Page 11 of Cruel Games

With my mask on and my knife in hand, I’d look just like every other fucker in this place, And ten to one, the guards wouldn’t stop me as I left. This wasn’t exactly a prison anymore. The members came and went as they pleased.

The only other option was to try to sneak back out through another room, and with no idea what the inside of the place looked like or what the residents’ schedules were, there was too much risk in that option unless someone had suddenly decidedto start putting windows that never locked in a fucking hall closet.

Blood pounded in my ears, my vision swimming as my eyes adjusted to the low lighting I was plunged into. Moving down the hall couldn’t have taken as long as it felt like it took. An eternity later, I found myself at the edge of the wall, opening up on what looked like a slightly more illuminated balconette of sorts—oh, no, there was a set of stairs. I followed the sound of low chatter over the rails and edged to the banister, clinging to the wooden beam that kept me from walking right off the edge.

And my heart stopped.

There beneath me, coming in from what must have been a night of debauchery, singing drunkenly and clinging to each other, were none other than the fucking dogs I was after. They looked almost human, the only identifiable thing on them the baseball bats slung over their shoulders and the masks hanging from their belts. I’d venture to bet even a stupid murderer wouldn’t wander too far from home without his mask and weapon in hand, just in case.

You never knew what kind of crazy you’d run into these days.

Those fuckers are just coming back. Which means . . .

Which meant the apartments I’d just been inside couldn’t have been theirs, unless they had a random fourth member I didn’t know about. And the thought of them sneaking in another member with how closely I’d kept tabs on them was unfathomable. It was impossible. Nobody was that slick.

Bonnie and Clyde would have said something by now.

Right?

The bastards wobbled and stumbled their way to the floor below me, marching down the hall just below the one I’d just come down, and I realized with a start that the fucking idiots I was paying for insider intel had counted one floor too high.

Never trust a fucking idiot to do a job right.

I should have known better than to rely on someone otherthan myself to figure something this important out. Cursing my oversight and lack of preparation, I slipped my mask on, puffed up my jacket to mask my feminine features, and snuck down the stairs after them.

Maybe tonight wasn’t a total loss after all.

Jackal was unmistakeable as I rounded the corner to spy on them, a second man slung between him and a third guy, the second clearly wasted out of his mind and unable to walk on his own. The fiend who’d haunted my nightmares every night, his wild cackle and malicious, frightening sharp teeth, turned to peer down the hallway as if he’d heard me breathing. His eyes peered into what I knew was darkness, emptiness, searching for something that wasn’t there as he shook the confusion from his head and slipped a key out of his pocket to open their door.

The third man dropped the bats he held, fumbling to keep his charge upright as the second man groaned ominously.

I knew that sound. I’d worked in enough bars and smoked enough mid-shift cigarettes in the alley not to recognize the sound of a man about to waste all the liquor he’d poured down his own throat.

“Get him inside, Dingo,” Jackal whisper-shouted as he flung the door open and shuffled in. “If he pukes on me, I’m going to kill someone.” He disappeared into the apartment, door still wide open behind them. “I might start with you.”

I blinked stupidly at the bats lying abandoned in the hall, ripe for the picking, and shook my head at the insanity of the idea that had just flitted through my mind.

I wasnotgoing to steal one of their bats. I had a perfectly good bat in my damn apartment. I didn’t need one of theirs.

How it ended up in my hands, then, as I slunk down the stairs and tried my damndest to pretend I belonged there, was a mystery.

My hands clenched the wooden handle so hard I was afraid I’d snap it in two and embed half the filthy wood in the palmof my hand as I passed the guards at the door, whistling to myself as if I didn’t have a care in the world. I shoved the swinging French-style doors open with a well-placed boot to the wood and tipped my head high as the outside air rushed up to greet me.

I walked a whole six blocks away from the edge of the damn property before I let myself breathe a sigh of relief.

Fuck, that was close.

On the one hand, I hadn’t accomplished what I’d set out to do tonight, thanks to faulty information from tweedle dumb and tweedle dumber. But now I knew for a fact their room was a floor below, and there were still only three of them. And with one of their bats as a trophy, I’d found a way to leave a tiny little worming curiosity in the back of their sober minds, wondering where they’d lost a bat.

My eyes scanned the length of the wood under a nearby streetlight, fingers tracing the lines of the name burned into the cracked wood.

J-A-C-K-A-L.

He stole my sanity. And now, I had his bat.

I barely registered the sound of trash cans falling to the ground, my mind fixated on the steady handwriting of the name of my mortal enemy, contemplating the type of person who must’ve customized this bat.

It couldn’t have been Jackal. He didn’t strike me as the kind to do something so elegant, so sentimental. That meant someone else cared enough about him to write his name on the wood, etching it with flame and electricity and love?—

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