“Nope.”
“Okay. Let’s go back to the inn and ask Loretta who she’s been giving spare keys to lately. I’m sure she’ll crack eventually.”
Mike looked at his feet, seemingly realizing that I wasn’t going to let him get out of this argument without the truth. He was caught, and he knew it. Finally he looked back up at me and spoke loud enough for me to hear, but quietly enough that the camera wouldn’t capture it.
“Fine. You’re right, I have a key,” he said with a sneer. “Loretta gave me spare keys to the rooms so I could mess with everyone else. Told her if I won, I’d give her a little share of the prize money for helping.”
“And then you went and screwed with people’s meds as part of your winning strategy?” I shook my head with disgust. “It wasn’t just Indi, was it? Anyone else who’s on meds… you messed with them too, didn’t you?”
He shrugged. “Hey, man. I’ve gotta do what I’ve gotta do.”
“That desperate to win, huh?” I spat at his feet. “You’re fucked up. You know what really gets me? You seemed like a really decent guy. You actually gave me some pretty good advice for my relationship. But you’re just a piece of shit. And you know what happens to pieces of shit like you?”
“Wh—”
Before he could even get the word out, I lunged forward, bringing my right fist to his nose in a swift, hard hit. He cried out and stumbled back, shocked, and I hit him again, aiming for his jaw this time. It hurt my knuckles, but I didn’t give a shit. He deserved a good fucking punch in the mouth for what he’d done. Messing with people’s health in the hopes of getting ahead on the show was screwed up.
I should’ve known it was him a lot sooner. I guess I was too blinded by his fake friendship and seemingly-genuine advice to see what he really was: a scheming asshole. He’d even told me himself that he desperately wanted—no, needed—to win the prize money on this show, and it went right in one ear and out the other. Didn’t even occur to me that he might be one of those pricks who would do absolutely anything to get ahead.
At least I knew now, though, and Indi’s body was hers to control again, as it very well should be.
I turned to Tim, who was still filming. “There you go. There’s this week’s fucking drama for your bullshit show. Happy?” Then I looked back at Mike. “You’re gonna get eliminated once everyone sees what you did. You think the viewers won’t vote you out now? Asshole. And by the way… if you ever go near Indi again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Mike wiped the blood dripping from his nose and let out a humorless laugh. “Oh, really?” he said. “Nah. I don’t think so, buddy.”
I turned away to head back to the medical center, ignoring whatever sarcastic bullshit he had to say. I didn’t care.
“Hey, Blake!” he shouted.
On instinct I turned around at the sound of my name. Mike spat some more blood on the ground, and then he narrowed his eyes, a dangerous gleam within them.
“You’re gonna regret this,” he said slowly. “You’re really gonna regret this…”
Chapter Thirty
Indi
“It was Mike?”
I gazed at Blake in shock as he started up the van. My doctor’s appointment was already over, and I’d gotten an emergency refill on my medication. After stepping out of his office, I hadn’t expected to find Blake standing outside the medical center with bloodied knuckles, yet here we were.
And rightfully so, it seemed. I wasn’t a huge proponent of violence, but holy shit, did Mike deserve the smack-down he just got from my man...
My man. God, it still felt so nice to think of Blake like that.
Blake stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. “Yep,” he said, stony faced. He revved the engine. “I wanted to do a lot more than punch the bastard, believe me.”
I shook my head in disgust. “What an ass.” I wrinkled my forehead in concern, recalling the last details of the story Blake just told me. “Do we need to be worried?”
“What do you mean?” Blake asked, briefly glancing at me before turning onto the road out of town.
“You told me that Mike said you were going to regret hitting him.” An involuntary shudder went through me, and I rubbed the goosebumps which suddenly cropped up on my arms. “What if he…”
I didn’t finish the sentence. I knew Blake would know exactly what I was getting at.
“He’s not the lunatic running around with an ax, Indi,” he replied. “He’s a prick, but I don’t think he’s a murderer. Don’t worry about him. All bark, no bite.”
“How can you be so sure? Sheriff Irons said the person who attacked the Tildens could be any one of us,” I said. I chewed my lower lip as I waited for his response.
“Mike’s a pussy. He went around swapping people’s medications in the hopes they’d either get pregnant or sick, forcing them to drop out of the show. That’s an underhanded move, but it’s also a total pussy move. All hidden behind everyone’s backs.”
“I guess.”
“I was also with him fishing on the day Yuri got murdered.”
“The whole time?”
He nodded. “Pretty much. Except when we got back and I returned the gear to Loretta’s office by myself while he went to the bathroom. But that was probably only five minutes before Yuri got attacked. I doubt Mike managed to put an ax in a guy’s back and clean himself up in just five minutes. I mean, he could’ve done it by the skin of his teeth, theoretically… but I very much doubt it.”
I settled back into my seat with a sigh. “All right. I still really want to know what the hell is going on in this place, though. Is it just me, or was everyone at the medical center really weird?”
Blake nodded. “They were. But I bet all the locals were told by the show producers to avoid interacting with contestants as much as possible while we’re on the island. Not to mention that they’ve probably all heard about Yuri’s murder by now. They probably think it’s one of us, so that’s why they’re all being strange.”
