Sequel: Slip

What We Left Unsaid

T H I R T Y - E I G H T

“What are you doing?”

Growling lowly, the dark-haired man made a point of ignoring the question, though he knew without a doubt that it was directed at him. Fingers continuing to glide over the keyboard and produce an almost irritatingly incessant clicking noise, he let his gaze trail over each and every monitor as the views shifted with each click.

“Brian! Don’t you think we should’ve kept the damn feed from Zack’s room up?”

He didn’t so much as roll his eyes, instead just offering another low growl in response and clicking away once again, that very feed appearing up in the corner of the wall of monitors again. Beneath it, two different feeds from different angles, both showing a familiar blonde woman storming down a long hallway, appeared.

“Oh.”

That was when he chose to roll his eyes. “She’s not even trying to be careful,” the guitarist observed, noting the way that his old friend was barely glancing around her, eyes narrowing a bit as he noticed that her mouth was moving, both of her arms waving open and then slamming back down at her sides. Groaning, he let his eyes blink closed for only a moment, before his attention was back on the screens and his fingers were clicking away again.

“She said to trust her, remember.”

“And you want to fucking start now, Sanders?!” he quipped, before sighing and shaking his head. “She’s walking into a trap, and she’s purposely trying to piss off whoever’s waiting for her. I do trust her, but that doesn’t make me any more comfortable with the situation. There!

The last monitor beneath the two of Ava shifted to an image of three familiar figures, all poised and ready where they waited around a corner. The painting on the wall behind them was one that Brian didn’t remember, though, so he had no idea how far away they were from Ava. And, when his gaze flickered back up to the two monitors she had been in only a moment before, he let out a curse, fingers once more clicking away until one of the new screens held an image of her once more, strolling down a different hallway, doing the exact same antagonistic things as she had been doing a moment before.

“You think she’s ready for three of them?”

”I don’t know,” he ground out through clenched teeth, still flipping through the rest of the monitors, while everyone else was more focused on the four he had left still on the right. Every other screen he flipped through came up empty, though, and the sinking feeling of uneasiness within him grew.

“We could have taken three of them had we all gone in together.”

“It’s risky, Johnny. We could have all gotten cornered--”

“Jason! She even said it was a trap! For crying out loud, Man, we just let her walk in there alone as if that’s any better. We shouldn’t have split up.”

“Trust her, Johnny,” the alpha interrupted, voice surprisingly calm.

“That’s easy for you to say, considering you didn’t seem at all concerned about her safety fifteen minutes ago!”

“No offense, Matt, but he’s right. What’s the plan if she gets captured, huh? Who’s going to rescue her then?”

The remaining guitarist, who had otherwise been silent throughout the little bickering fest, chose that moment to interject. “She wants to get captured,” he enlightened them, sighing a bit as he did. “She’s going out of her way to make sure those guys know exactly where she is at every given moment. She wants them to grab her, because she wants them to take her to where Baker is, and use their working security passes to get there.”

“That’s still not something she has to be alone for! Matt, would you have let me go alone?”

“That’s diff--”

“It’s not!”

“It is, Johnny,” Brian interrupted again. “You, Matt would never risk. But he didn’t stop her because he wants to let her take the risk; he wants to see if he was really wrong all along. Isn’t that right, Matt?” There was hatred in his tone as he spoke, but he didn’t bother to turn his attention away from the screens, switching the ones on the right again until they landed on the new hall that the blonde was in. He continued to surf through the other ones, finally blowing out a breath when one of the new screens showed a room full of security and a handful of his old pureblood... friends. He couldn’t decide how much of a good or bad sign that was.

“...Matt?”

The alpha didn’t give any response, only sighing and -- from the sounds of it -- turning around to pace across the room. “I don’t know what to fucking think right now, alright?!” he admitted reluctantly. “But I do know that whatever the truth is, she does have a plan. So let her play it out, and we’ll see what happens.”

The younger man only shook his head and scoffed out loud, not bothering to say anything more than the soft “unbelievable,” that he muttered to himself.

“Something’s not right.”

“A lot of things aren’t right about this, Syn!”

The guitarist only scowled, growling in response to the bassist’s little jab. ”No!” he insisted. “Something’s really not right. There’s--”

“Oh, shit! They’ve got her!”

