he was, but he wanted to destroy him first. How? By trying to turn Lucy against him? That couldn’t happen, could it? She wouldn’t believe whatever lies Paxton and Colton came up with, no matter what “proof” they had.
Would his son believe it?
What if the evidence was good enough for the cops? The FBI? What if he lost his house, his money, everything … and disappeared because he was dead, but no one knew? Everyone thought he was on the run because he was considered a fugitive?
Lucy would be left with nothing and a teenager to raise, broken, heartbroken, confused.
Sean felt ill. It might not matter that Lucy would never believe he could kill a cop or … do whatever Paxton had planned … if the world came crashing down, it would crush her.
What did Paxton hope to gain from it? Just … keeping him away from Lucy?
Colton remained silent. They walked past the limo and to the garage. Through a side door that was opened only by a code. Colton didn’t even attempt to hide it from Sean—0217. Sean didn’t know if he could use it, but it was always good to have as much information as possible.
February 17. Lucy’s birthday.
Sean felt physically sick.
“You have to see that Paxton isn’t sane. He’s not going to get away with this, and you know it.”
Colton led Sean down a wide hall, then turned and went down narrow stairs to a basement. It was cold down here, humid, musty. There was also a cage. An eight-by-eight-foot cage.
“No,” Sean said.
Colton more than anyone—even Lucy—knew how much Sean hated confinement. He wouldn’t say he was claustrophobic—small spaces didn’t bother him, as long as he knew the way out. But being trapped terrified him.
And Colton knew it.
* * *
Sean had one semester left before graduation; Colton had graduated a week ago. It had taken him four and a half years because he took time off to take care of his ill little brother, and that experience had changed him. In both good ways and bad. But Sean had stuck with him because Colton was his best friend. More a brother to him than Duke, who acted like a dictator, or Kane, who fought other people’s battles all over North America and had made it clear he didn’t think Sean was capable of helping him, outside of a couple of isolated piloting gigs when Kane had no one else to call.
Sean and Colton lived together off-campus and it was Christmas break. Sean didn’t want to go home—he had hardly spoken to Duke in three years. Only when absolutely necessary. He still hadn’t forgiven him for sending him off to MIT, for not listening to him, not believing him, not trusting him.
Some things were more important than rules.
Sean and Colton had four weeks before the next semester started, and time plus genius-level IQs plus anger was a recipe for disaster.
But all their previous plans had worked perfectly, for the most part. They needed something to do, something to believe in.
A rumor had been going around campus for the last few months that one of the RAs, Brian Bean, was videotaping the showers in his dorm—both girls and boys. An investigation had been launched, but the campus police couldn’t find any evidence. A few videos that had surfaced on the internet were untraceable, according to law enforcement.
But Sean and Colton weren’t law enforcement, and nothing was foolproof. They’d been tracking Bean, and Colton cloned his hard drive to figure out how he had been recording when there was no evidence of cameras or wires in the community bathrooms. That’s when they realized he was recording live—he didn’t need wires if he went in between the floors whenever he felt like it. And not just the showers—they found recordings from the dorms as well.
Because the campus police had screwed up the initial investigation—and because Sean had no faith in the system after he’d been expelled for hacking, for doing the exact same thing as he was doing now—Sean and Colton wanted to destroy this bastard themselves. Justice came in all forms.
That’s why they had to wait until winter break. First thing they did was break into his dorm room, hack into his computer, and destroy everything he had on the cloud. Sean suspected he’d hidden the files on his computer so they wouldn’t be easy for law enforcement to find—or he hid them on another website. So he downloaded his history—history the jerk thought he’d erased—to analyze later, then