Rage and Ruin | 2

3 | 9

G I G I

We arrived at the ONNT headquarters late in the afternoon, when the shadows were growing longer and the sunlight made everything gold. Mr. Hunt wanted to talk to a few of us about Benny's capture and possibly see if we could get any more valuable information out of him. After all, he did have connections within our crew. Perhaps they could get him to say what the ONNT officials couldn't.

Personally, I didn't want to see him again. The two times I'd seen his face had been enough. The face of a killer. I wondered if that was the same face my mother had seen before she'd been murdered. The thought made my hands itch to claw into something, caused my mind to go to dark places.

     Finn, Riley and Delphinium broke off the group after being called to speak with Hunt in his office. The rest of us were led downstairs to where the assassin was being kept.

     After following the ONNT worker down, deep down into the depths underneath the buildings, we came to a wall. She placed her hand against a pad next to the door and when it had read her fingerprints, the door slid open. As I passed through it, I took note of how thick the metal was.

     She had us go down a platform in a large open space. Ahead of us was a glass box and, as we neared, I could see that Benny sat on a single chair inside of it, feet chained to the floor and arms wrapped in a straightjacket. Judging by the thickness of the glass surrounding him, it was bulletproof.

     "You're free to talk to him," the woman told us, grasping a clipboard tightly to her chest. "If he acts up or threatens you, we'll have him taken away. But keep in mind that he can't do anything to you while in this enclosure."

     She stepped away to a separate room to observe the conversation. Benny eyed us. "So here you are, back again." When no one said anything to him, a smile spread across his scarred face. "You can come closer. You heard the woman, I can't do anything to you from in here."

     "Yeah, I'd rather not," Arlo said boldly, though his words suggested that he was more alarmed than he let on.

    "Why? Scared?"

    "Stop these mind games," Jaxon demanded, stepping so close that he was less than a foot away from the glass wall. "Tell us, what does your master want from us?"

     "That, I will tell you," Benny allowed, eyes fixed on Jaxon with alarming intensity. "At first, he didn't care. He only wanted Tesla and Evans. He allowed the rest of you to be shipped to a random buyer to be used for your power. But then you attacked us on our own land and proved that you're more powerful than he'd originally thought. Now, he wants to have all of you."

      "Does he want to kill us himself?"

      "I can only assume so."

      "When did Hundsen begin working with Orion?" Jake asked, arms crossed over his chest, leaning against a wall in the corner.

      Benny did his best to shrug with the straightjacket restricting him. "My master had Hundsen and the Club doing smaller jobs for him for years now. But their most important job came when they caught you eight in their lair."

      Kane edged closer to his restrained brother. "Why are you telling us all of this?"

     "Because, brother, Orion wants me to. He sent me to tell you that he wants to meet with all of you. And he will, he will have you all."

"Say he does want to kill six of us himself," Kane said, shaking his head as he tried to it all the pieces together, "Why did he want Delphinium and Jake specifically?" I got a sneaking suspicion that Orion wasn't going to kill them, at least, not immediately. They both had ties to the organization already. My heart sunk when I thought of Delphinium, who I'd grown much closer to recently, going back to the place that had made her life a living hell. Jake could survive it, but Delphinium? I wasn't sure.