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“Mr. Emil will have me peel the skin from your bodies and I won’t feel anything.”

“Lili, let’s put that on the back burner. If we get our girl back, then they can live. If not, we’ll drop them over the edge of the cliff,” Jared says.

My eyes move over the people who immediately accepted Noor, and I blink rapidly.

“Alexa from the theater club took her,” I gasp. “She wanted to suck up to Ciaran, but we never told her to do this. We had to make it look good once she was dumped at our feet.”

“Stupid fucking high school politics,” Ignacio mutters.

“Tonight was Senior Chase Night, right?” Mrs. Denton asks. At my surprised look, she shrugs. “I’m a really good fucking therapist, kid. People tell me things. Alexa is also a teen terrorist. Noor told me about her.”

“Where is she?” The man wearing glasses pushes them up his nose. He’s been very quiet this entire time, and he walks over to glare at the computer set up in the cellar. “We tracked Alexa’s plates toward the park and followed as soon as we realized what happened. I always check the cameras before I go to bed. I never would have known she was gone otherwise.”

“We were decorating the house for Noor’s birthday,” Mrs. Denton mutters.

“We had an accident,” Ciaran whispers. Draven is still gagged and he closes his eyes at his words. Fuck.

“Do I need to pull it out of you?” Ignacio punches Ci in the face angrily, uncaring about what it’ll look like later. If we survive tonight, we’ll lie about the bruises and any broken bones.

“The chase is a sex game,” I rasp.

Mrs. Denton blinks as she leans forward. “No one told me this. They kidnapped her so you could fuck my daughter?”

“It sounds so much… No, it’s exactly as bad as it sounds,” Ciaran says, his voice thick with blood. Ignacio broke his nose and it’s a mess over his face. Ci doesn’t make a big deal about it because he’s survived worse at the hands of his parents. God, they’re part of the reason we’ve been trying to get out of the goddamned town. “It’s consensual though. There are rules in place to keep it that way.”

“Kidnapping negates that,” Liliana sighs. She lifts something from a cart, holding it to her side as she paces. It’s long and thin, with tiny prongs on the ends. I don’t know what it is, but I do know it’ll hurt.

“No, but you don’t understand⁠—”

Liliana presses the prongs to Draven’s side where his shirt is riding up as I attempt to explain our fucked up games, and his body convulses. I can smell noxious things coming from his ass, and immediately know he’s shitting himself. Anxiety always fucks with his stomach, which is why he focuses on what he can control.

“Tell me then,” Liliana says, wrinkling her nose at Draven. “This is worse than the girls filling their diapers.”

“I knew one of them would shit themselves,” Emil mutters.

“I… She was there, we convinced her to play with us,” I say quickly. “Everything was fine, but something spooked her after we caught her.”

“Did you have sex with Noor?” Mr. Denton snarls.

“Will we die if I say yes?” I ask, wondering if I’ll be the next to be electrocuted. Draven is still twitching as he tries to relearn how to breathe through the gag.

“You’ll die when we’re good and ready to let you,” Mr. Emil grunts. Fuck. He even makes death seem like a gift.

It probably is where he and his family are concerned. They’re sure to be the worst fucking in-laws anyone could have.

“Yes,” Ci says. “We followed her when she ran from us because there is a steep drop off where the cliffs begin. She didn’t know that we had everything marked off to keep people from going too far.”

“We… She caught herself and started screaming at us. We didn’t understand why she was so mad,” I explain.

“She told you about the baby.” Mrs. Denton is matter of fact as she says it, and I nod.

“There’s so many things we wanted to tell her, but we didn’t get the chance.” I’m getting choked up as a tear slips from my eye. I don’t cry. I fight, scream, plot, but crying is outside of my wheelhouse.

Draven hangs his head as he prepares to take the next punishment, and I scream as Liliana shoves the cattle prod into my side.

“You’re speaking about her in the past tense,” she growls. “Where is she?!”

“Dead!” Ciaran screams. “Fuck. At least, that’s what we think. I don’t know, she fell off the cliff and we couldn’t catch her. The ground disintegrated underneath her feet. We searched for her. It’s why we’re wet. We couldn’t find her.”