Page 88 of Wicked Games

“I think we all have to be in our own rooms after curfew,” I said, softly stroking his back. “Otherwise I’d say yes.”

He stared down at me, eyes filled with concern. “Should I just risk it? I don’t want you to be alone right now.”

I bit my bottom lip and considered it before shaking my head. “I don’t know what the next consequence will be. The first was just a text with information that made you look bad. But the next one…”

I trailed off, leaving the dark implication hanging in the air. Maverick groaned. “Yeah. You’re right. I should go,” he said. “I wouldn’t be much help to you if I was dead, would I?”

I winced. “Don’t even say that. Please.”

“Sorry.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

Once he was gone, I switched off my light and lay in the darkness, heart pounding. Maverick’s company had distracted me for a while, but now my brain was working overtime, going haywire with a thousand different thoughts.

My mind kept returning to the last game. What was it that was nagging at me so much? I must have seensomethingthat aroused my suspicions in there,or else I wouldn’t keep coming back to it again and again.

I let out a frustrated sigh and tried to replay the entire experience in my mind’s eye. There was the dark tunnel, the creepy sigils painted everywhere, the snakes and insects, the flashing lights and terrifying sounds, the blood, the gore, the bodies…wait.

I sat bolt upright, heart jackhammering in my chest.

I knew exactly what was wrong.

Carey

It wasn’t something I saw earlier. It was something Ididn’tsee. Something that should’ve been there but was missing instead. That was why I couldn’t put my finger on it for so long.

As we were making our way through the twisted labyrinth during the Seven Minutes in Hell game, we saw Rhys’s corpse chained in an alcove, Evan splayed over a glass ceiling above us, Kiara hanging from a rope, and Tate’s dismembered arm sewn on a doll.

We never saw April’s body.

We saw the gun that killed her, multiple photos of her corpse and the wound that caused her demise, and the bloodied sweater she was wearing when she was shot. But never a body. Not even a part of the body, like we saw in Tate’s case.

I leaned back, sucking down a deep breath.No.I was just being paranoid, surely. This place had finally succeeded in driving me mad. After all, why would April fake her own death? Why would she be the Game Master? Why would she doanyof this?

God. I was a horrible bitch for even considering this shit for a second. April was my friend. I should be loyal. Should be grieving her death.

But even as the guilt poured in, the suspicions kept coming just as strongly.

The Game Master told us from the start that he or she was one of us. Kiara was our strongest suspect for a while, but I knew she was truly dead. We all saw her die right in front of us, and then we saw her corpse dangling from that rope in the dark passage this morning. Judging by the appearance and the stench emanating from it, it was really her. Not some sort of Hollywood-designed fake corpse.

As for Evan, Tate, and Rhys, they couldn’t possibly have faked their deaths either, given how they occurred. But April… she died from a gunshot wound that theoretically could’ve been faked.

I had a rough idea of how they did it in movies—some sort of red ink pack would be affixed to the person beneath their shirt, and when the prop gun went off, they’d press a hidden button to release the ink, splattering their clothes with realistic-looking ‘blood’. That could’ve happened in this case. It would also explain why someone as smart as April made such a silly mistake during the game. At the time, I put it down to her exhaustion and stress, but now I wasn’t so sure.

On top of that, none of us were allowed near April to check her pulse and confirm her death. The remaining players on the chessboard couldn’t move to any wrong squares for fear of dying, and those of us who’d already made it across weren’t allowed to return to the board. The closest person was Courteney, but she was still a few squares away, meaning she might not be able to tell for sure if April was breathing or not. April could’ve lain there motionless, taking only short, shallowbreaths as infrequently as possible so the players on the board wouldn’t notice that she was still alive.

As for the rest of us—we saw and thus believed exactly what was presented to us. We saw someone get shot, we saw them stagger and fall, and we saw them lying still on the floor with blood pooling around them. Of course we all assumed that person was dead. Especially when none of us had any reason whatsoever to suspect that person of being the Game Master.

The questions kept flooding in, making my stomach churn with confusion and fear. If April was really the Game Master, what made her decide to bring us all here? Why fake her death halfway through the games? How the hell did she even design this place and pull this thing off?

My mind drifted back to a conversation between Kiara and April on our very first day here.‘Your family are literally military contractors. You totally could’ve built something like this,’Kiara had said.

‘Oh, sure,’April retorted.‘I just called my parents, along with the US Army and the Pentagon, and asked if they’d help me set something up to deal with some kids at school who are being mean to my friend. That all sounds totally reasonable and realistic.’

She made it sound so ridiculous at the time, but was it reallythatoutrageous to consider? The Garrick family was uber-wealthy. Beyond billionaire status, if you combined the net worth of every family member. That sort of money bought a ton of influence, power, and most importantly in this case… silence.

A place like this could’ve been designed and built in a hush-hush way, as long as the right people were contacted and bribed. April’s family probably could’ve acquired Icarus Hall on the downlow too, given her father’s close ties to Babylon Prep.

Still, none of this answered my biggest question.Why?

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