Chocolate eyes flickering over to the screens on the right, he sighed, but didn’t appear surprised. Still, he watched the little struggle with mild apprehension, letting out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding when he saw the way she managed to slam one of the guards into a reinforced wall at the perfect angle to have him slumping to the ground, unconscious. That didn’t stop the other two from rather quickly restraining her and hitting her hard enough to disorient her and make dragging her down the hallway rather easy.

Shit!

“She’s fine,” Matt dismissed, earning several different growls of response. “Damn it, guys, she is! Have you ever seen Ava lose a fight that quickly? Or stop struggling when she’s still conscious?”

“No, she’s not fine, Matthew, because something’s fucking wrong. Look at these goddamn screens!” Brian snapped, jabbing his finger in the direction of several of the other monitors he had pulled up. “This is the door outside of Drake’s office: no guard. These are the doors to all three of the different meeting rooms, too, and there’re no guards. Here’s the garage. Do you see one car flashy enough to belong to the head of the Rinaldi family?”

“Drake isn’t here.”

”Bingo!” the guitarist said, slamming a fist down onto the desk as he said it. Finally tearing his attention away from the screens, he looked directly up at his alpha with fear etched into his expression. “Something’s wrong,” he repeated. “Drake would never miss this, Matt! Never. Not unless there’s something else going on, something that we don’t fucking know about.”

While the entire room quieted down significantly, the alpha only stood there, staring over at the screens, obviously deep in thought. “The question is,” he finally said, “are we the only ones that don’t know about it?” Then, after another moment, his eyes widened, and he spun around to glance at the door. “Where the fuck are the other guards? They know we’re here... why haven’t they tried to come and get us, yet?”

“Oh, there’re all sitting around having a few drinks and a few laughs with a couple of our old packmates, right... here,” Brian answered, tapping the screen on his far left as he spoke. He was quick to look back in the alpha’s direction, eyebrows raising pointedly. “Something’s up, and I don’t know if Ava noticed it or not before she left.”

“She did,” the largest man deduced on another long sigh, raising one of his hands to run over his face as he hissed out a curse under his breath. “It’s why she didn’t want even you to go with her, because she knows something that we fucking don’t!”

“Let’s hope she’s not the only one,” the pureblood grumbled. “I think it’s about time we wake up our friend Danny, and ask him why no one has come to rescue him yet. May--”

“She’s there!”

Spinning right back around, chocolate eyes quickly flew to the top right screen, where Zacky -- though he was still sitting crouched in the corner -- had lifted his head, his eyes fixed straight ahead on what Brian could only guess was the door, head tilted in the way it always was whenever he was straining to listen. A little more clicking of the keyboard, and one of the other screens lit up to show a different hallway, one where Ava and the two guards were once again struggling. One violent shove from the taller of the guards, and she slammed into a windowed door, dropping to the ground against the frame and almost immediately receiving a harsh kick to the side from the other guard.

But that wasn’t what caught the guitarist’s attention the most. No, instead of hissing out in sympathy with the others, Brian was once again looking at Zacky’s screen, where the beta was suddenly getting to his feet and making his way over to the door, one of his feet flying forward and then back in a sweeping motion, before he switched to a very casual standing position. A key! It wasn’t hard to deduce what exactly had just happened, but, luckily, it didn’t appear that the two guards had noticed.

Instead, one of them had just leaned toward the window and undoubtedly said or done something taunting, while the other had refocused on the blonde woman. Though this time she did put up a struggle, she was extremely disadvantaged by already being on the ground, outnumbered, and somewhat cornered against the door. She did manage to knock over one of the guards, but it wasn’t long before she was forced to resort to merely shielding herself from certain kicks and rolling out of the way, appearing somewhat unharmed if the very Matrix-y way she hopped back up to her feet was anything to judge by. Still, she wasn’t able to avoid having her arm twisted roughly behind her back -- and from the look on her face, either dislocated or broken in the process -- or having herself slammed back into the reinforced wall. A second later, and the door to Zack’s room was opened just long enough for her to be thrown in without getting caught as it slammed right back shut again.

For a moment, she just remained there on the floor where she had landed, her chest rising and falling, undoubtedly extremely aware of the fact that the two guards were both hovering over by the window, probably saying as many antagonistic things as they could. Zacky, on the other hand, just remained standing where he was, not having even sent a glance in the blonde’s direction.

