“Let me tell you a little story. Maybe this will tie it together for you. Once upon a time,” Hudson began, “there was a little girl named Olivia, known to most as Livy. She was the sweetest, most kind and generous person in the entire world. She also had a knack for keeping her twin brother in line. She was amazing, and almost always happy, even though she’d had to deal with tragedy at a young age. She was able to find the beauty in anything. Art was how she coped with setbacks but also how she shared her joys.” Hudson began pacing back and forth in front of Graysin. He didn’t look at him, choosing to stare ahead or up toward the ceiling as he spoke. His voice remained steady, though I knew how much these words pained him to speak. “Livy grew up and went away to college. She made friends and got decent grades. She was happy. But then one day she came across a man.” He paused where he stood and threw a glare at Graysin, then continued pacing. “A very bad man, at the spring break party that Blaine, the guy she’d been dating, was throwing.”
Graysin’s mouth turned down and his brows pinched together. He hunched down into himself even more, looking very bleak.
“Livy and this guy probably had too much to drink at this party. Maybe took a few pills. They ended up in a bedroom together, where the guy took advantage of her while she was blitzed out. Her boyfriend threw a massive fit and broke her heart when he found out. To make matters worse, it turned out that the guy had taken it upon his sick-ass self to take photos and videos during…well, during. Which he then used to blackmail Livy.”
A few tears slipped down Graysin’s cheeks.
Hudson took a deep breath. “That would have all been bad enough, but unfortunately, sweet Livy made the catastrophic decision to take her own life by overdosing on fentanyl pills that this asshole had previously supplied her with. And her twin brother had the unfortunate luck to find her.” Hudson stopped directly in front of Graysin, and stared down at him, long and hard. “Any guesses who the asshole might be in this story?”
“I am so sorry for your loss,” Graysin whispered. Tears fell freely down his face. “I had no idea that Livy had passed away.” He swallowed hard and looked down at his hands clutched tightly together. “I admit that Livy and I had a one-night stand of some sort. I genuinely have zero memory of it, other than waking up feeling sore all over and having a hangover that was nothing like anything I’d experienced before.” He shook his head. “If I took photos and videos, I’m unaware of it. I certainly did not send them to her or to anyone else. And as for the fentanyl, I don’t do drugs. I don’t sell drugs. I don’t give drugs to other people. I swear on my life that I never gave any to Livy.”
I was speechless. Could we believe him? My stomach dropped out when Graysin followed all that with, “I think you need to talk to Blaine Colfield. He’s my best friend, yet I didn’t even know they were dating. That morning, after she’d left, I’d even told him what had apparently happened, and he was completely unbothered and didn’t react any sort of way when I mentioned Livy.”
After that earth-shattering information—which I decided I believed…it didn’t seem like Graysin was lying—we had to regroup. It didn’t feel right leaving Graysin cold and locked up in the warehouse, but we also needed to find out what really happened. This was the closest we’d come so far to finding out the truth.
8
Hours later, I was still reeling from what Devil had shared. The whole thing was sad and confusing and made my skin crawl. There was someone out there spinning a false narrative about me, and those lies had caused me a massive amount of harm.
I stood by the window of the small room I was now in, trying to get a closer look at anything that might be helpful later if I found myself with an opportunity to escape. The warehouse had a mezzanine system that added a second and third floor to the moderately sized building. There were several small rooms and large storage areas on each floor. On the second floor, one of those small rooms seemed to have once been an employee break room. It was this room that the masks had recently moved me into. The window I was perched behind overlooked the bottom floor. Outside this room, a metal grating walkway led to an open platform area, as well as a metal staircase.
It was nothing much to look at, but my new space was warmer. And I had clothes. And a clock. I could walk around freely within the room. And there was a bathroom off to the side with a tiny standing shower I’d been allowed to use. I’d never thought something as simple as a shower could bring such relief, but it did. I felt almost like a normal human again.
I assumed I was stuck here until they figured out how to bring Blaine in. I didn’t know how they were going to convince him to give them the time of day though. He was not likely to come easy.
Imagine my surprise when the following afternoon I stepped out of the small bathroom after showering to find Blaine sitting at the small card table in the center of the room. Or slumped over the table may have been a more appropriate phrase. He’d clearly been beaten, and when I shook his arm to rouse him, his pupils were blown wide like he was on something. He blinked a few times and then grinned. A chill ran down my spine. I’d never seen a smile like that on his face, and this was the scenario that had prompted it?
“Graysin! What are you doing here?” He squinted at me. “What happened to your face?”
The pain had subsided. I looked worse than I felt now. I wasn’t sure if that was because my injuries were healing, or because it seemed like things had somewhat shifted between me and my kidnappers and it made everything feel not quite as hopeless.
“Are you high right now?” I asked Blaine.
“As a kite.” He stretched his bound arms over his head and popped his neck side to side. “Your new friends are appalling.” He held his hands out to me as evidence. “They cornered me in my garage and drugged me with something. This shit is unreal.”
I slid into the chair across from him. “They drugged you, beat you, and stuck you in this room?”
“Well, we had a chat first.” He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what shit they gave me, but Christ, I couldn’t keep my fucking mouth shut.” He laughed hysterically, then stopped abruptly and his face went blank.
“What did you talk about?”
“Spring break.”
I gulped roughly. “What about it?”
“Oh, you know.” He waved a hand around airily. “I told them about the threesome we had after I spiked your and Olivia’s drinks.” I stared at him blankly. “You’re always so uptight about pills. Figured they’d go down easier that way.”
I couldn’t believe the words coming from my best friend’s mouth. Mysupposedbest friend.
“I told them about the pictures I took of the two of you. The ones they’d seen, plus the others. There are more, some of all three of us. Some of just me and you. Some of me and Olivia. I explained that I’d sent them to her from your phone and then erased the messages.” He scanned my face, attempting to read my expression. I was horrified, repulsed, nauseated. I thought I might throw up. He seemed to settle on annoyed, which was completely off base. “It’s no big deal, Graysin. Don’t look at me like that.”
Placing my hands on the tabletop, I leaned toward him, and then flopped back against the seat again. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him. “You drugged us, forced us to have sex with each other and with you, and took pictures of the acts. How is that no big deal? How could you…Whywould you do that?”
“I was bored.”
Bored? He’d felt that destroying the lives of not just Livy and me, but also her brothers was warranted because he’d been bored? I was beginning to realize just how much I’d never truly known Blaine. I’d always known he was different, and a lot to take, but this was something I never saw coming. I was having a hard time processing everything he was saying.
“But we were friends.” I grasped at straws, desperate to find something that would make all of this make sense.
