I emerged from Grey’s room, intent on heading back to the war room to continue going through the files, but I stopped when I saw Zoe leaning against a wall, waiting for me.

“Hey,” she said as the door closed behind me. “How is he?”

I hesitated. I wasn’t sure how to tell her about the conversation that Grey and I had just had, as I had no idea how to even process it for myself. Grey was willing to share his body with Leo and was okay with me having some sort of relationship with both of them. The idea that he could be so accepting of this, of us, had opened up a strange possibility in my mind, and I really wanted time and space to think about it.

On the one hand… God, Grey loved me. So much so that he was entertaining the idea of sharing his body with an AI forever, just to make me happy. On the other… it was weird.

So I put it away, and applied a little effort to forming a small smile for my friend. “He’s going to be okay, I think. What’s up?”

“Oh, Dylan called Maddox to request a meeting with you both. Maddox had her come up here, and they’re waiting for you in the front room. She asked me to tell you, so…” She pushed off the wall and spread her arms. “Mission accomplished. You’re welcome.”

A surprised laugh escaped me, and I shook my head at her. “Thanks. Did they say what it was about?”

I had a suspicion, though I asked the question anyway. Dylan Chase had also been in the Tourney, and had technically won the fourth and final challenge, but ultimately lost when the Knights voted me in as Champion instead of her, breaking with tradition. I hadn’t been sure what to make of her during the Tourney—she was highly competitive and outspoken—but had suspected her and two others of being legacies.

But Dylan had surprised me, first by coming to my aid when Baldy attacked Leo and me, then by insisting that she look into the situation personally. I had paired her with Tian, knowing that the youngest member of our group could keep a careful eye on her, as well as help her root out the legacies who were living as undocs. I was still unclear about her true loyalty.

It seemed today would reveal another part of the puzzle, as she undoubtedly had new evidence to share. If it was in line with what we were seeing from Sadie’s computer, and she was telling me the truth, then I had to start entertaining the possibility that her intentions were honorable. There was a chance she was feeding us good information to try to gain our trust, to set us up in some way, but I didn’t see that as being her style.

And I really wanted to trust her. I couldn’t explain exactly why, but I liked the woman. Yes, she was obnoxiously blunt, and asked for what she wanted in a way that made it seem like a demand, but she cared about the department and the people inside of it. Her views on the Tower were interesting, in that she saw it as more of a mission, an experiment, the integrity of which needed to be protected. If it was an act, it was convincing.

“She’s got the DNA results from the house we found in the Attic,” Zoe replied. “As well as the blood taken from the catwalk. Maddox said she seemed pretty excited, so maybe it’ll be something that’ll blow the lid off this thing.”

I laughed. “We should be so lucky. But unless she’s got detailed information about a hideout for the legacies, I’m not sure the results will yield very much.”

“You never know,” Zoe replied with a little shrug. “Anyway, I’m getting back to the files in a moment. Just going to check on Eric.”

“Okay.” I watched her go for a second, my heart a few ounces lighter for all of her bright happiness. It was such a dramatic difference from this morning, and I was glad that Eric’s prognosis was looking good. We’d come too close to it going the other way, and I hated to think of what Zoe would’ve been like had she lost him. I couldn’t bear to let anyone know that pain, especially not her.

I turned away from Zoe and started toward the kitchen, quickly following the spiraling hallway past the bedroom and bathroom doors and into the kitchen, where I stopped long enough to grab a glass of water. I drank it quickly, placed the cup in the sink, and then resumed my trek, following the hall to where it would eventually spill into the largest room of my quarters.

I heard their voices long before I entered the room. They were speaking in low tones, and the acoustics of the room didn’t help give the sounds any form. I emerged from the hall and went down the handful of steps into the wide conference room, angling for where the two women were standing in front of the large wall screen, opposite the theater-style seating. I had designed this room specifically for conferences with my Knight Commanders, so that when I finally got around to having them, it would make the large-scale debriefings easier.

Of course, right now I was only going to be meeting with one Knight Commander. But it was important.

“There she is,” Maddox said, nodding her head in my direction.

Dylan turned around, an excited smile growing on her lips that served to make her look even prettier. “Oh good,” she exclaimed. “You are never going to believe what I found.”

I raised an eyebrow and looked over the blond woman’s shoulder to Maddox, meeting her green eyes with a questioning glance of my own.

