AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Thirdly, even if there is a story there—again, there isn’t—whomever you take this to will claim it as their own, and you’ll get trampled underfoot, like the cannon fodder you are. You won’t even get an honorable mention.” Sad, but I suspected highly likely to be true.
“Last, but by no means least, if you’d genuinely witnessed what you thought you did that night, and have failed to report it all this time, then you have as much blood on your hands as we do. Don’t you know that we’d ensure we made a big show of telling the world you knew, but sat on the information for your own selfish and nefarious reasons.”
Seeing her so clearly scared out of her mind made me feel like the biggest piece of shit ever to have wandered the earth. It was a fair assessment of my status.
“You might be in the clear legally on this, but morally, you’re as knee-deep in hard-on as we are. The time to swoop in as Saint Honey was when you saw what you thought you saw, or shortly afterwards. Your failure to do so doesn’t look good for you as a witness, nor generally as a functioning member of society. In fact, it totally undermines your credibility on both counts.” Another extremely compelling point. “Being known as a shady wannabe journalist, who would rather pursue her own ambitions than do the right thing to see that justice is served, would be a severely career-limiting outcome, wouldn’t it?”
I had to hand it to us—apart from the unprecedented, and never-to-be-repeated debacle with her laptop, when we did something, we did it properly. We did a copious amount of research, covered all angles, and made sure whatever we did was watertight. It had worked liked a charm, until a bookish and infinitely attractive fly in the ointment had screwed with our plans and our unblemished track record.
“Bonus round. If we go down we are taking you with us. With the money and might we have behind us, if you so much as have a library book outstanding from first grade, or took a toke on someone else’s joint at a party in high school, we’ll find out about it, and find a way to use it against you. In short, we’ll bury you so far, you’ll never make it out of the grave we dig for you, alive.” #fact.
As well as being one of the wealthiest people I knew, Xavier was also the most vengeful. He could hold a grudge like nothing I’d ever seen, and would bide his time, sometimes for years, to exact his revenge. Rocky knew from bitter first-hand experience exactly how badly that could play out for those on the wrong end of it.
Strangely, it was how she and Xavier had ended up an ‘item,’ for want of a better description of the weird thing they had going on. Even more bizarre, because the two of them were like brothers from another mother, Drew had an equally ugly but very different story to tell about how he and Kik got together.
Maybe we were all out of our fucking minds. As conflicted as I felt about events as they unfolded, I was beginning to think I could definitely benefit from a dose or two of head shrinking.
For sure I should probably have given more of a fuck that I was probably on Xavier’s shit list after some of our clashes over Honey. Weirdly, I couldn’t bring myself to care. My sole concern at that point was for her safety and wellbeing.
“Anyway, all that’s a little bit of a sidebar. The main point is we tried to shut you down quickly and painlessly, and you resisted, so now we have to do it the long and hard way. Which frankly pisses me off, as I have better fucking things to do. So, back to your new piece of jewelry. It’s amazing what can be procured on the dark web for less than the cost of a three-course meal at a Michelin star restaurant.” That was scarily accurate.
“Here’s how it’s going to work. It’s secured to you, and it has a timer. The timer will detonate the bomb in...” He looked at his watch. “One hour, fifty-three minutes. The only way to prevent this from happening is to insert three keys in sequence into the little keyholes on the front there. You can touch them gently.”
She raised a quivering hand slowly, and gently laid it on the collar, feeling around cautiously until the tips of her fingers had brushed across each of the holes.
Fuck. I had not been prepared for how much I’d hate seeing her go through this. Not even close. My stomach was in knots, and my chest was so constricted it was as though someone was crushing my ribs, heart and lungs in a powerful vise.
“So...?”
“How do you get the keys?”
“Yes.” Her voice was thin and reedy, nothing like her normal confident self. The woman who’d all-but thrown a ream of paper at me in the cafeteria was nowhere to be seen. Shit.
“That part is relatively simple. You just need to shut your mouth and do as you’re fucking told, for once. Well, it would be relatively simple if you weren’t... you. Three keys, three simple conditions, and we can all go on with our lives as though none of this ever happened.”
He definitely needed his head examined. As if any of us could just move past this without a backward glance when it was all over, least of all poor Honey.
Chapter 28
Honey
This whole thing was crazy, like the plot of a cheesy made-for-TV movie, but instead of a budget studio creation, the bizarre set of circumstances was actually my fucking life. The thing was, I’d already had enough outlandish experiences to last me a lifetime, and I thought I’d left all the craziness behind years ago. Now here I was, going through more life-threateningly terrifying shit. After what I’d endured in the past, I really didn’t know how much more I could stomach without losing my shit.
I tried to keep still and concentrate on what the masked madman was telling me, but it was hard to focus when I had so many thoughts and fears racing through my head.
“So here’s how it’s going to work. The clock is already ticking, but you have the best part of two hours to complete the tasks I’m going to outline to you in a moment. Upon verified successful completion of each one, you’ll be given a key. Each key partially unlocks the collar. It can only be fully unlocked when each key is inserted in order, so there’s no cheating or skipping steps.
“If you attempt to unlock it any other way than using the keys it will detonate. If you fail to complete the tasks within the allotted time it will detonate. If we find that you’ve tried to call or in some way involve any third parties including, but not restricted to, law enforcement agencies or authorities of any description, it will detonate.” Wait t?
“Oh, did I forget to mention the remote? I’m not in the habit of leaving anything to chance. Ever. So regardless of the timer and keys, the whole thing is run by an app on my phone—God bless the geeks, where would we be without them”—one of the other metallic voices snickered—“so I can override the timer at any point, adding time, cutting time, or just killing the whole thing altogether. Pardon the pun, though it was very much intended. I can literally push a little red button, and you can kiss goodbye to your skull.” I gasped, though through my tears, it was more like a gurgling sound.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m unlikely to do that unless you do something to really piss me off, like call the police. At a minimum, I’ll be trying to avoid doing it when I’m in the same room as you. Not the least of reasons being that this is a brand new, twenty-five-thousand-dollar bespoke suit. Not my finest, but this is the first wear, and I think it’s going to become a favorite. It would be such a shame to see it go to waste because it’s covered in your brain Jell-O and skull shrapnel, y’know?”
It was a rhetorical question, surely. I kept quiet.
“So, you’re going to want to listen very carefully to the instructions for each task. When I’m done explaining them all, we’ll ‘accompany’ you back to your dorm, and you’ll have the remainder of the time to complete each one and get your keys, or KABOOOM!”
He yelled the word at the top of his metallic voice, and I startled, moving way more than I wanted, then braced myself for the impact—eyes scrunched closed and every muscle in my body tensed. When nothing happened, I opened my eyes slowly.
