“I lied,” I confess.

“What the fuck, bro?” Clay says angrily.

“I know, okay? I know I’m an asshole and you can punch me or do whatever the fuck you need to do after we find her.”

“Who is the guy?” Evan asks.

“I don’t know,” I say, pulling at my hair agitatedly.

“Are you worried because you think she’s going to fuck this guy, or because you think she might be in danger?” Hunter asks.

“Both. I can’t. She’s mine.”

“Her tracker,” Evan yells, his eyes almost as panicked as mine.

“Fuck,” Clay hisses, shaking his head and spinning slowly in a circle.

I consider it for a minute, before opening the app on my cell phone that has the ability to show me the location for the trackers all of us have implanted in the skin at the back of our neck. None of them have ever been activated, including Starling’s. I select her icon and change the tracker status to active and wait as a red dot appears on the screen, then I quickly move forward as the app advises the distance to the tracker’s location.

It feels like it takes forever to push our way through the throng and into the hallway that runs along the front of all six houses in the row. According to the map, she’s still in the fourth house, and I angrily barge past people, shoving them out of the way as her location counts down.

Five hundred meters

One hundred meters

Fifty.

Thirty.

Twenty.

When it reaches ten meters, we’re standing outside a row of doors that lead to bedrooms and I see red. Lifting my foot up, I kick in the first door, finding the room empty. I do the same to the second door, not caring about the gasps from the people still partying in the house that are now watching me. It’s empty too. When I reach the third door, I can hear muffled sounds. Wasting no time I kick open the door, only to find Starling on the floor beneath a huge guy. She’s kicking and screaming, frantically trying to push him off her as he rips at her clothes.

Blackness engulfs the edges of my vision and all I see is her face and the terror that’s etched into her beautiful features. I don’t realize I’ve moved until I’ve ripped him away from her, pinning him beneath me as I’m slamming my fist into his face over and over.

“Sebastian.”

The sound of her voice pulls me from my murderous rage and I stop, my knuckles split and covered in a mixture of his blood and my own. His face is a mess, his hands lifted, trying to protect himself from my fists.

“Sebastian,” she calls again, her voice cracking.

Pushing off him, I turn toward her, moving a step closer, watching her intently, not wanting to scare her. Scrambling off the floor she runs to me, launching herself into my arms as gulping, broken sobs burst from her shaking body.