Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 128488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
“Do you . . . want a drink in my room?” Evan asked as they both sat up. “Or just a water . . . we could order room service, too, if you’re hungry. Maybe dessert?”
He was nervous, and it made her smile. “Water would be good. I . . . I think I remembered something . . . maybe.”
Ten minutes later, the elevator dinged, and they got off on their floor and then walked the short distance around the corner to Evan’s room. He unlocked the door, and they both went inside, where she kicked off her heels again and sat on the desk chair, bringing her other foot up and massaging that one.
That man had massaged her too. He’d touched her. He’d let his hands linger wherever he’d wanted. He’d brought her pleasure that had also hurt.
She started to shut her eyes, to shake her head and block it out, but then stopped, squeezing her foot to keep herself there. In that room of horrors.
“All those things we received, Evan . . . the graphite from the pencil, the rose petals . . . some of them were random . . . gifts . . . but some of them were not.”
He pulled two waters from the mini fridge and handed one to her. “Yes. I agree. It was like someone was trying to help us.”
Okay, great. She didn’t have to convince him of that. She nodded. “Yes, so from what we know, many people were watching us.”
“Yes,” he said. “Because it was a sort of game. Sickos who put us in cages to see what we’d do. For the pure thrill of it. Like a coliseum of sorts.”
Coliseum. Like the Roman Colosseum, where kings had watched slaves fight for their lives for the pure entertainment of it. A chill made her lift her shoulders and then drop them. “Yes, so there would have to be money involved, right?”
“Always follow the money,” he murmured. “So they—whoever those sickos were—watched us from a live feed that showed everything. They’d pay to watch. It was a digital coliseum, and they were the crowd in the stands.”
She pictured all those dull-eyed gamblers they’d walked past in the casino. “Yes. But what if they didn’t just watch. What if they were also given the choice to . . . bet.”
That seemed to surprise Evan. “On what? On the choices we’d make from the ones given?”
She nodded.
“And then some of them rented us for purposes of sex or violence,” he said.
“Yes. But other victims, who were maybe not so ‘rentable,’ for lack of a better term, were placed in different situations.”
“But the purpose was always to see how much another person would be willing to suffer in order not to be the cause of someone else’s.”
“Twisted,” she whispered. “But on paper, interesting.”
“Too bad it wasn’t just on paper.”
“Too bad.”
“Okay, so which of the watchers sent us the random gifts? Like the butter or the peanuts.”
“Maybe the renters sent food gifts as sort of a demented way to say thank you. Maybe it brought them some sick sort of glee to see us eating it. Maybe some of them were trying to keep us healthy-ish so the game would continue.”
“And the other gifts? The ones that weren’t random?”
“They—or maybe just he or she, but I think more likely a he—were supplying us with items that might help us escape. That did help us escape.”
“Like the pencil. That you used to start a fire.” He paused. “The million-dollar question is, How would someone guess you’d even know how to do that?”
“Maybe he knew I was the daughter of an electrician. I knew how to start a fire in an electrical outlet because I’d followed my dad around on jobs since I was a kid.”
He scratched his jaw. “I mean, I wouldn’t have known how to do that. A pencil, or the uses for what’s inside it, would have flown right over my head.”
“Right. It was personal. He’d researched us.”
Evan appeared slightly dubious, and so she bit her lip, trying to think of the right way to clarify this. For a moment there in the casino, it had clicked in her mind, and she didn’t think she was explaining it adequately enough, or maybe it was just that in her mind, the thought had been braided together with the feeling, and she had no way to convey that part.
“What about you?” she said. “You were given that mallet. I’d guess it was approved by whoever oversaw that kind of thing because it was presented as a musical instrument to go along with our singing. But that wasn’t the true intention of the sender. And you knew it wasn’t. Maybe the person who sent it knew you’d smash your hand to get it through the bars.”
He paused as though he’d already considered her being sent a tool that would allow her to start a fire but hadn’t considered what he’d been sent. And how he’d used it. “How could he know that, though? How could anyone?”