“Like what?” Bennett asks. He’s been mostly silent since Hayes told him to shut up.
“I think she knew,” Camille says. “I think she knew what that place was when she got there and that’s why she was pacing around the room.”
“And she was always crazy,” I say. “I saw her on move-in day, walking around campus talking to herself.”
“Maybe she knew she’d be asked to join?” Sofia asks.
“Because someone told her?” Kiera adds.
Everyone looks at me for the answer to that, but I have no clue. So I just shrug.
“Anyway,” Kiera says. “Hayes and I moved over by Connor and she was muttering something about being sorry, but she had to do it. She had to get out. And then she pulled the trigger, but she missed us and hit the wall. Then she aimed again and I jumped in front of Connor and took the bullet in the shoulder.
“And then,” Kiera continues, “after the police left the next day and hauled her off to jail, you came up to me and said, ‘Make sure you go on Saturday. Because if you don’t you’ll be next.’”
“I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt,” I say.
“And that’s when the suggestion box showed up,” Camille adds. “So… fuck it. I was scared. And we had to…” She glances over at Bennett. “We had to do our task on the cold, hard floor. So fuck it. If I was stuck in this stupid game, that was the last time I was going to do anything on the floor. So I asked for a couch.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN – KIERA
Task.. It’s a small, four-letter word that is almost never used in a sexual way.
Except when one of us says it.
I hate that word. I’ve never written it in any of my books. Ever. Never uttered it out loud after my last night up in the tower. I hate it.
But here it is again.
Task.
Sofia gets up from her chair and sits down next to Camille, pulling her into a hug. Camille wilts like a too-hot flower, and allows herself to be embraced. They huddle together, entwined arms and crossed legs. One of them sniffles. Sofia pets Camille’s hair. Camille rests her head against Sofia’s shoulder, sighs deeply, then closes her eyes.
And not for the first time I feel jealous for who they are to each other. I picture them in New York City, in their separate but nearby penthouse apartments. How they probably bump into each other at the corner market or coffee shop. How they brunch on Mondays the way most people do on Sundays because they are writers. Authors. And authors do things like that. They have weird quirks, and live in bustling places where a story is born on every block, and collect other strange writer friends who relate to them.
They complain about word count together. They bitch about plot holes, and commiserate over characters they loved but now hate, and sigh over missed opportunities after publication.
It’s true I speak to them, but rarely on the phone and never in person. We bump into each other on Facebook a few times a week, but that’s just typing. Writing is what we do.
I don’t ever go to the city and meet up with them. It’s just too much bustle for me. I like my little cottage. I wish they all lived close by. Even Bennett. I’d even put up with Bennett at Monday brunch.
But they couldn’t get out of Essex fast enough. I left before graduation, but my home was a forty-five-minute ferry ride across the lake. Hell, I can see the damn school from my back yard and I bet, if I climbed up on my roof, I could see the tower.
I wonder if they think I’m weird for staying?
I lived in the main house for several years. And then I started fixing up the cottage, and my mother got sick, and… yeah.
Now I’m alone.
“They sent me a note,” Bennett says, breaking the spell of quiet.
“Who?” Hayes asks.
Bennett shrugs with his hands. His eyes catch mine, then pass over and rest on Connor. “Whoever.”
“What kind of note?” Camille asks.
“It was instructions about what to do if I wanted to get out. Like Emily and you guys.” He juts his chin first to me, then at Hayes.
“They told you to shoot me?”
“No,” Bennett says. But it comes like a moan. “No. They told me to rape you.”
I think the room gasps. Not us. We make no sound at all. But the room exhales something in the shockwave of Bennett’s revelation. Something leaves in that moment. Any leftover childhood innocence, perhaps. Any hope that this might all make sense one day is just… gone.
I look at Camille, picturing her in a new way. Picturing her first as the girl who asked for a couch because all she wanted was to get up off the cold floor, and then as the girl who almost became Bennett’s go-free card, but didn’t.