Page 31 of Drop His Mask

The Prisoner jumped as the heavy steel door to his room opened.

“There’s no space for your own room, fucking Griffin!” a guard barked out from the other side.

A single beat later, a body was thrown into The Prisoner’s cell. A large male, covered in dirt, their muddy hair covering their face.

The door slammed shut.

Are they even breathing?

The Prisoner reached out as far as he could with his foot and just barely managed to touch the body.

“Urgh!” it grumbled.

“Are you okay?” The Prisoner spoke hoarsely, his throat raw from disuse.

The new arrival shifted before carefully sitting up, groaning as he did so. “Better than you.” The man laughed, casting a look around the decrepit room. “Hopefully we won’t be here much longer.”

“You just got here,” The Prisoner bristled. “Who are you anyway?”

The moonlight shifted, cutting further through the window.

“Wait, I recognize you.” The tattoo at least. It wrapped around the man’s forearm.

“Yes, I’m Gri—”

“Yes! A part of the Griffin gang. I’m Julian.”

The Griffin gang member quirked his lips and his eyes lit up. The green turning nearly fluorescent in the dark space. “You are? Well, Julian. It’s nice to meet you. Now how about I tell you how we’re going to get out of here.”

If The Prisoner was paying better attention, he would have realized this man recognized his name. Knew who he was.

But instead, he allowed another seed of hope to fester.

Chapter 17

All Knowledge Can Be Used

Maverick

Present Day

This game was easy.Tooeasy.

Maverick cast a glance around the room. 197’s team had solidified what he had already guessed. Anyone could be in the barrel and the organs would count.

At this point, it was almost as if the rules were being thrown together haphazardly. As if they were showing how little they mattered.

It was lawless. Chaotic. Difficult to predict.

A suspicion had bloomed in his mind during the last game when The Host had said only 65 players remained…but there had actually been 67 left.

Maverick had hoped to hear The Host again, to see if he could find any other oddities occurring, but a robot had replaced him.

Something else had changed since the puppet game, and it infuriated Maverick.

Or maybe it didn’t.

Maybe what was truly breaking Maverick apart was his crippling anxiety. The realization that Enzo was holding a secret close to heart. But even worse than that?

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