Thea

Aiden paces the metal room resembling a gothic dungeon. "Aiden," I say. "Aiden!" I grab his wrist as he walks past me. He stops pacing, his back to me. "It's okay. We'll figure this out." He turns to face me.

"We're in a dungeon, Thea. What is okay about this?" I pull him closer, staring into his stern, grey eyes, which soften at my glance, while I run my other hand through a lock of his hair.

"You are here with me." Aiden relaxes slightly. I hate confined spaces, and I'm sure after the year we've had, Aiden doesn't either.

"Hey, that's my thing with Aiden!" Noah wines. Anna and I roll our eyes, remembering Noah's philosophy of arrest policies. Kaitlyn just looks bored. Aiden tenses again as footsteps are heard in the distance. He turns back to the metal bars, pushing me behind him further.

Two men and a woman, all looking just a few years older than us, stop on the other side of the bars. The men wear suits, the girl a formal dress. Her and one of the men have tattoos sticking out of their sleeves, matching the one from the guard. The other man has what looks like a bandage on.

"Why the hell are we in here?" Aiden yells at them.

"We'd like to know the same thing," the man with the tattoo says, rebuttoning his sleeves.

"Let us introduce ourselves," the other man says, threading his fingers through the girls'. "I am Preeminence Jonas Blackwood. This is my wife, Iris, and my brother, the Beta, Colton Blackwood. Since you are unarmed, we do not assume you to be rebels at this time. However, with your lack of Marks, we cannot assume you simply got lost on your stroll through the mountains. I would start to talk before I allow my brother to have some fun with you." The woman, Iris, looks uncomfortable with the last sentence. The brother, Colton, turns his lips in a smirk, matching Aiden's glare. Shivers run up my spine when I see a slight resemblance to Tony.

"What's a Mark?" Aiden asks. "And what the hell is this place?" The brothers look confused. Colton crosses his arms.

"This place," he says, with a mixture of annoyance and confusion. "Is the Society's Estate. And this..." He pulls up his left sleeve. "Is a Mark." He reveals his tattoo, which is a set of numbers, separated into three groups. "Also known as an Expiration Date."

"Is that..." I begin to ask. Jonas interrupts me.

"The day he will die. Everyone in Elleany gets imprinted with one the day they are born. It's their fate."

"The United what?" Kaitlyn asks in her signature, bitchy tone. I'm surprised she's even listening to the conversation.

"Society," Colton repeats. "Led by the Order?" The people on my half of the bars look at each other.

"Do you mean the United States?" Aiden asks. I grab his arm as he takes a step closer to the bars.

"They're armed," I whisper to him, looking at the guns tucked into the men's waistbands.

"The United States hasn't existed for over two hundred years," Jonas states, confused. "Those rebels could barely last thirteen."

"Jonas, Colton," Iris asks after my group looks at each other again. "Can I talk to you for a moment?"