“She wouldn’t tell me until you were here,” Maddox replied with a shrug. “Now that you are…”

“I just didn’t want to have to explain it twice,” Dylan said wryly, giving me a look. “Don’t you hate when you have to do that?”

I nodded. I really did. “Go ahead,” I told her. “What did you uncover?”

“Only that the DNA from the bridge and collected from the blankets and plates at the scene of that weird structure thing you found in the Attic shows that these people are all biologically related. Siblings, in fact.”

“Siblings?” I repeated dumbly. “How is that possible?” Residents in the Tower were only permitted two children per couple. There had been at least thirty people in the house we discovered. Someone had over thirty children?

Dylan pulled a data stick out of her pocket and plugged it in to the port at the base of the screen. A second later the screen came on, revealing several different files. “Well, ‘siblings’ isn’t exactly right. Some of them are siblings, sharing both mother and father, but others are half-siblings, sharing only the father. In fact, sharing only the father is common; the mothers look like they’ve had a minimum of three children each, but I have evidence to support that one had seven children with the same man.”

“So one man is the father of… thirty people or so?” Maddox asked, beating me to the much-needed clarification question. I was shocked. How could one man have so many children without the Tower knowing about it? Both genders had birth control shots that kept us from procreating without the Medica’s involvement. Accidents happened, but for the most part, it should’ve been impossible for someone to have that many children after a birth-control shot. Not without the Medica’s intervention, anyway. Or waiting for the five years it took for the shot to expire.

“Yes,” Dylan said grimly. “Not only that, but I was able to use parts of the DNA to track back to the mothers, and…” She pressed on one of the files, and pictures and information for at least a dozen different women filled the screen. Everything about them was different, from their hair color to their department, but there were two things they had in common: half of them were dead, while the other half were labeled ‘missing.’ “The DNA matches all of these women. They’ve all been reported missing at some point within the last fifty years, but now I think they were kidnapped. It seems I’m the only one who put that together, however. The ones who are labeled dead were discovered years after their disappearances, in various states of decomposition, and all the autopsy reports read the same thing: died in childbirth. The Knight reports that accompany the autopsies say that the girls were probably dissidents who became undocs and then died having an illegal child, which was never recovered. Nobody ever looked any deeper than that. Nobody ever saw the pattern.”

I felt sick. Someone—a man—had evidently been taking women, forcing them to have his children, and then discarding them when their bodies gave out because they didn’t receive the medical treatment they had needed to survive. And no one had put it together as anything more than a girl being dissatisfied with Tower life, making an attempt at being an undoc, and dying for her folly.

“That’s disgusting,” Maddox whispered, echoing my thoughts in a much more direct fashion.

“I know,” Dylan replied, an undercurrent of anger in her voice. “And it gets weirder. I did a search to see if any known DNA records matched the DNA of the father, hoping to find the sicko. No luck, obviously, or else I would’ve marched his ass up here to talk to you directly. But something odd did come up. Apparently, Frederick Hamilton shares a distant relationship with these people. Cousins, at most, but the relationship is there.”

I sucked in a breath. I knew from the files Jasper had uncovered that Salvatore had been Sadie’s candidate in the Tourney—and the one she’d unleashed the sentinel for—but Hamilton had been another suspect, because of his relationship to Ezekial Pine. Lacey had assured me that her family had wiped Pine’s out, and that Frederick’s survival had been an oversight on her part… but had it been? Or was Frederick a child of two legacy families? Had his branch of the family managed to escape because of his other family, who kept him hidden when the slaughter began?

Was that the legacy family we were dealing with today? Was Dreyfuss or Sage one of them?

Or worse, had Lacey’s family missed someone else? Was the father somehow one of Ezekial Pine’s descendants, too? If so, who was the male in the equation? Presumably another person Lacey’s family had missed, but who?

My gut told me it was Dreyfuss, but there was a chance it could be Sage, or even, on a very off chance, Plancett. All three men had been around twenty-five years ago, and were the only ones still alive who were old enough and connected to this in any way. And while Sage was a possibility, I found it hard to believe the man would have anything remotely resembling a libido (or maybe I just hoped he didn’t). He was 115, for crying out loud, and far too busy to be fathering child after child. Unless he was having those women artificially inseminated.

God, I really hoped he wasn’t. The thought made me want to throw up.

Plancett was a possibility as well, but one that didn’t strike me as quite right. By all accounts, he was working for Sparks, and then later Sadie. Then again, he did at least have the letter P in his name. Maybe they had obfuscated his role in the organization to keep him hidden and safe. That way, if anyone came close to learning the truth, all signs would point to him being complicit, but not entirely guilty. It was smart.

