Fractured (Josie) novel Chapter 303

Chapter 303 

** Deacon’s POV ** 

The minutes tick by at a snail’s pace as every inch of the underground network is uncovered. 

Only the section my bond group had been in had collapsed, or more likely, had been purposely destroyed. We only find one more teen, who was not buried but had been trapped in one of the small cut–out rooms by the collapsed earth. 

“There’s no one else down there,” one of the guys with a molecular gift I’d brought in calls over to us. 

“There is! Keep looking!” Josie demands as she moves more earth, going way beyond the original tunnels. 

The guy looks at me and I give him a subtle nod to stop searching. It’s clear that Luke is not here, now I just have to convince Josie of that too. 

I slowly approach Josie, with Axel and Theo beside me, and Mason starts making his way towards us from where he had been searching. 

“Josie…” I start. 

“Take me down there,” she demands, cutting me off. 

“He’s not there, Josie, I’m sorry. Let’s get back to headquarters and come up with a plan to find him,” I say cautiously, knowing she is right on the edge of how much she can take. 

We had only just got Harper back, and only spent a few minutes with her before we came here to deal with this mess, and now we are already thrown into yet another crisis, another person we love taken from us. 

“Either port me down there, or I’ll jump, I can make it,” she threatens. 

I look down into the pit in the ground. She could make it, she’d possibly break her ankles, but she would survive it 

“Just take us down there, D, she isn’t going to rest until she sees for herself he is not there,” Mason says, and I nod before porting us all back down into what used to be tunnels. 

Josie shifts into her wolf in an instant and Axel joins her, shifting to his huge wolf too. The pair begin sniffing around as the rest of us watch. I’m not sure what they think they will achieve by doing this. If they do pick up Luke’s scent, there’s no way to say it was from when the place caved in or just minutes before, when he was here searching with us, or posing as a rogue not long before that 

I try to reach out to Luke through the bond again, but there’s nothing. Just an empty void where I should feel hin My heart rate begins to pick up, and I look over to Josie’s wolf as she focuses on something in what remains of one of the bedrooms. She paws at a blanket on the ground and then lets out a yip. Axel lies on the ground beside her with a whine. 

“What is it?” Theo asks as we walk towards them. 

“A syringe, and whatever was in it smells toxic. I don’t like how this looks,” Axel responds in the mind link. 

I look down at the object and, sure enough, there is a syringe with a needle attached to the end. It looks empty, but there must be a trace amount of whatever its contents were still inside the actual needle. 

“No one touch it,” I say, even though I know none of them would. 

I pull out my phone to call Raff to let him know what Josie Has found, and he tells me he is already getting a 

Chapter 303 

forensics team together and to wait for him to get there before we move. 

“What does it smell like?” Mason asks. 

“I don’t know. It’s nothing I have ever smelt before, but it’s acrid,” Axel says, shifting back to his human form. ” There’s also a faint scent of Luke here,” he adds as Josie continues to sniff around the area. 

“So are we thinking Luke was injected with whatever is in the syringe and taken?” Theo asks. 

“That or he is Tristan and history is repeating itself,” Mason growls, his fists clenching as he speaks the words I hadn’t dared to. 

Josie shifts back to her human form so fast that I barely register it has happened before she shoves Mason in the chest. “Don’t you fucking dare!” She hisses. 

“Why not? Do you want us just to pretend it’s not a possibility? That he wouldn’t do such a thing? Because news flash, one of us already did before,” Mason snaps back at her.