by Meli Raine
“I love the Wyatt I knew when he was four,” I tell Drew. “I have no idea what the Wyatt of the present is like.”
“You’re drawing distinctions that don’t exist, Duff. Your brain can’t catch up fast enough. You’ve carried this for twenty-three years. If you were to see him face-to-face right this very minute, are you really telling me that your first reaction wouldn’t be joy, even if he had a gun drawn?”
“I don’t know what my first reaction would be, Drew. I haven’t experienced it yet, and the chances are really slim that I ever will.”
“You wouldn’t be on this mission if they were zero.”
“No. I wouldn’t,” I grudgingly admit.
“We’ve been doing more investigations into this theory you have about Harry.” Drew swivels the chair to the left, thumbs through a series of folders, and pulls one out. Before he opens it, he grabs his cellphone and starts typing furiously. The wi-fi appears spotty, but it’s present.
“What’re you doing?” Silas asks.
“Ordering extra security for Lindsay and baby Emma.”
A chill runs through me. He’s right. He’s smart. He’s doing exactly what I would do if I were in his shoes.”
Silas’s phone makes a strange sound, a beep that half chirps at the end. “What the hell?” he mutters to himself, looking at it. “Oh. We’re back in better range now.” He flinches. “Voicemail? Who...”
He presses play, holding it up to his ear. The sound of someone’s voice, muffled and tinny, comes through, then it stops suddenly. Astonished, he stares at his own phone as if it were a dead animal. Then he taps again, putting it on speakerphone.
“Drew, Duff. Listen.” He hits play.
“Hey, Dirty, there's a guy here who–” It cuts out.
All three of us look at each other.
“Dirty?” Drew asks with a frown. “The only people who call you that are from–”
“Now we know,” Silas interrupts. “Margin of Error. That's where they are.”
“He took her there?” I practically scream.
“Looks like it.”
Romeo stole Lily and took her to a sex club. The same one where Nolan Corning's men took Jane.
The same one where Silas nearly died.
And the same one we're about to storm.
He'd better not lay one finger on her.
Not one fucking finger.
And even if he doesn't?
He's still a dead man.
Chapter 5
Lily
I'm in a cave of death, the smell of stone and dirt overwhelming my senses.
It's damp, claustrophobic, with air that feels like I'm inhaling a wet blanket over and over, sour wool and choking sulfur making my eyes and throat burn. The cave is so narrow that I am on my belly, the wet gravel making my skin so cold, so chilled. My elbows sting with thousands of tiny cuts, forearms bare against the wet rock as I pull my body forward, dragging my belly along cold rock that does not care.
“Help!” I gasp. The words just bury themselves in the noxious air. I inhale slowly, hoping for oxygen, but instead my mouth fills with cotton, thick and drying. Trying to breathe, I lift my head and cry out as something pierces the base of my skull. Bending my head down fast, I strike my forehead on the rock.
I cry out again.
No one answers.
Until a low chuckle fills the space.
It's a man's laugh, mocking and cruel, debilitating and paralyzing. I reach behind me to rub my neck but the needle that pierced me seconds ago scrapes along the back of my hand, tearing skin. Slowly, ignoring the mocking laughter, I turn to look up.
Half an inch from my eye, a stalactite's tip stares back.
Frozen, I am half twisted, one hip still digging into the stone slab, my waist and chest facing up. Two gleaming eyes meet mine from between the thin, dangerous mineral formations that act like hanging knives.
I scream.
He laughs harder, face coming into view as Romeo's black onyx eyes turn into spiders, pouring out of his sockets like they are terrified to stay.
One of the stalactites cracks and falls, piercing my chest, the spiders all climbing inside, spreading my ribs, puncturing my heart. I choke and gurgle until his eyes, oh God, those eyes, meet mine.
“This is the part I love best. Watching you drain away,” he says as I do.
Oh, the pain.
Oh, Sean. Please. Please come.
