Page 17 of Crave Me

With that, I walked out, the scent of that motherfucker burning infusing my senses.

5

~Skylar~

I stared at the interactive map created by Caspian’s tech team on one of the command center screens in the lair. It showed the massive area that his people were scouring in search of Bastian and Caleb and every time an area was covered, the part was shaded in real time to indicate as much.

They were almost fifty-percent of the way through their search and so far they’d turned up nothing.

Shit.

Caspian and Dante were both also delving deep to search out a mole within their empires.

I understood where they were coming from with the information that would have needed to be obtained in order for these kidnappings to occur and for Elijah to have been alerted to the multi-pronged assaults that night, but I didn’t buy it. I just didn’t buy that Caspian could have missed something like that. In fact, he’d rooted out any problematic elements before that final stage of the war had been finalized from a tactical standpoint. And Dante Mancini was a renowned and experienced businessman. It just didn’t fly for me.

There had to be a mole, yes, given the knowledge Elijah was able to gain in order to react and act as he had, but it couldn’t be from within either of their organizations.

The bank that King and the Mancini Syndicate were slated to make from decimating one of their main competitors and one as lucrative and as powerful as Bane Industries would clearly be coveted by a hell of lot of other empires and organizations, those with the wherewithal to manage something of such a complicated nature. It was certainly viable that they would want to move in and take it as theirs.

But why give Elijah a heads-up? That wouldn’t serve them in any way to obtain the spoils of war if the enemy was still breathing and able to rise again as such.

And for them to be watching, they’d need to know about the intricacies of the war itself, and Caspian hadn’t made that public knowledge. The whole thing had been very hush-hush.

So it couldn’t be rooted purely in business rivalry or aspirations.

But someone had been watching.

Not from within.

Somebody else outside of their inner circles who somehow had access to that sort of carefully guarded information.

Damien had been in such a position but he would never allow Bastian to be taken like this, never risk him in such an awful way. He’d been disgusted that Jett had taken him that time two years ago, it had never been a part of their deal. As he’d gone to great pains to prove to me when I’d first contacted him during my mission to hunt down Jett.

As I sifted through all the information that Caspian and Dante had gathered between them so far as they fought to put the pieces together and create the bigger picture to it all, I noted just how well orchestrated both kidnappings had been. The smoothness of both, the intricate timing, every little detail accounted for. They had been meticulously executed operations, leaving no discernible trail—which was causing such a major issue with our progress in the search for Bastian and Caleb.

They’d disappeared like ghosts.

I started.

Ghosts.

Meticulously executed operations.

Access to carefully-guarded information.

Outside of their inner circle.

“Oh my God,” I choked, as the awful realization slammed into me.

If my hunch was correct, there was only one person who stood a chance of hunting down the bastard and getting the intel we would need to ascertain Bastian and Caleb’s location fast enough before so much more time passed of them in captivity at that madman’s hands.

My skin was crawling just thinking about it.

I felt sick with it knowing they were at Elijah Bane’s mercy.

And it looked like it was because of a certain shithead.

Thinking he’d actually go to these lengths to hurt them… I didn’t want to believe it to be true, but I knew that he had a nasty side. I’d just never thought that it would be directed anywhere near me and mine. Not like this. Not condemning my men in this way.

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