the passenger side of Mikel’s van, gesturing for Bellamy and the Rosales to climb in. “You’re with Mikel.”

Isobel looked up just in time to see Gabriel and Elijah reappear, hauling the rest of their luggage.

“Everyone, turn off location services on your phones,” Elijah ordered.

“Also Bluetooth, Wi-Fi assist, auto-updates, cloud syncing, and Find My Phone. Delete all apps except the essentials. Social media apps aren’t essential.

Our group is already using a VPN, but Maya, Sophia, Luis, and Bellamy—you need to hold off accessing the internet until we stop driving and I can get you set up. ”

Kalen stuck his head into Mikel’s window and spoke quietly as they all moved to obey Elijah, pulling out their phones and quickly deleting apps.

“Ease up on the rain now,” Kalen told the other Alpha. “Slow it even more as we pull out—we need to make it gradual.”

As all the rest of the luggage was piled into Mikel’s van, Elijah handed over the rest of their statements to Isobel to add to the plastic folder, and then they were on the road.

Leaving Ironside.

Driving alone in a country that wouldn’t even bother to deport them back to the settlements if they were caught breaking the European Gifted laws that allowed them to provisionally take up space within the walls of the academy.

As they drove, Isobel nervously scanned each of the statements, absorbing the horrible details and making sure they were signed and that all the proper details were recorded at the end.

With each statement, the sick feeling inside her churned tighter and tighter.

The officials would do anything to keep these statements from ever seeing the light of day.

The rain eased as they pulled up to the bus stop close to the academy.

“Dropping the folder,” Kalen tersely told them, twisting back to take the statements from Isobel before slipping out of the van.

Oscar stepped out of the passenger seat, following Kalen.

Isobel shifted on Theodore’s lap to stare out the window as Kalen stopped by Mikel’s van, briefly speaking to the other Alpha.

Oscar had gone to the back of Mikel’s van.

“What’s Oscar doing?” she asked as Kalen walked up to one of the bollards by the bus stop and untwisted the cap.

“Taking the plates off the vans,” Moses explained.

He was sitting in the aisle between seats, all of them packed so tightly into the van that they were probably going to be bruised when they squeezed out.

Moses was already wincing. Some of them could have gone in the other vehicle with the Rosales, but it seemed that nobody wanted to separate from the group, even if it meant extreme discomfort.

Their protective instincts were too strong to ignore.

Isobel watched through the fogged window as Kalen slipped the plastic folder into the hollowed bollard, sealing it with a turn of the cap.

That folder was a bloodletting and a reckoning.

Each page inside held the raw, handwritten confessions of the people she loved most in the world, and for a moment, she swore she could feel the weight of them pressing through the metal, making the bollard tilt toward the earth like it could feel the heavy secrets as keenly as she could.

The raw and ugly truths folded into that folder were like loose teeth yanked from their mouths, blood spilling freely on their final day at Ironside as their smiles for the cameras turned gory.

She had written that every night in the Stone Dahlia was another sale, another piece of herself auctioned for spectacle and profit. One step closer to the night she would be expected to sell everything for fear that the people she cared about would be hurt if she didn’t.

Gabriel’s statement had been exacting, tidy, and brutal.

Elijah’s had been curt and matter of fact, but just as damning.

They both wrote that the Stone Dahlia was not a new hell for them—it was a sex-trafficking prison they were familiar with from childhood.

They wrote that the officials had sent them into rooms to extract pleasure from the powerful, uncaring of how they did it, only that their clients paid well and came back for seconds.

Kilian’s statement was thinner than the rest.

He wrote in clipped language about how he had been tortured for information after Isobel’s first settlement tour, and talked about one of his recurring visitors in the Icon Cafe.

A very famous TV producer who worked with children, who always sat too close to him, fingers heavy on his thigh, so close that Kilian could always smell his breath.

The man had said, “If you have children one day, you should send them to me when they start high school. I’ll put them on my network.

They’ll be easier to break in at that age.

That’s how Ironside does it—grabs them while they’re young and breaks them in real good.

They’re all used up and crazy by the end of their twenties, but by that point we don’t need them anymore—the entertainment industry has no use for them once they age out, so we just send them to rehab.

It’s just how it works. You work them nice and hard and then send them out to pasture when they start foaming at the mouth. ”

Sophia’s handwriting had been shaky. She wrote about how they had beaten her, shaved her, and poured bleach down her throat before wrapping up their vile acts with a pretty bow because her suffering made her more sympathetic, more palatable, more desirable.

Bellamy’s statement followed hers. It was a raw explosion of fury.

He said that they didn’t punish him directly because Yulia Novikov said, “Pretty girls break so much better than pretty boys.”

Theodore and Cian had written and signed theirs together, as two sides of the same coin.

They were the decoration of the Stone Dahlia.

Beautiful faces. Flawless bodies. Convincing smiles.

Propped up like dolls in velvet chairs while women whispered about which one they would choose if only they had enough money, and how sometimes, the whispers weren’t whispers at all.

Sometimes they were promises. Sometimes those women detailed what they would do with them as soon as the Stone Dahlia began accepting bids for private dates with them, like it was inevitable, like they had absolutely no choice in the matter.

It was a source of delight for their potential clients—not the source of shame or horror that it should have been.

Moses’ statement was short. He had never been good at talking about himself.

He wrote about the same thing as Niko, who had scrawled his so roughly that the pen broke through the page.

They wrote about being made to fight for other people’s entertainment, about being told to win or lose depending on the secret bets placed by important Ironside officials, and they wrote about being forced to watch Isobel being drugged and shoved into a red room for a man who had purchased her.

Mikel, Kalen, and Oscar’s words were all jagged with violence, spilling the secrets of the Icon Cafe, the fighting rings, the kink rooms, and every other private room or hall they had stepped into.

They had spent the most time down there, so their letters were as damning as they were disgusting and disturbing.

They named many famous or important people outright.