* * *
I wake up. Romeo’s not here. That’s the first thing I realize.
My hands are shaking. They’re so cold. My feet, too. They’re still in the high heels, the heavy sequined dress pressing against me like earth on a coffin. My mouth is dry, and one side of my neck pulls against my shoulder, a thin line of muscle going down the back into my shoulder blades, a thread of yanking pain.
My ears ring so hard, as if someone’s banging a tiny gong against the inside of my skull.
Words. I’m staring at the thing across the way. It’s flat. It’s tall. It goes up to the… what’s that word? I’m hot. I’m cold. I’m surrounded by air. My brain feels like it’s leaking.
The dream feels real, and reality feels like a dream.
I blink, hard, and open my mouth. The will to speak is an impulse I can’t stop.
“Hello to the picnic car,” I say, the words making no sense. I’m trying to test all of the pieces of me because it feels like they’ve been reassembled backward and upside down. Is this what the doctors were talking about? The stroke?
I reach up and touch my fingertips to my cheek, running them in a line along my jaw. I smile. I stand up, lights barely working, and squeeze the edge of the chaise with both hands.
How did I get back here? The last thing I remember was looking at Duff-not-Duff at the end of the small passage. What happened between then and now?
How can you tell whether you’re having a stroke if the stroke makes you unable to think properly?
Paresthesia, lots of it, all flowing through me, rolling down the front of my body, trickles into my navel and below. My skin prickles and tingles, like ants scrambling up and down my arms, my legs, my back, with waves of numbness interjecting.
My back feels weak. My thighs start to shake.
And then the door opens.
“Heyyyy!” says a man I don’t know. He’s bald, wearing a suit, but his tie is loose around his neck, pulled down by the same hand that now holds a drink. He slugs it away and looks at me, hunger in his wrinkly eyes as he licks his lips. “Nice!”
The tone of his voice makes it clear what he thinks is about to happen between us. We're in a sex club, after all. Isn't that what Romeo told me?
I open my mouth to say No, go away.
To say Help me, take me with you.
To say completely contradictory things that don’t make sense.
But all that comes out is, “Uh.”
A pounding in my chest feels like the world’s largest bird is taking flight, cracking open my breastbone, ripping through the flesh of my chest and emerging from my heart. It looks down into my arm, flowing out of my fingernails.
I am feathers. I am wings.
I am... dying.
He walks up to me, smelling like alcohol, smelling like hope and confusion and freedom and pain.
“What’s your safe word, baby?” he asks me, slowing down as he stands three feet away.
“Help,” I say.
“Ah. This is my first time here,” he says, his words sloppy.
I look at his eyes. He’s beyond drunk, probably on some kind of drug that, mixed with alcohol, makes him completely useless for helping me to get away.
“Uh…” I say, trying to make the words come out. I move closer to him. Not because I want him to touch me, but because he’s standing between me and the door. It’s ajar. Light comes in, dim and mysterious, through the crack.
The man's features warble, singing like demons are coming out of his nose and mouth, the sickly sweet smell of alcohol on his humid breath making me re
tch. He's like pavement in summer heat, rippling before me, the air itself a visual distortion that isn't real.
“Uh,” I repeat, unable to say anything else. Stumbling, my thigh cracking into his as his arms come up and he grabs my breast.
“Like that, is it?” he says with a happy grin, his mouth coming towards mine. I look up. I’m a foot below him, my knee bending down, the strain of my thigh muscles making me gasp.
And then suddenly, something whistles.
Then it’s raining. Black rain.
Warm rain falls out of the sky, dropping on my hair, on my bare shoulders, rolling down my back, falling into the crevice at the base of my ass. The dress covers so little, spaghetti straps barely there over my collarbone. I look down, and the rain is red.
Not black.
Click. Clack. I look up again, and he has no face.
Suddenly, the man’s face becomes Romeo’s.