I murmured my agreement. “Mm. That makes sense.” The van’s dashboard suddenly began to beep, and I frowned. “What’s that?”
Blake let out a huff of frustration and slammed his hands against the steering wheel. The van lost speed and eventually petered out to a stop on the edge of the road. “Shit! I think it’s out of gas. Would’ve been nice if the damn gauge came on to warn us earlier.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “We’re still about three miles from the inn. We can hardly push the van all the way back, especially up that hill at the end of this road.”
Blake frowned, worrying his lower lip as he considered our options. “We could always just walk back by ourselves and tell the crew what happened. They can send someone to pick the van up later.”
I nodded in agreement. “All right,” I said, undoing my seatbelt. I got out of the van, and then I frowned and squinted. Thick green forest lined the road, but I could see a thin grey plume of smoke rising from the treetops only a quarter mile or so into the distance. When I looked even closer, I saw a little track with a mailbox at its head near the edge of the road.
“Wait, Blake,” I said, calling him over to me. “I think there’s a house near here. They’re obviously home, because they’ve got their fire going, see?” I gestured toward the smoke, which was clearly coming from a chimney. “They might have a jerry can with fuel. No harm in asking, right?”
Blake shrugged. “Beats walking three miles.”
We trudged down the track for a few minutes, and I squealed with excitement as a log cabin came into view. “See!”
“Nice catch. I wouldn’t have spotted it,” Blake said, patting me on the ass.
The track was now an obvious driveway, lined by rocks. We were only a few yards from the house now, and we could hear faint music drifting toward us.
“Someone’s having a good time,” I said with a smile. “I hope we’re not disturbing them while they…”
My voice trailed off as I caught sig
ht of a familiar face through one of the windows, and I ducked down, yanking Blake down with me. Then I scooted behind a thick tree trunk nearby, pulling him behind me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
I shook my head. Surely I was wrong. Seeing things.
“Indi?” Blake said. “What is it?”
“I thought I saw… no, it can’t be,” I said. “Never mind.”
But even as I said it, my eagle-eye was proven accurate. The cabin door opened, and a familiar man stepped out. “Back in a minute, Elise. I’m just going to call Ed and tell him to drop off some more food for us,” he said, looking back over his shoulder into the cozy little cabin.
Blake and I peeked out from behind the trunk and stared at him. Then we looked back at each other in a stunned silence, unable to believe our eyes.
The man standing only yards away was Yuri Tilden.
He was alive and well.
Chapter Thirty-One
Indi
“What the hell is going on?” I hissed, still barely able to believe what I’d just seen. Yuri had moved out of sight around the other side of the cabin now, but I knew I wasn’t hallucinating. It was definitely him.
Blake shook his head. “I can’t believe it. But I get it now. It all makes sense,” he said slowly.
My eyebrows drew together in a puzzled expression. “What do you mean?”
“Remember how I thought the ‘you’re next’ threat written on our mirror was just the crew fucking with us to freak us out?”
“Um…yeah.”
“What if everything else that’s happened so far was just them fucking with us too?”
I shook my head. “I don’t follow.”
He grabbed my hand and looked me dead in the eye. “I’m pretty sure we’re on a horror reality show, Indi.”
“A what?”
“Think about it. The horror genre is having a bit of a comeback at the moment. So the network decides they want a horror reality show. But they want real reactions from real people, so they tell the contestants that the premise of the show is something else. Something way more innocuous. Then they fuck with them. Drive them out of their minds.”
“Scare the shit out of them… and get it all on camera,” I said with a nod, picking up his thread. “Oh my god, you’re right. Cinta told me how dodgy Channel Nine are. This is totally in their wheelhouse.”
He shook his head. “It all makes sense, right? Freaky shit has been happening ever since we arrived. Remember at the start, how some of the couples reported hearing knocking at night or hearing weird voices? Also, there was the weird stuff we heard in the forest that night when we went camping. It’s all fake. From the very beginning, they’ve been trying to build this atmosphere of dread all around us.”
I nodded vehemently. “Like that guy I talked to in the bar on the first night! I bet he wasn’t really a local. He was probably an actor, planted there to tell one of the contestants about a supposed massacre that occurred here, just to start freaking us out from the beginning. I bet if we actually Googled it, we wouldn’t find anything online about Tom Howieson… because he never existed. That’s why there was nothing about the alleged ‘massacre’ on the island’s Wikipedia page. It never happened.”
“Yup. Exactly. It was all made up by the showrunners, designed to slowly scare us, and it all built up to the day Yuri got ‘murdered’. That’s when things really kicked off. But Yuri isn’t dead, and Elise isn’t injured. I’m willing to bet the two of them aren’t even a couple. They’re just actors playing a role.”
I nodded again. “Yes! We never actually saw Yuri get attacked. He could’ve stumbled into the room that day, pretending to be in pain with fake blood pouring from him.”
“And what looked like an ax in him, thanks to the special effects department. None of us actually touched his body after he collapsed. Ed got one of the crew members to check his pulse.”
“And of course the crew are all in on it. So they lied to scare us. Told us he was dead.”
