I wanted to be sick.
This couldn’t be happening.
I should’ve been using every waking moment to find a way off this heinous place. Instead, I’d allowed Sully to fog my mind with wonderings about him. Permitted the beauty of this place to suck me deeper into its web.
How stupid could I be?
How could I forget my role here?
I stumbled in the sand.
The man’s hand lashed out, locking around my elbow and giving me balance. I appreciated his help, but I couldn’t stand him touching me.
Ripping out of his control, I swayed and looked at both of them with disbelief. I looked at Jess too. Unable to believe the puzzle that this girl and these men weren’t enemies but…somehow symbiotic friends.
I wanted nothing to do with it.
I want to go home.
“Ex-excuse me.” Swallowing back a wash of stomach acid, I bolted up the beach.
The bottoms of my soles burned from the hot sand. My breath caught in my tight chest. The air was too syrupy and heavy to stop my light-headedness.
By the time I got to my villa, tears plummeted down my cheeks, and I collapsed behind my door, blocking it with my body, creating a lock that didn’t have a key so I couldn’t be fetched, couldn’t be taken, couldn’t be used in Euphoria.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“SIR?”
I looked up from a text-heavy email full of theories, formulas, and questions from my scientists on where to go next with my latest concoction. This drug wasn’t for pleasure or control. It wasn’t for personal use or financial gain. This was purely philanthropic: a cure for cancer.
So many of the big pharmas spent more money on lobbying the giant industries that promoted food and lifestyle-causing cancer rather than investing in teams to cure it. In their minds, disease was great for their bottom line. Profit, profit, profit. In my mind…I owed a bit of good karma for everything I’d become.
Cricking my neck from sitting at my desk since dawn, I pinched the bridge of my nose and cursed the faint headache brewing. I couldn’t blame dehydration or screen time because I’d worked much longer hours before. The pain behind my eyes was caused by the knowledge that in a few short hours, Jinx…Eleanor…would step into Euphoria and be fucked by another man.
Not just once.
Not twice.
Probably well over—
Don’t fucking think about it.
He’s paid.
He’s owed.
She’s serving him.
“What is it, Cal?” I dropped my hand and peered at him. He’d taken off his suit jacket, leaving him in a white shirt and ice blue tie. His cufflinks winked with silver stars as he passed me the dossier.
The dossier.
“Markus finished outlining his fantasy. Want me to input the parameters, or will you?”
My hands fisted around the folder. What sort of heathenous, wicked role-play would he have her endure? What world would I have to be the architect of to ensure he got his money’s worth?
“I’ll do it.” My voice came out thick and black.
“You sure?”
I looked up, narrowed eyed and threatening. “I said…I’ll do it.”
“Fine.” He held up his hands in surrender, then his lips twitched into a smirk. “It’s an interesting request. A first, that’s for sure.”
I didn’t like firsts.
I didn’t like hearing about fetishes that I hadn’t come across before. Especially fetishes that included Jinx being the main meal.
Waving him away, I waited until he’d exited and closed my office door before flipping open the file.
Markus Grammer.
Forty-four years.
Sexual health, clean.
General health, average.
Health and safety wavier, signed.
Agreement that he enters Euphoria at his own risk, signed.
Payment, in full.
Programming, ready to begin.
Gritting my teeth, I turned the next page.
A flurry of green and yellow shot through my open driftwood doors, followed by an indignant chirp.
“Ah, great. Just fucking great.” I looked up just as Pika dive-bombed the file and started attacking the corners as if demon-possessed. “Hey! Oi. Stop it.” Flicking the annoyingly energetic caique parrot off my reading material, I shook my hand, trying to dislodge his tight little claws as he wrapped around my middle finger, deciding to attack me instead.
Raising my hand, I huffed as he dangled upside down, his bright black eyes inquisitive, intelligent, and far too naughty to get away with the murder he managed on a daily basis. “Coconuts. Goddess. Sex! Sex. Sexxxxx.”
God, why did I ever teach him how to talk?
“Pika…we’ve had this conversation.”
He honestly laughed in my goddamn face and proceeded to gnaw on my fingernail. His little wings spread out as I shook my hand again, trying to break his tenacious grip. “Let me go.”
He chirped. Then trilled. Then squawked and carried on a conversation as if I could understand every caw. After his noisy argument about why he never behaved nor did what I asked, he let my finger go, plopped onto my desk, and rolled onto his back, giving me his white fluffy belly and yellow chest.
“Hello. Please. Now!” His scaly legs waggled, just tempting me to scratch him.