I start to scream. The sound is choked in my throat but it grows, moving up from the split of my legs over my pubic bone, trying to come out through my belly button, but crawling up… up… up through my heart and my throat and out my mouth. The scream grows like an om in meditation, like a prayer of exultation, like the keening of a mourner.
I scream, and I scream, and I scream, and then I look at the door and see that it’s closed again. Romeo kicks the man’s body away from me. I’m slumped against the wall, covered in something that’s definitely not rain.
“Go ahead,” Romeo says. “Scream. It won’t do you any good, Lily. It’s a soundproof room. Remember?” He smiles.
I stop screaming.
“Of course it is. It’s a sex club. Would you expect anything else? Thank Silas for all of this, Lily. He's the one who showed me this place. Cleared it of surveillance himself. No one's listening. No one's watching. No video cameras here, either. Just like your parents' flower shop two years ago. People can be so foolish when it comes to security. Their mythologies are stronger than reality.”
He waves the gun in the air, then turns, kicking the dead man aside as he walks to the door, steps out, then looks back and says:
“But reality has its way of dominating.”
The click of the door closing is like a final heartbeat.
Duff
Knowing she's here and not knowing where is killing me.
Silas knows the layout of the place better than any of us, his sure steps taking us through the crazy maze of levels to get to the main bar. Every public area is red. It's dramatic yet understated, designed to be a paradox.
Just like people.
Music, low and slow, pours over the senses, chosen to arouse. It's music that makes you feel a need to connect. To integrate.
To fuck.
Intimacy is nothing more than the joining of two bodies in an emotional dance. Body, mind, spirit, and impulse–put them together in a private environment filled with other people seeking the same experience. In a sex club like Margin of Error, the goal is to heighten everything.
We walk past a man on his knees, wearing a fake dog's tail and nothing else, the base of the costume a butt plug inserted deep within him. He is licking his lips, staring at the open vulva of a woman in a sex swing, laid out before him like a geometry lesson. Three deep couches are arranged in an open triangle around them, each covered with a couple, everyone naked, everyone’s eyes gleaming and excited.
Silas turns us away from them, into a stifling hallway where red velvet covers the walls, then through a large lounge. No sex play in here, but the steady beat of a jazz-technofusion song is designed to make blood pump and set a sex-filled rhythm to keep people in the mood.
Not that anyone seems to need encouragement.
“Where are we going?” I growl in his ear, feeling a little too much like a rat in a maze for my liking.
He pauses. I nearly run him over.
“What the hell are you doing?” I whisper in his ear.
“We can’t just go in there like a bunch of nut cases.”
“Speak for yourself,” I tell him.
Drew’s eyes cut over to me. “Maybe you shouldn’t be here, Duff.”
“Good luck keeping me away, Drew.”
Silas shushes us. “We need to find Busy. I’m really sure she left that strange voicemail on my phone. Once we find her, we can finish developing a plan.”
“Where is she?” I snap at him.
He tips his head to the right. “This way.”
Down a long hallway and to the right, I start to hear the sounds of the bar again and wonder just how interconnected this place is. Silas makes another right and then I stop short, nearly sliding on the floor, Silas grabbing the wall, too.
“What the hell?”
We’re paused directly in front of a small door. It’s narrow, the kind used for a storage closet in a restaurant or a club like this.
Silas lets out a strange grunt. “This is where they shoved me in,” he says. “Janitor's closet.”
Drew drops to the ground, his fingers tapping the floor. He stands, rubbing his thumb against his first two fingers, then sniffing it.
“Bleach?” I ask.
“Blood,” he says.
Silas grabs the doorknob, rattling it. It’s locked.
Drew looks down. The hallway lights are too dim to see anything. If blood is pouring out of the closet, there must be a body in there.
Lily.
Her name comes to me in sorrow. “We’re too late,” I whisper to Silas, who ignores me as he pulls a small tool out of his jacket pocket and quickly dispenses with the lock. A foot, then a hand, then the rest come tumbling out, slack and pale in the dim light.
