Page 51 of The Masked King

Brian’s hand slips from mine, and I know with a plummeting feeling in my gut that we’re not going anywhere. “Nyx? What happened? Are you hurt?” His voice moves away from me and back into the room.

Nyx is whimpering now, strange choking sounds that make bile rise in my throat. He’s right, we can’t leave her. She’s only here because of me, and I can’t walk away knowing that she’ll suffer for her role in enabling our escape.

I follow the disturbing sounds of her writhing and jerking on the floor. When I reach her, Brian is already there, murmuring, “Hang on in there, Nyx. I’ve got you,” and my heart cracks open for him because I was right all along.

Brian is one of the good guys.

He is cradling Nyx in his lap when my hands find them in the blackness. I saw Brian get shocked through the bracelet, but this feels different.

“Why isn’t it stopping?” I ask.

“Fuck!” Brian murmurs. “They’ll fucking kill her if we don’t get it off her.”

“I don’t know how. They have a key.”

“You sick fucking bastards!” he yells. “You want to take someone, take me!”

“No!” I cry out, but I’m too late.

I hear the hum of static through his bracelet and Brian’s body jerks away from me, as the door opens and what feels like the entire security team spills into the room. I scan their faces in the faint glow from the corridor, but Michael Douglas isn’t with them, and then I spot snake-guy at the rear, his mouth twisted into his customary snarl, and I know that it’s over.

Strong hands haul me onto my feet and carry me from the room struggling and lashing out at muscles made of steel. “Let them go!” I shriek. “They didn’t do anything wrong. I broke the rules, not them.”

I watch the name on the door growing smaller as I’m carried away, tears of frustration streaking my face inside the mask, and realize how close I came to meeting the real Brian.

13

ENZO

My eyelids flutter, barely cracking open enough for me to get a glimpse of my surroundings. Bright light. Too fucking bright. My mouth feels like I crossed a desert on the back of a camel and have forgotten how good water tastes.

I try to swallow and get a dry clicking sound in the back of my throat that quickly gives way to bile that has no trouble finding its way out. By the time I’ve finished retching, my brain is pulsating inside my skull accompanied by Batman-style speech bubbles going Boom! Wham! Ka-pow!

I roll my head back against the pillow and lose myself in the colors exploding behind my eyelids with every thudding heartbeat.

My first hangover was when I was eighteen. I’d been to a house party the night before with a bunch of kids I’d grown up with in Sicily, mostly sons and nephews of other mafia families. We were all privileged, all aware of our places within the hierarchy, some higher than others, none of us strangers to violence and death, and eighteen was like a bomb detonating beneath our feet and telling us to get out there and live a little.

I woke up on a beach in a puddle of my own vomit. I was fully clothed, stinking, with no memory of how I’d gotten there, who I’d been with, or what alcohol I’d consumed to end up in that state. Everything prior to that moment had slipped away inside a giant black hole never to be recovered.

It was the lack of memory that scared me the most, the thought that anything could’ve happened to me, and I would never know. I vowed then that I would never relinquish control of my life to liquor and started training myself to be tolerant of its effects, building it up gradually over time.

That’s how I feel now, hungover with my memory snoozing at the bottom of a gigantic black hole, but I instinctively know that I wasn’t a willing participant this time.

Before I do anything, I need to know where I am.

Cracking open one eye, I study what’s directly in front of me without moving. The light is natural and must be coming through a window as I’m in a room. Careful not to upset my aching brain, I roll my head sideways, noting the minor detail I missed when I first woke up: I’m sleeping on a bed.

The window reveals a pale blue sky with painted-on gray-white clouds. I slide my eyes down to the floor, to my shoes standing smartly side-by-side on the carpet, my clothes folded neatly on the armchair across the room.

My room.

Why don’t I remember getting here?

I push myself into a sitting position and grip the side of the bed to stop myself from face-planting the floor.

“I’m going to be sick,” I announce to the room in general.

Lurching from the bed, I dash to the ensuite bathroom and land on my knees in front of the toilet. My body takes over, expelling whatever toxins are wreaking havoc inside my skull, and leaves me shivering in a heap on the cold tiled floor.