Page 58 of Sinful Palace

He’d insisted on riding in the back with me, so Mal was in the driver’s seat and Adam was in the front passenger seat. I looked at them with furrowed brows, wondering if I should say anything in front of them.

I settled on staying quiet while they were around. I didn’t trust them one bit.

“Oh, you mean the bracelet I wanted to show you?” I said in an airy tone, pulling out my phone. I started tapping out a message in a basic notes app. “I’ll just Google it for you.”

Logan looked confused until I held the phone out and showed him the message I’d written. Not here. Talk in private.

He nodded briefly and handed the phone back to me. “Yeah, that is nice,” he said, playing along. “If you’re lucky, I might buy it for you for Christmas.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence. When we finally reached the extravagant golden gates of Wonderland, I felt a strange rush of relief, as if I were arriving home.

That was ridiculous. This place wasn’t a home for anyone, least of all me.

Clearly, these new thoughts and feelings were the first insidious whisperings of Stockholm syndrome. I had to violently shove them aside before they crept all the way in and took hold of my mind.

After Mal and Adam escorted us to our suite on the top floor, I put a finger over my lips to warn Logan to remain silent. His forehead wrinkled with confusion until I showed him another note on the phone. Do you have one of those apps on your phone that can detect hidden cameras or microphones?

He nodded. “Why?” he mouthed.

We need to look for one in here, I wrote.

Still frowning, he grabbed his phone and opened an application called ‘Hidden Device Detector’. He showed me a note on the app which explained how it worked—we had to walk around and hold the phone out to manually inspect every part of the room for unusual activity. Apparently, hidden devices used electromagnetic waves to transmit the information they captured and stored, and these wave signals could be detected by modern cell phone sensors.

We spent the next twenty minutes walking around our suite, searching slowly and methodically. The phone screen remained green until we reached a framed painting on the wall above our bed. It turned orange right away, and a notification popped up informing us that a hidden device could be close.

Logan reached up to the painting and fumbled behind it. Grimacing, he yanked out a tiny black object and held it out to show me. My eyes widened.

I was right. The room was bugged.

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