A minute passed before the guards took their leave, at the same time that Ava had lifted her uninjured arm and twisted a bit as she reached for her other arm. The motion turned her face away from the camera, and Brian wasn’t able to tell whether she was talking or not. What he was able to tell, however, was that Zacky wasn’t planning on sticking around to listen, anyways. The second the blonde had turned, he had dropped down to pick up the key from under his foot, and without any slight hesitation, had appeared on the screen outside of the room, where he was quick to slam the door shut behind him, his naked body leaning against it for a moment.

“Damn it!” the alpha hissed out on a growl as he leaned forward to better look at the screen, leaving Brian with not nearly enough personal space. “Come on, Zack!”

Ava was standing up at that point, looking right in the same direction Zacky had been, and clearly shouting at the top of her lungs. The guitarist on the other side of the door, however, didn’t stick around long enough to listen.

“Wait, where the hell is he going?!” the guitarist questioned as he watched his beta move away from the door. Growling, he slammed a fist down onto the desk and glared up at the monitor with irritation. “That son of a bitch! He’s leaving her there!”

“Fucking idiot,” the largest man in the room grumbled, before running a hand over his very short hair. It was then that he decided to take Brian’s earlier advice, quick to close the distance to the still-unconscious man. His hand flew out and the slap echoed in the room. “Time to wake up, you worthless fucker!” The second the man had drifted back to consciousness, Matt jabbed a finger at the screen with one hand and used his other to roughly grab their captured man by the shirt. “Where is this room?”

The blonde-haired man snarled at the half-blood holding him by the shirt, but didn’t dare to try and break the grip, not when he was surrounded by several enemies. Fixing a harsh glare on the hazel eyes facing him, he shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t bullshit me!”

“We have a lot of rooms like that, and you idiots messed with the monitors. I don’t know which specific one that is. Sorry,” he added, though his tone told him he was anything but. The hint of a smirk on his face and the malicious twinkle in his eyes left him with a less-than-perfect poker face.

“I don’t give a fuck how many rooms you fuckers have; you know which one you locked Baker in!”

The captured man only shrugged and gave a less-than-apologetic smile. “I almost wish I could help you boys -- you’re so very convincing -- but I just have absolutely no idea which room Drake would use. Locking away your mutt wasn’t my responsibility.”

Johnny took the initiative to sigh and throw a punch at the wall, growling and sharing a look with the two brothers. “Why the fuck are we keeping him alive, Shads? He’s no use to us.”

“We’re not keeping him alive; we’re just waiting to decide on a way to kill him, and the longer it takes us to gather everyone and leave, the more time we’ll have to get creative with our methods. Still not remembering that room?”

“You won’t intimidate me; stop trying.”

From behind his alpha, Brian narrowed his gaze at the man he was more than familiar with, his mind reeling as he tried to recall all of his past experiences in the house, but the years made everything fuzzy. “You really expect us to believe you don’t know where you were keeping that fucker? You brought the mutt into your property; you wouldn’t keep him just anywhere.” Sighing, he rubbed at his temples, trying to imagine a floor plan for the estate. “It would have to be on a first floor or basement, because you sure as hell wouldn’t walk him through any more rooms than you had to, and it would have to be a room you don’t use for anything, really. But which fucking building?”

“We can just run through each--”

“No; that’d take too long, and we’d have to split up. We need to narrow down the field.”

“Matt’s right, Johnny,” the black-haired man declared, sighing even as he said it. Running a hand over his face, he turned and paced away as he tried his hardest to narrow things down as fast as he could, but he just didn’t know the property like Ava did. “It’s got to be an area where you have an entire floor basically empty; you wouldn’t want to live right next to the mutt... so that crosses off... damn it! No, it doesn’t. Because you’d want him to be close. You’d want to be able to easily drop by and torment him and show off.”

Everyone kept their gazes fixed on the pacing guitarist, no one daring to waste time by interrupting his thought process.

“It’s got to be centrally located. It’s not the high-rise, though; I remember what the first floor and basement of that building look like. So that leaves--”

“So sure a renovation hasn’t been done in all the years you’ve been gone? You never were that bright, Haner.”

