Page 42 of Wicked Games

Maverick made it to the top first, closely followed by Zach. “Oh, fuck,” he said. His deep voice almost disappeared in the roaring wind, but I could just make it out from my position as fifth in line. “No fucking way!”

“This can’t be happening!” Zach shouted at the same time.

With my heart pounding, I finally made it to the top of the staircase and stepped into a small watchtower, revealing a panorama that stretched as far as the eye could see. All around us, the dark waters of the ocean churned restlessly, smashing against jagged rocks and dirt along the crooked shoreline that surrounded the mansion we stood atop.

“We’re not at 4 Sutherland Drive,” April said breathlessly, grabbing my arm. Her face had gone completely white. “We’re on an island.”

Maverick

“Oh my god...” Jasmine inhaled sharply as she stared out at the seemingly endless ocean. “How is this possible?”

Brooke slowly shook her head, following Jasmine’s gaze. “I don’t know. I don’t get it,” she muttered. Her skin had turned pallid, aside from the purple half-moons beneath her eyes. She looked exactly how I felt—exhausted, confused, defeated.

This was what the Game Master wanted. He wanted us to feel hopeless and scared. Wanted to toy with us mentally, emotionally, and physically before bringing the hammer down. The twisted children’s games were just one part of the overall scheme to destroy us.

I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t let him win. I had to stay strong. If not for my sake, for everyone else’s.

“It’s okay,” I said, lifting my chin. “We can figure this out.”

“How?” Kiara screeched, throwing her hands up. “Seriously, how thefuckare we going to figure out any of this shit? We’re trapped on a fucking island!”

I kept my voice and expression neutral as I replied. “Let’s try to approach this like we already know there’s a solution. That’ll help us stay calm, and that’s really important right now.”

“How the hell can we do that when we all know there’s probably no solution?”

I lifted a palm. “We’ll make a list of questions we have about everything, and then we’ll try to answer each one logically. That’s a good starting point to figuring out a way through this shit. All right?”

I wasn’t sure if my suggestion would actually help matters, but I figured it would bring some much-needed order to the situation and momentarily distract the others from the terror they felt. The last thing we needed right now was to give in to the crushing fear and hopelessness.

“Well… I have an answer to the question of how this is possible,” Carey said, lifting her hand like we were in a classroom discussion.

“How?” Brooke asked.

Carey raised her voice several octaves as the howling wind picked up again. “It was the drugs. They transported us to the island while we were all unconscious.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said, dipping my chin in a brief nod. “We assumed they put us to bed at 4 Sutherland Drive because we didn’t have enough information to even consider that we might be somewhere else. But now we know better.”

“We don’t even know if we were only unconscious for one night,” Carey added. “For all we know, it was longer. We might’ve lost a whole day and a half to those drugs.”

Jasmine rubbed her arms as she shivered. “Can we talk about this inside? It’s freezing.”

“Good idea.” I turned on my heel and headed for the spiral staircase. The others marched after me in silence.

“So, they moved us when we were knocked out from the spiked drinks, and they set up the foyer downstairs to look like the one at Sutherland Drive,” Zach said once we were all settledback in my room. “That means they wanted us to think we were in the same mansion that we went to at the start.”

“Butwhy?” Jasmine turned her wide eyes to him. “Why the hell would they do that?”

“To mess with us,” Brooke murmured. “It’s all to mess with us.”

“Agreed.” I nodded. “Earlier this morning, we all had hope that we could be tracked here by the cops. The Game Master only wanted us to have that hope so he could rip it away from us. It’s all part of his game.”

“Exactly,” Carey said. “No one is looking for us here. They’ll track our phones to 4 Sutherland Drive, and they’ll find nothing but an empty house.”

We all remained silent for a moment as we contemplated her words. Then I stood up and clapped my hands together to snap everyone’s attention back to me. “Let’s do what I said before. We’ll make a list of our questions. See if anyone has any solutions.”

“Okay. First question. If we aren’t at Sutherland Drive, where the fuck are we?” Rhys asked, cocking his head. “Anyone have any idea?”

Everyone bleakly shook their heads, including me. The Northern Californian coast was dotted with hundreds of tiny islands. Hell, the whole West Coast was like that. We could be fuckinganywhere.

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