Their Vicious Games(25)

And she has someone who can rain hellfire if she disappears.

I don’t. There’s no one who could fight for me if I disappeared. Not against the Remingtons. So, I have to disappear myself.

The house is so quiet that I don’t dare to even breathe. Each shadow is a ghost of a girl, a warning of a man, all threatening and long, an all-consuming darkness. The silence gets louder and louder, and then I realize that it’s half in my head.

The real world is not so quiet.

I hear them, closer than expected, in a room that I thought was an abandoned office when I explored earlier in the day with Saint but is very much occupied now.

“…yourself together. Enough, Four, enough,” a voice says gruffly. I don’t know it well enough to immediately place it, but it’s familiar in a way that I don’t have to search my brain long for.

Mr. Remington. Third, my brain supplies.

“You want him to get himself together? He just watched a body get loaded into the freezer.” An acerbic voice retorts. Graham.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. I just…” Pierce trails off.

Slowly, I creep closer, watching the thin line of light that beams from under the door. Crossing it feels dangerous, like they’d catch me, so I stay pressed into the shadows, listening to a conversation that I don’t belong in.

“You’re not fine,” Graham says. “This is why we should have canceled it.”

“You want your brother to be a disappointment like you?” Third asks snidely.

“Better a disappointment than making himself sick,” Graham retorts.

“Things are supposed to be different. That’s what you said, Graham,” Pierce says, voice growing stronger with each word. “You said it was going to be less… dire.”

“Your brother is a fool. There is tradition for a reason,” Third snaps with impatience. I hear a shuffle of movement and then Third’s voice rings out, much closer than before. “Why you listen to your brother, I don’t know, but the fault lies in you, Pierce. You wanted women from outside our circle, wanted this to be different, fine, but then you invited that girl here.”

“What girl?”

Me, of course.

“Adina Walker?” Pierce whispers. My name sounds loud in the silence. “She’s just a—”

“She’s not just anything. I don’t know what games you’re playing, but this isn’t the one to experiment with,” Third says, each word careful and measured. “Each of those young women was hand selected, some perfectly bred, even, with the purpose of joining this family, knowing if they didn’t, we could keep them quiet about anything that occurred. And then you bring an outlier. An inadequate choice that—”

“Why?” Pierce barks. “Because she’s not yours? Not Pen?”

“That we have no leverage on to keep quiet.” Third’s snarl rises over Pierce’s voice, effectively silencing him. “You’re the one who wanted the rules to shift, and now you’ve introduced an element that we’ve no idea how to handle other than how we always have.”

It’s veiled, but it’s not hard to glean the meaning.

“May I remind you that a girl died,” Graham interrupts. “A girl has already died and it had nothing to do with Adina.”

There’s a brief moment of silence. “I didn’t think this would happen. Why is this happening?” Pierce whispers.

“I told you.” Dr. Remington’s voice joins, richer than all the others. Unemotional. “No matter your intention, there will be blood. That is the very nature of this game.”

And then Graham again: “Dad is right about one thing. She changes the circumstances, because she’s not one of us and she’s not prepared. Just send her home before they eat her.”

It sounds like a condemnation, but I remember what he said. It just means you have a soul.

I intend to keep it. I slide away from the room, going back the opposite way, toward the stairs. Only when I turn the corner do I feel comfortable running, sure that I’m far enough away that they won’t hear me.

I rush down the hallway, down the main staircase, not daring to cast my gaze upward.

I creep along the front wall, not directly to the front door—no, that would be obvious—keeping an eye out for a security system. Going through the arch into the next room, I search for a side door, but I find myself in a sunroom, a place with wide windows that look out onto the manicured lawn and the iron gates that block my way to freedom. In the silence, there’s a crackling sound that I only place when I think of things like Mission: Impossible and James Bond.

The crackle of a walkie-talkie.

“Saw some movement earlier, confirmed deer, but all is quiet out front.” The voice is slightly distorted with him being outside and me being inside, but I can hear him as much as I can see him—just barely. He’s a tall, broad man, his body subsumed by the matte black of what looks like tactical gear. I can see only his back and the dark bronze of his hair as he stands in front of the window, staring out at the gates, feet planted hard to the ground.

The man pauses, like he can sense my presence. And then he starts to turn around. There’s no time to think—only react. I fall to the floor hard, my only saving grace the soft wool rug underneath the breakfast nook. I crawl beneath the table and peer through the tiny slit between the table and the end of the wooden bench.