Chocolate eyes flickered quickly to the guard in irritation, but the second they locked on to the man’s twisted grin, they narrowed speculatively instead. “Thanks for confirming what I already suspected,” he declared, watching with some satisfaction as the guard’s grin dropped to be replaced by a scowl. “No, it’s not the high-rise, but it’s still centrally located. First floors have too many windows and too small square footage in the one north of the high-rise and...” he trailed off for a moment, cursing as he pinched his eyes shut and threw back his head, still trying to picture the layout, “and the two on either side of that one.”

“It’s still too much to work with, Bri...”

“I fucking know!” he snapped in response. “I’m trying! I don’t know how el--”

“Someone’s coming!” Jason interrupted from where he stood near the door, his body already turning toward the entrance and muscles already tensed and ready. His words had everyone else silencing, attention snapping toward the doorway as the handle turned and the door creaked open.

A second later, a bruised Italian frame appeared, green eyes not even getting the chance to take a full sweep around the room before his body was slammed up against the wall, an absolutely furious man right in his face. “Wha--”

“You fucking left her there, you son of a bitch! She saved your life, and you left her in there!”

“Get him off of him! Brian, for Christ’s sake, he’s the only one who knows where she is; you can get your revenge once she’s safe!”

It took a few moments for the two Berry brothers to manage to ply the two guitarists apart at their alpha’s command, but they managed to do so, both of them remaining close in case they needed to intervene again.

“You’re going to take me to her, now.” It wasn’t a question.

“The hell I am!” the man snapped in response, appearing just as pissed off as his fellow guitarist.

“She just risked her fucking life to go and save your ass, Baker! Your mate just did that, and in return you fucking left her there!”

“Look,” he started, voice still furious but volume reined in a bit, “I get why you’re mad, but--”

Mad?!

“--you don’t understand the half of what’s going on, alright? She’s--”

“I understand perfectly! But I really don’t care about your issues right now, I only ca--”

“She’s not who you fucking think she is, damn it! She’s not--”

She’s not who you fucking think she is!” the longer haired man interrupted, hands flailing in the air. “Goddamn it, Zacky, you’ve got it all fucking wrong! She had nothing to do with what happened to you; she didn’t even fucking know. But you know what? If you don’t fucking take me to her right fucking now, I will personally torture you far worse and for far longer than any of the Rinaldis ever could!”

The beta froze, his muscles stiffening instantly and his expression paling, but what stood out the most was the look in his green eyes. Hurt. It wasn’t the other guitarist he was looking at with that absolutely devastated expression, though, it was the alpha, and the larger man appeared pained by it as well.

“Zee--”

“Fuck you,” the Italian interrupted, voice only a whisper. Shaking his head and turning his gaze away from any of his packmates, he only stood there for another moment, silent and unmoving.

Brian waited all of ten seconds before stepping up to and giving the man a large push to snap him out of it, sending him right back against the wall. This time, though, he was careful not to grab him by the shirt or do anything that would have him once again ordered to back off. “Damn it, Zacky,” he started with a low growl, “you’re my friend and I’m so fucking sorry that they ever put their hands on you -- I really am! -- and I can even understand why you hate her so much, but I’m telling you, you have it all wrong. We can work past you almost killing her last week, Man, but if you let anything happen to her right now, if you don’t take me to where she is right now, I swear to God I will never forgive you!”

For a moment, the green-eyed man only started at his long-time friend, expression unreadable. “No! You can’t ask me to do that, not after everything she’s done to me -- everything you apparently fucking know, and you’re still choosing her side!”

“There aren’t sides in--”

“No, Matt, he’s fucking right. There are sides, and you’re damn right I’m on hers, because she didn’t do anything, Zack! She wasn’t behind your torture; she didn’t even know about it! You should’ve seen her face when Matt started yelling at her about it!”

Guiltily, the larger man dropped his head at the comment, an action that earned a furious growl from the beta. “And you fucking believed her? Goddamn it, Matt, I told you what happened! I told you how fucking good of a liar she is, and you just believed her?!”

“I don’t think she was lying, Za--”

“You don’t think?!” both guitarists had snapped at the same moment, before quickly snarling at each other.

It was Zacky that spoke up first again. “She watched me put the damn note in her bag, damn it!”

“She didn’t see it!” Brian was quick to respond. “And it wasn’t her fucking book, you moron, it was Axel’s. You want to guess who opened that book that night and saw that damned note of yours?”

Though his green eyes narrowed at the information, the beta was quick to give his head an adamant shake. “She saw me!”

“You’re wrong!”

