Page 120 of Make Them Cry
Juno. I hope she’s okay.
And Gage—please, please let Gage be okay.
Tears sting the backs of my eyes, but I force them down. I won’t cry. Not here. Not when whoever brought me here clearly wants me scared.
That’s not happening.
I take another deep breath, trying to calm the racing of my heart. But something doesn’t add up.
Why me?
Why now?
If this was Cathedral—if this was Regent—why wait until now to take me?
Unless… it’s something I know.
Or something I have.
My mind flashes to the hard drive.
The folders I found. The fragments of code. The suspicious admin names.
I might have been walking around with a ticking bomb in my possession this entire time and never knew it.
“Think, River,” I whisper to myself. “Think.”
A metal door groans open to my left.
I snap my head in that direction, heart pounding.
Footsteps. Slow, steady, deliberate.
A figure steps into the light.
Not masked this time.
Helena.
My chest seizes.
Helena. My HR rep. The woman who’s been “on my side” since day one.
She smiles. But it’s not the warm kind I’ve seen in team meetings. It’s empty. A hollow mask.
“Well,” she says softly, her heels echoing as she walks toward me, “you’re more trouble than I expected.”
My blood turns to ice. “Why?”
“Because,” she says, stopping just in front of me, crouching to my level, “you had to keep poking around. And now you’ve seen things you shouldn’t have.”
“You’re Regent,” I whisper.
Her smile widens. “Good girl.”
A wave of nausea hits me.
She stands again, pacing slowly. “I’ll admit, I underestimated you. I thought you were just another sad little coder with a dead-end job and a broken heart. But no—you’re smart. Smarter than most of them. Smarter than Andrew. Smarter than those idiotic developers who thought they could go against me.”
