Page 102 of Savage Surrender

My father’s eyes are open, but unfocused. They move over the cords, the gun Owen threw across the room, and the broken door before they find me. Confusion lasts less than a second.

“Frederick.” He barks my name, but somehow it’s lost all power. Maybe I only answer to a feisty blonde girl now. “Take this ridiculous thing off me and bring your mother to me.”

I walk past him and pick up his gun. The magazine drops into my palm when I press the release. One round in the chamber. I clear it, put the pieces into the backpack separately, and take the contractor’s pistol from Owen.

“I’m speaking to you.”

“And I don’t care.”

Owen passes me Charles’s phone and a flat black drive he found in the open drawer. Ammunition follows. I leave the cash and passport where they are.

The phone is locked so I pocket it.

“You boys are in deep shit.” Charles twists against the cords again, harder now. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You humiliated and stolen from men with the means to bury you, and now you’ve broken into my home and assaulted me. You’re kidnapping my property.”

“We need to take the laptop,” I tell Owen, completely ignoring him. “The listing is still live.”

Mason sends a fresh one-use link for the second machine. I approve it and leave both laptops powered and connected.

“I can kill the listing from inside the account,” Mason says through the burner. “Give me a few minutes.”

“Okay, be quick. We need to go.”

“If either machine sleeps, I lose the session. Don’t close either lid.”

I step back into the hall. Charles tries to sit up, and Owen shifts his boot from his hip to the center of his chest. He puts him down again without using the bad shoulder.

“Call him off, Frederick.”

I zip the backpack. “No.”

“Untie me now and I won’t make a big deal about it.”

My fingers tighten around the strap.

He stares at me like he’s seeing me for the first time.

“You sold her.”

“Your mother agreed to correct the damage she caused our family. Whatever story she told you⁠—”

“You put her naked body on the internet,” Owen cuts in. His boot stays planted, but the rest of him has gone still. “Piece of shit.”

Charles looks up at him. “Coming from you?” The smile comes back slowly. “I hear your last omega is paralyzed.”

Owen’s face barely moves.

“She was never my omega,” Owen says simply. “But you already know that. I don’t care what happens to her, just like I don’t care what happens to you.”

His smile thins.

I crouch beside him, grip his jaw, and hold the screen in front of his face. He tries to turn away. Owen’s boot presses harder into his chest until the lock opens.

I open his messages. There’s a group with Vincent, Alexander, and William. It opens in the middle of the mess Mason made: attorneys, accounts they can’t reach, cars that need to disappear, warnings not to use old numbers. Every location they mention is there or the usual place. I scroll through hours of them blaming one another or one of us and look for what they’re planning next.

A gray thumbnail passes beneath my thumb.

I almost keep going. Then the hat catches me, and I swipe back.