I search the dead woman’s face for answers. It’s not Lily.
“Busy!” Silas gasps. “Shit!” He bends down, reaching for her neck, feeling for a pulse and clearly not finding one.
I move closer, stepping in more of the blood that's pooling. It spills out of the closet as Drew turns on the flashlight on his phone.
“She’s dead,” Silas says. He slams the heel of his hand against the doorjamb.
“And you’re sure she’s the one who left the message on your phone?” Drew asks him yet again.
“Now I’m really sure. Someone killed her as she was recording that voicemail.”
“We need to call the locals,” Drew says, reluctant, his shoulders tensing. “This is bad. Cops need to be here.”
“We need to find Lily first,” I insist.
He waves me away. Rage fills me, pumping through my system like the blood that’s pouring out onto the floor.
“This doesn’t make sense, Drew,” Silas says. “Her body was dumped in the exact same closet that I had to break out of. See the seam in the bottom here, where it’s been fixed? That’s the door I peeled back when I was trapped in there after I got sucker hit, when they kidnapped Jane.”
“He’s reenacting,” I say. They both look at me. I continue. “Romeo’s the one who sucker hit you. Romeo’s the one who shoved you in that closet and locked you in there. Whatever he did to you, he’s just done to Busy. She’s the one who tried to warn us.”
“Shit,” Silas says, increasingly aggravated. “You're right.”
“Where do you think Lily is? Whatever he tried to do to Jane, he’s doing to Lily right now.”
Drew gives me a nod of agreement. It’s hard to see in the dark, but I know it’s there.
“We need to find the room where Nolan Corning and Romeo had Jane,” he says. “This isn’t a question anymore. We know exactly who was involved in Jane’s kidnapping now, and in Lily’s.”
“What about Busy?” Silas asks.
I grab her by the shoulders and start pushing her back into the closet. Silas gapes, then quickly recovers. He’s a smart man. Well trained. He knows this is our only option until we can find Lily alive.
Or find Lily at all.
I finish shoving the body into the closet, Drew pressing the door closed just as we hear footsteps down the hall. An unmistakable accent ma
kes us all tense.
Drew whispers, “Open the door.”
“What are you doing?” Silas asks.
Without another word, Drew disappears into the closet, stepping on top of Busy’s body. I follow him. Silas crams in with us, all three of us on some part of her.
We close the door, the sickening give of her skin making me go emotionless.
Robot engaged.
If Romeo is here to check on the body, we’re done.
If we open the door at the wrong time, we’re done.
But I don’t care about us being done.
I care about Lily being done.
Chapter 6
Lily
Being locked in a room with a dead body is not on my bucket list.
Being locked in a room with a faceless corpse, the dim light making his exposed, bloody skull bones gleam like rubies, is definitely not on my wish list.
The scream that wants to come out turns inward, helplessness stopping it somewhere in my chest, comforted by my heart, which only wants it to go quiet. Screaming won't fix this. I can't find an escape by making noise. Romeo's right.
Reality has a way of dominating.
I look down at the dead man.
Who is very, very real.
I move gently on the chaise, taking the deepest breath I can, holding it for too long. Suspending myself in time and space feels like the only out. I can't actually leave. Second best is closing off my air supply, shutting my eyelids, not moving. Freezing in place gives me an illusion to grasp, the fleeting seconds important.
My hand slides under a throw pillow. The cool haven of hidden fabric makes me shiver.
A black spider, all too familiar, comes off the pillow my hand is under.
That makes me shiver even more.
I jump up, shocked by the intrusion of another living being.
The door calls out to me.
The spider crawls down one leg of the chaise, then makes its way dispassionately along the tip of the dead guy's shoe.
In order to get to the door, I have to go around the dead body. In order to move, I have to feel the sensation of his blood on my skin. When I bend my arm, the dried blood on my shoulders and neck crackles. It puckers, like child's glue spread over skin and allowed to dry for fun. For amusement.
