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Maybe she was waiting outside the locker room.
But she wasn’t there.
Maybe she had misunderstood what he said, and she had gone to wait somewhere in the stands or in his private box – though he couldn’t imagine her doing that. But, of course, she wasn’t in any of those places either.
He knew she wasn’t there. But he had to look. Or maybe he just needed to wait for a while, and she would reappear. This could just be taking longer than they expected.
But when he left the stadium, thinking maybe she was waiting for him outside, he came up short. There were Orza and Kirs. Both of them waiting by his private hover. Neither of them said anything. They didn’t even try to come grab him.
Because they didn’t need to.
They knew he would come to them now.
“Rane!”
He looked back. There was his team. Had they been following after him this whole time? Trying to catch up to him. They were determined.
Couldn’t imagine why, really.
He faced forward again. Orza had stepped to the side, allowing the door to open. Their expressions were as closed off and hostile as ever, but he could read something there. He knew what they were saying without a word.
Rane walked to the hover. He spared neither of them a glance as he stepped inside. He turned back to see his team. They had closed the distance and were now standing where he had just been, looking at him with expressions ranging from angry to confused.
The hover lifted off the ground, turned from the stadium, and bore him away. He felt strangely like he was going to his own execution as he sat back.
“Where is Sandy?”
No response but silence. Rane didn’t really expect an answer from either of them, but he had to try to ask anyway.
“If either of you have hurt her, I’m going to rip your skin off one scale at a time.”
Nothing.
Rane didn’t try again. He just waited. He had a horrible feeling he was going to find out soon. He would deal with whatever his mother was doing now. So long as Sandy was safe, so long as they hadn’t hurt her, he could deal with anything.
The ride was tense and silent aside from those two questions. Orza and Kirs didn’t even say anything when they pulled the hover up in front of the manor. They simply pressed a button, opening the door, allowing him to walk out.
They caught up to him halfway up the steps. They didn’t grab him, just flanked him on either side, as he went up through the main doors. When he would have climbed those steps to get to his mother’s office, where he assumed he would go, they finally took hold of him. Each one grabbing a shoulder and turning him down a different hall.
He knew exactly where they were going from there. The place his mother liked to keep him locked up – the basement punishment room. It’s where he had been when Sandy had gotten control over the house last time.
He supposed he was going to be there until she succeeded again.
That didn’t bother him. He spent a lot of time there, especially before Sandy got there. It was practically his second room. There wasn’t really anything special about it. The room was just a basic one with four walls and a drain in the floor. That came in handy when his mother remembered to send Orza or Kirs to hose him down or when they needed to clean up blood after beating him unconscious. Multipurpose.
But when the door opened and he was shoved inside, his heart dropped.
“Sandy,” he breathed.
His little human female was silent again. Looking at him with an impassive expression that did well at hiding how afraid she must be.
But not completely because she was on her knees, hands magcuffed behind her back, hair clutched in his mother’s fist forcing her head up. Her shoes were off, and he saw the dusting of bruises along her arms where Orza and Kirs had grabbed her.
He would kill them.
No matter what it cost him, he would kill them for hurting her like this.
Elffa smiled at him when one of the duo shoved him to his own knees. They grabbed his arms, jerking them back, as they pushed his shoulders down. Forcing him into a position of supplication in front of his mother.
