Chase couldn't keep his eyes off of the dashboard. At every red light which he stopped, he sat and marveled at the luxury within Cadence's car. He wasn't able to fully process it at the time, but she gave him her Mercedes S65 with no strings attached—her instructions were to return it 'whenever.'
He figured the car was worth over a hundred grand, easy. Maybe two hundred. The windshield was heated and the seats were ventilated. There was a programmable cabin fragrance system, voice command, and a refrigerator. The seats had massage buttons—which Chase tried and immediately had to shut off when pain shot through his injured leg.
With the high-resolution screens, the soft leather, and the interior LED lighting, it felt more like a spaceship than a car, making Chase chuckle at the irony.
If this was merely a spare car, he shuddered to think what her other two were.
"I wonder if she even would miss it," he mused out loud.
It would more than cover his debt to Chambers. And Cadence could collect the insurance money—assuming she had insurance. If not, it seemed that she was filthy rich anyway.
How are these aliens so freaking rich?
Chase figured they were probably using their mind powers to coerce the stock market or something on that level. Regardless, it was a safe assumption that Cadence didn't "need" need the car.
Before he met Avery, he wouldn't have thought twice about it. Some chump mindlessly lends him a car worth this much, they deserve to lose it. But the image of Cadence telling Avery that Chase 'lost' her car made him feel sick. He could see the disappointment on her face. Even if he never saw Avery again, disappointing her like that was something he was not prepared to do.
Of course, the other problem was that Cadence and her friends may come after him with phasers or something.
Chase laughed out loud at the thought. But his mirth slowly faded with the overwhelming realization of who they really were. The notion that Avery and her sister were aliens was still difficult for him to swallow. And what was with their looks? He remembered McClouth telling him that they were all beautiful—now it made sense. It wasn't enough that they invented space travel. They had to rub it in by eliminating obesity and facial moles as well.
But the most interesting revelation of all was their mind control. Avery told him that it was not pure control; it was more like a suggestive influence. Either way, Chase was somehow immune.
Immune.
They watched him because their psy—as they called it—simply didn't work on him. They assigned Avery to closely monitor his actions in case he went public with McClouth's information. It all made sense now.
No wonder they were so obsessed with watching me.
While one mystery was now solved, several more popped up in its place. What were Avery's people doing here? What did they want? Avery had mentioned something about her people being 'in trouble.' In trouble how?
Chase tried to replay the conversation at Cadence's house in his head, grimacing at the memory of his last words to Avery. It was not the first time he had spoken out of turn, but it was the first time he ever blurted out that he loved someone.
He had a habit of interrupting people his whole life, usually because he knew what they were going to say and just became impatient. It was an annoying habit, and he knew that it alienated a lot of people in his circle. But what they didn't know was that if he didn't interrupt then his attention would be lost, forcibly tuning him out and resulting in an even more offensive situation.