But so was Dreyfuss. He was next to nothing on paper, a retired Knight manning a stall in the Lion’s Den. Kept in the background so that he could continue to strengthen their numbers, like some sort of stud bull. His position as a food vendor suddenly made a bit more sense, too—or at least, it would if I were in their shoes. Food vendors were practically invisible but talked to everyone. His people could come and talk to him in the open, under the guise of getting food, update him, and get their new orders right then and there. Nobody would ever suspect him. It would be the perfect place to hide. It’s what I would do, if I were them.

And it was smart, in its own disgusting way. He could run everything in secret while ensuring that if anyone came after them, he could escape before they realized his significance, and then turn around and start a new family, ready to take over where the others had left off. It might take them years, but they had proven their method worked. Their family had survived.

That didn’t leave me with much, and I turned my mind back to Frederick, deciding to add him to the list of people we would need to arrest. He might not have the same father as the rest of the legacies seemed to have, but I had no idea where he stood in all of this, and the DNA connection was too strong to ignore. If I left him out and he disappeared, the cycle might start all over again. And I couldn’t take that chance.

As for who the father was… Well, we just had to do everything in our power to figure that out.

“We’re going to have to find out who this man is before we do anything,” I said, intending it for Maddox.

“Well, of course we have to find out who he is,” Dylan replied, cocking her blond head at me. “But what do you mean, ‘before we do anything’?” She looked back and forth between us, her blue eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What’s going on?”

I bit my lip and looked at Maddox. “Did we find any evidence that points to her being involved?” I asked, rudely talking about Dylan in front of her.

Maddox shook her head. “Not so much as a message between them. There was a file on her, but from how it reads, it looks like they were gathering intelligence about her, not working with her.”

“‘Her’?” Dylan interrupted, crossing her arms over her chest. “Do you mean me? And who is ‘they’? The people who tried to rig the Tourney?” She frowned, as if a thought suddenly occurred to her. “Wait, have you uncovered new evidence? Do you have suspects?” She took a step forward, her entire body reflecting the intensity of her interest.

I cocked my head at her. “It doesn’t bother you that we suspect you?”

“It would, but you don’t,” she replied. She stuck her thumb out to point it at Maddox. “She just said that there weren’t any messages between myself and whoever you’re monitoring, so…” She trailed off and shrugged. “Up to you, but if you know something about who this man might be, then I want to know. This—what he’s been doing to these women—it’s disgusting. He needs to be stopped.”

“I agree,” I replied. Even if he wasn’t the father of all the legacies, I would still agree. He was taking women and forcing them to bear his children, until they died from it. It was beyond sick—it was downright evil.

I considered what Dylan was saying, and Maddox’s report that they hadn’t found anything implicating her as working with Sadie, and took a deep, calming breath. I’d been suspicious of everyone for so long, but I had to start trusting at some point. Maybe I’d already started with the Patrians—I’d let them take my brother with them, after all—and for the first time in a long time, I decided to let another person in.

“I’m going to let Maddox catch you up on everything in a minute,” I told her. “But for now, all you need to know is that we have three potential suspects: Marcus Sage, Emmanuel Plancett, and a former Knight who is now living in the farming department with his daughter.”

“Great. I’ll go down there and…” Dylan trailed off and frowned. “Did you say Marcus Sage? As in the head of the Medica?”

I nodded grimly. “I’m not certain yet, but—”

“What if the father is someone other than those three?” Maddox asked pensively. “What if we’re wrong to have only them on the list of suspects?”

I hesitated. I was banking on the idea that whoever the father was wasn’t content as a simple sperm donor—that he was someone important to the family itself and had known about the outsiders right from the start—but there was every possibility that I was wrong. Still, the three men were the only leads we currently had. I had no doubt that if we looked up their DNA profiles in the database, it wouldn’t be a match. Undoubtedly they would’ve been smart enough to upload a fake genetic profile to avoid situations like this. We couldn’t trust any comparisons to what was on record. We needed to collect their DNA personally and handle the testing ourselves.

If the DNA didn’t match, we would figure it out later.

“We’ll worry about it later. For now, we need to get DNA samples from all three men and do a comparison. That will tell us what our next move is.”

“All right,” Maddox agreed. “Who do we go after first?”

“First, you fill Dylan in on what we are doing,” I replied. “Then we’ll figure out the rest.”