“Same with Elise. They told us she got attacked in the night, but again, none of us saw it,” he said.
I shook my head as all the puzzle pieces slowly fell into place. There were so many elements that’d seemed odd over the last few weeks, but they all made sense in this new context.
“That’s why they kept on filming after what we thought happened, even though we were all scared and assumed it would be canceled. It was all part of the show, so of course it wasn’t canceled!”
“Yep.”
“And they kept us here! I bet there’s no storm cell off the coast, preventing boats and planes from coming and going. They just told us that so we couldn’t leave. It also added to the fear, making us feel trapped on the island,” I said.
Blake nodded grimly. “Same with the internet at the inn. It worked until I actually went and asked about it when we wanted to use the iPad again. We weren’t meant to have phones or computers, but they must’ve realized we might be able to access one somehow. So they turned it off just in case and simply told us the internet and phone lines on the island were down due to the supposed bad weather. I bet it works fine for everyone else here, though… they just didn’t want us being able to communicate with the outside world and find out what was really going on.”
I frowned. “Speaking of everyone else here… what about them? As in the locals. What if they wanted to leave the island or use their boats for anything? They couldn’t while we were here, or we’d realize boating wasn’t really unsafe with the weather. And the sheriff, too—obviously he knows no one really got murdered. Is he an actor, or did they pay off the real sheriff to pretend in front of us?”
Blake rubbed the stubble on his jawline as he considered my questions. “I’d say everyone was paid off. There’s only five hundred permanent residents on the island. The network probably offered them all a nice little check if they played along with the show and didn’t use their boats for a while, and there was the added bonus of all the tourism it might bring the island once it was finished airing, which would help the local economy. They would’ve been made to sign NDAs and either been told to ignore us if they saw us wandering around, or told to go along with whatever we say. Like today, I asked the medical center receptionist about Elise, right? Seeing as we were told she was being treated there.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Yeah?”
“She said she’d never heard of her. But then someone whispered something to her, and her whole demeanor changed and she suddenly ‘remembered’ Elise. Like she’d been reminded that she was supposed to play along and lie to any contestants who she came across. She’d obviously half-forgotten, because she wasn’t expecting us to show up at the center at any point.”
“That makes sense.”
“As for the sheriff and all the other cops… I dunno. Either they were paid by the showrunners to play along as well, or they’re all actors.”
“Either way, it’s messed up,” I said, gritting my teeth. “To screw with people’s heads like this is horrible. We’ve all been scared out of our wits!”
“I know.” Blake ran his hand through his hair in exasperation. “Christ, even the show’s name makes more sense now. I Do Or Die. We were told it was about married couples fixing their dying marriages. But it also works as a name for a horror show where married couples are genuinely fearing for their lives.”
I rolled my eyes at the awful pun in the name. He was right. “Also, I bet they wanted couples whose marriages were already failing for a specific reason. What better drama for all the viewers than watching a bunch of people’s already-fragile relationships completely falling apart under all the stress?”
“It’s so fucked up,” Blake said. Then he scoffed. “How ironic that we ended up here, though. We’re in a fake relationship on an even faker show.”
I bit my lip. I had to admit, his comment stung a little. He still thought our relationship was fake?
Surely not. He told me he was falling for me a few day
s ago, so it must’ve been a slip of the tongue. He probably simply meant that we started out as a fake relationship, which was true. I wasn’t going to bring it up with him—there were far more pressing issues at hand.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “Should we go and confront Yuri and Elise? And what are they even doing here?”
Blake frowned as he thought about it. “I think I know. The showrunners couldn’t have them leave the island after their job was done, because they told us all that transport was cut off. If any of us happened to look out a window and see a boat or seaplane leaving the island, then their lie would be uncovered. So they decided to hide Yuri and Elise here instead.”
“Oh, right. That makes sense,” I said with a nod. “So should we talk to them?”
He shook his head, lips set in a thin line. “No. We should go back to the inn and confront Ed. Tell him we know what they’re all up to.”
I nodded. “Good idea. I’m going to give him a real piece of my mind,” I said. Then I took a deep breath. “And then I’m gonna tell him that I’m getting the hell off this island!”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Blake
The three mile walk back to the inn felt like thirty miles. I was fuming, absolutely raging, and I simply couldn’t wait to get back and tell Ed Kramer what we now knew. I’d never liked the man; always thought he was a slimy ass-wipe.
And now I knew for a fact that he was.
He’d put ten couples—well, nine if you didn’t count the fake Tildens—through hell over the last few weeks, all for ratings. The only couple who’d really escaped unscathed were the Holbrooks, who were the first to get voted off the show for being ‘boring’. At least they’d been able to get off the island before all the serious scare tactics began.
Meanwhile, the rest of us were ‘trapped’ here, forced to go through all this bullshit.
It was sick.
As we trudged up the last hilly bend that led to the main gates of the Candle Cove Inn estate, I held Indi’s hand. She seemed as if she was almost on the verge of tears, so I stopped and frowned, squeezing her hand tighter. “Hey, baby girl…what is it?”
Husband For Hire (A Billionaire Fake Marriage Romance) Page 17