With a dark growl, he only waved his hand dismissively, his attention shifting away from his fellow guitarist and back over to the vocalist. “She quoted it,” he reminded his friend quickly. “That’s proof enough!”

Carefully, the alpha crossed his arms before his chest and gave the desperate-looking man a once-over. “You told me she paraphrased it.”

“Same damn thing!”

”No!” the alpha snapped. “There’s a huge fucking difference, Zachary! How much of it was the same?”

“I don’t fucking know, Ma--”

”How fucking similar was it!?”

“I didn’t draw a fucking diagram to compare them! It was pretty damn similar, just in a different fucking order!”

His answer had the alpha cursing again, his fist slamming right back into the desk again. “She wasn’t fucking lying! Zack, look, you made a mistake, alright? I get it, okay, but you are mistaken. You need to take us back to her, now, before--”

“I know what fucking happened, Sanders! I’m not mistaken about anything! She and her goddamn broth--”

“Dan even admitted that it was all their idea! She didn’t have a single fucking idea of what happened!”

With a snarl, those green eyes narrowed. “Purebloods lie.”

While the alpha let out a loud, irritated growl, the recently-conscious man in the chair perked up, obviously thrilled to be a part of the conversation. “He’s got a point, you know,” he drawled happily. “We do kind of have a habit of--”

“What fucking happened every goddamn time she said she was bored when you were being beaten up?!” Brian suddenly interjected, fists clenched at his shaking sides. “Goddamn it, Zacky, I was there a time or two when she said that! Did you ever fucking notice that they all decided they had more interesting things to do after that? She saved your ass, you fucker!”

The beta stilled, expression a mixture of calculation and confusion, but it was just the start of an opening that Matt had been waiting for. Quickly, he moved forward and grabbed his bandmate by the arm and dragged him over to the monitors, his finger jabbing right at the one where the blonde was standing, turning in place as she looked around the room. “That’s your mate,” he stressed, giving the man beside him a shake for emphasis. “That’s the woman you crave to have in your arms when you fall asleep at night; that’s the woman that held you in her lap while you were unconscious from the tea that first time; that’s your fucking mate, and she’s in danger, Zacky! She needs your help!”

“I-- I don’t...” the Italian started, eyes a mixture of different emotions as he stood there, staring at the screens as directed. “She...”

“Damn it, Zack!” the vocalist snapped again, turning away from monitors and stepping in front of his friend as he gave him a rough shake. “She didn’t know about it, alright!? She wasn’t behind it! She got fucking sick when she heard what had happened, and she ran in there to save your ass.”

But the rhythm guitarist only looked just as lost, clearly struggling to try and make sense of everything, which -- although understandable -- there just wasn’t time for.

It took Matt a few moments to think of what else could be said, but when he did, he seemed confident. “You want to know what she said when I told her she shouldn't walk into the trap?”

Still-narrowed eyes blinking, the man nodded.

“That she didn’t have a choice, because you are her mate! Forget everything else, and just think about that. She’s your mate. Zack, I’m not--”

The rest of the alpha’s statement wasn’t audible -- nothing was. The loudest noise that any of the werewolves had ever before heard crippled them, bringing them all to the ground as their hands desperately pressed to their ears, eyes pinched shut and expressions contorted in pain. They didn’t notice that the lights had gone out and that the monitors’ screens had gone black until after the ground had stopped shaking, but even then, every sound was drowned out by the disorienting ringing in their ears.

One of the Berrys had the door opened some time later, the entire room lit up by the light of the glowing flames that danced in the rubble just a few yards away.

And then Brian was on his feet, face contorted in a very different expression of pain as he started toward the doorway, stopped only when the alpha managed to wrap his strong arms around the guitarist’s waist. His mouth flew open and his chest caved in a bit as he shouted out, voice falling on deaf ears.

And all the while, the beta male just stood there, green eyes watching everything and nothing at the same time.
♠ ♠ ♠
THERE IS AN EPILOGUE.
Please keep your sharpened tools ready, but don't use them on me just yet... unless, of course, you don't want to know what happened.

Thank you to Heaven_syn_gates, tipy, OMFGitsBeckiie, Alesha., Ailurophile, LeahVengeance, Bunny-on-Drugs, tony-perry, zackystheman4me, abnurmel, SynysterVengeance13, MoMo_92, Ravenhair24, mforaker and madi220 for all of the comments on the last chapter.