Page 76 of Verses and Blooms
“If you think it’s them who leaked the information, you’d be wrong,” Sanchez said carefully. “We’ve had eyes on your entire parent pack since you identified them from those pages.”
“So, tell me what you know. What did you uncover? There’s no way you foundnothing.”
He hesitated. “Well, we found nothing on theWalkerpack. That was the name they were registered under in that file.”
He stood up and walked around the desk to grab a file. He sat down next to me, elbows resting on his knees as he studied me.
“Are you sure you’re ready for this? It’s not pretty.”
“Yes,” I said firmly. “There was no love lost in that family anyway.”
He handed me the folder. Once again I felt like I might be sick but I swallowed down the urge and opened it, too desperate for answers to delay it this time.
“That’s a long list of names and aliases,” I said slowly, flipping page after page. “Why are there so many names on here?”
“The more I dug, the more I found,” Sanchez said. “The most common name they used was Blake. Different first names, same pack name. Still not sure which are their true identities. Like I said, we didn’t find anything with your last name outside of basicinformation. For anyone doing basic background checks, they’d look squeaky clean.”
“Butwhy?”
“Likely money. The funds in their various accounts were sickening. And get this, the only untouched account was a trust fund inyourname.”
“What?”
“Let me guess,” Ledger said. “She was eligible when she turned eighteen?”
“Bingo,” Sanchez said. “It should’ve been hers the week after the abduction.”
“I never even knew about it,” I said quietly.
“That was likely on purpose. If they got you out of the picture, they could access it as next of kin. Especially if you were presumed dead for ten years.”
“So did they drain it?” Ansel asked.
“No,” Sanchez said. “There was a failsafe, put in place by yourgrandmother.”
“She was the only person to ever be kind to me,” I admitted. “Mom wasn’t abusive in any obvious way, but she was too strict for us to ever be close.”
“Trying to control you ahead of time,” Ledger said, his lip curling into a sneer. “Fucking assholes.” We definitely agreed on that.
He ran a hand through his buzzed silver hair and stood, starting to pace while Sanchez forged on. We couldn’t take much more news at this point.
“Your birth certificate is real, but the names aren’t,” he said finally. “They were already using aliases at that point, one they’d built their ‘real’ life around. Hence why your grandmother was likely none the wiser.”
“My own mother sold me into an omega auction… over money?” I said.
“Yes,” Sanchez said quietly, eyeing me like he expected more.
“That tracks.”
He frowned. “You’re taking this surprisingly well.”
I wasn’t. My emotions were a raging inferno through the bond, but I’d gotten too good at hiding that. Outside, I was numb.
I took a steadying breath. “How do we take them down? Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Have they tried to get you to sign anything since you’ve been found?”
I shook my head. “Not that I can remember. I kept running away from them and getting thrown into facilities.”
