The Girl Who Dared to Endure (The Girl Who Dared #6)

It was so jolting that I slowed to a stop, absolutely repulsed by the idea that Sadie was flirting with Quess. I cast a worried glance over at Maddox, and saw her head cocked and eyebrows raised, green eyes flashing first in shock and then intense displeasure, and I suddenly had a picture in my mind of a gun about to go off.

And why wouldn’t she be angry? Quess was her… boyfriend? I wasn’t sure, and I hadn’t asked. He had been there for Maddox during her emotional crisis and had managed to nurse her through it. Now they shared a room. That was all I knew, and all I needed to know. They were adults, and it was none of my business.

But it became my business if Maddox’s jealousy could potentially damage the final stages of our plan. We were almost there—almost finished. We just had to knock Sadie out again, put her net back in, give her one last dose of Spero, and then send her on her way, report in hand.

Then she’d go back to her home, find it completely disassembled, and tell the council, hopefully with no memory of the events that had, and were about to, transpire.

“Keep it together,” I told her in a low, urgent voice. Her eyes flicked over at me without her head moving, and she carefully began to pull the anger off her face, softening the hard lines of it until she didn’t look so… murderous.

Quess glanced over his shoulder at us, and I started moving forward again, keeping my face even and plain. He gave me a little nod and turned back to Sadie. “CEO Monroe?” he asked, his voice soft and almost hesitant, nothing like the confident man I knew. I smiled when I realized he was playing her hard, because sure enough, her head swiveled up to him, an eager smile curling on her lips.

“Yes?” she asked, leaning closer to him. I bit my lip as his hand dipped down to his belt and slowly eased his baton out, hiding my smile. “What is it, Sam?”

I heard Maddox snort slightly under her breath, but my moment of levity was gone, and I was once again hyperaware of the time. Sadie was really out of it; clearly the sedative had lowered her inhibitions, and she had zeroed in on Quess as her conquest. And that was great, but we didn’t have time for this. On the one hand, I was happy that he had gone along with it in order to better manipulate her. On the other…

Maddox growled under her breath, and I silently prayed to a higher power for her to get a grip.

“Oh, I was just wondering about this little line of code,” he replied with an innocent smile, and then stretched an arm around her to point at something on her side of the screen.

She giggled and turned her attention to it, and I crossed my arms, my impatience growing, even as Quess slowly withdrew to create distance between them so that he wasn’t shocked along with her. “Sam,” she said, her voice a shrill squeal that rivaled the loud slap she placed on his forearm a heartbeat later. “You already know what this is!” She chuckled throatily and flipped her hair over her shoulder, spearing him with a predatory look. “What are you playing at?” she purred.

“Ho-kay, that’s enough of that,” Maddox said, and the next thing I knew she was crossing the floor toward Sadie in long, determined strides, her baton sliding out of her loop. Sadie’s head wobbled around toward Maddox, her eyes narrowing in confusion. Quess had just enough time to step away before Maddox was pressing the end of her baton into Sadie’s shoulder.

Sadie seized up for several seconds, and then slumped over as soon as the charge was expended, slipping right into Quess’s waiting arms.

“I had it,” he said as he eased her down with a grunt. “What the hell, Doxy?”

“Sorry,” she said, but her tone was anything but contrite. “I just couldn’t stand any more of the Sadie and Sam kissing hour.”

Quess rolled his eyes and then looked over at me. “How’d it go?”

“We had problems,” I told him honestly as I approached and dropped to the ground to help them flip Sadie over. “I’ve got Jasper and Rose in some slaved hard drives, but Jasper is still attacking Rose, and it’s drawing a lot of power. We need to get them downloaded…” I trailed off to check my watch, and my mouth went dry. We only had six minutes left before the hard drives failed. “Immediately,” I bit out, my stomach churning. A minute to exchange nets, and then we’d only have five more to wake Sadie up and get her out. We were cutting it really close.

Maddox straddled Sadie’s back, her hands already filled with the kit she’d used to exchange my net for Sadie’s in the elevator. I pushed Sadie’s hair out of the way while Maddox passed the bloody net she’d taken out of my neck to Quess for him to sanitize, and then began to cut, her eyes narrowed in concentration.

“Okay,” Quess said with a grim nod. “I’ll get them uploaded immediately. Anything else?”

Maddox withdrew her hand, revealing a half-inch-long incision, and handed the long silver cutter out to me. I took it automatically, knowing she needed to move quickly.

“Yeah,” I replied, my stomach flopping around with anxiety as each second dragged on. If she woke up while we were doing this… I shook it off and answered Quess’s question as he handed the net, now clean and glistening with sterilizing liquid, back to Maddox. “I’ve got the guy who cut my throat.”

Quess froze, but Maddox remained focused as she slid the net into the incision with a pair of tweezers, using them to push it all the way into Sadie’s neck. As soon as she was satisfied, she handed me the tweezers and pulled out a silver canister. A press on the top spilled some pink foam onto her fingertip, and she gently smoothed the mousse over the wound. It would be healed in a matter of minutes.

“Talk about it later,” she said as she got off Sadie. “Quess, how is this going to work?”

“Prop her up against me,” he said, and within moments the three of us were lifting her onto her feet, Quess’s large arm around her waist helping to brace her. Her head rolled forward as we worked, and he reached over and gently positioned it against his shoulder so that it seemed she was sleeping against him.

“I’ve got her on a sort of loop,” he told us softly, shifting her weight a little bit. “Right after you left and Maddox got back, I gave her a quarter pill, and we staged a new arrival scene without you, saying you’d been called away, and then I guided her through things. The sedative made her dopey, but she was able to follow along and jump to the conclusions we set up for her. I gave her a half of a pill forty minutes later, and every thirty minutes after that, restarting the loop in her mind so that there was still a ten-minute sequence of her arriving and interacting with us. Hopefully, this next one won’t eat too much into that time, so she has at least some memory of being here.”

I nodded in wordless agreement. Our entire plan hung on this one thing, and if it didn’t work, Sadie might remember too much and figure out that something was up. If she put everything together and realized that we had pulled one over on her to raid her quarters… then nowhere in the Tower would be safe for us. Summoning up a deep calm, I took a few steps back and waited for her to wake up. Maddox moved to join me.

It only took a minute for Sadie to give a soft little groan, and her head shifted, nestling into the crook of Quess’s shoulder. “You smell nice,” she slurred, and I reached out and grabbed Maddox’s forearm before the statuesque woman could think to move.

The muscles under her skin were tight, but as I glanced at her, I saw her giving me an annoyed look that told me I was overreacting. She wasn’t going to screw this up.

“CEO Monroe?” Quess asked, and something about his tone implied that he’d said it once before and was both nervous and embarrassed to have to do it again.

Sadie murmured something incoherent against his neck with a little snort. Quess cleared his throat and repeated, “CEO Monroe?” in a firmer voice, but there was an undercurrent of panic to it.

Her head rolled up, and she blinked at Quess blearily. “Wha—”