I try to sort through what she’s told me.
The secret room in the frat house had contained secret files, files of people with modeling contracts — mostly women — who had gone missing. There hadn’t been a file with Rachel there, but Pandora thinks it’s related.
She thinks Blaze and the Bouchards are responsible, or at the very least, know what’s going on.
She’d turned Asch and Blaze against each other.
“Are you sure it was Zayden who sent them?” I ask. I used to be good at following her lines of thought, but I’m more out of practice than I thought. I cross the room, going to sit beside her, and I grab her hand. “I need you to focus, Pandora.”
“I am focused!” Pandora argues. “This is the most focused I’ve been! Yeah I got caught up in the romance or whatever, three perfect hot guys who all want me, but that’s all trash, right? The three of you don’t actually care about me. Rachel’s theimportant one. Samantha is the important one. Zayden got what was coming to him, Tate will get what’s coming to him, the entire fucking frat will get what’s coming to them. I’ll find Samantha, I’ll get revenge for her and Rachel and every other person the Kafka Asshole Omega Shitheads ever talked to?—”
“It’s not trash,” I snap at her. “I?—”
I can’t tell her I care about her. I still want my own revenge on her. It’s hard to forget that when she keeps rubbing my fingerbones in her pocket.
“Fine, we don’t care. What’s Samantha got to do with it?”
Pandora rolls her eyes at me. “She’s missing. I said that. I think I said that. She’s been gone since that night. She took her phone, but not her tablet. All her clothes are still there. And the fucking blood red dahlias. I got Anastasia to unlock the tablet for me, and Samantha was dating Zayden, and he went to get her and then she was gone!”
Fuck.
Another missing woman, another piece of the puzzle… and the answers are potentially in the next room.
Maybe I was a little hasty in stopping Pandora from slicing and dicing Blaze Bouchard until he told her what he knows.
He’s not going to be caught unaware again, though, and I’m not entirely sure how to proceed.
“Okay. So what are we going to do?” I ask her.
“Figure out where they took Samantha,” Pandora says. “And cut up everyone who was involved. Was that part of my plan not clear?”
There’s no way Blaze is going to give us answers, especially not now. That means we’re going to have to take another approach.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I instinctually take it out to check who messaged me.
It’s the frat chat, and it’s yet another video of Pandora. I think I’ve seen this one before. It’s hard to keep track of all the videos they send.
I click the screen off, but it’s too late.
Pandora tilts her head at me. “Oh. You like those vids?”
“What? No,” I say. “The frat—” I cut myself off. She doesn’t need to know how obsessed they still are with her. “I don’t watch them.”
It’s a lie.
I’ve watched them so many times I know them by heart.
But it’s not for the reasons she thinks.
It’s a form of penance, forcing myself to watch something that had made a void open up within my chest, something that I feel completely separate from now. It would be easy to forget that I was there, that I’d had anything to do with it, but I can’t do that.
So much for wanting revenge.
“We could watch one now,” Pandora says. Her voice is completely flat. “I haven’t seen the porn of me either. Do you think they’ve got one of my cunt stretched wide around the bottle?”
“We aren’t watching them,” I snarl at her.
“Because you’ve already seen them,” Pandora says. “Because you’ve been having fun spreading them around to all your friends. Do you get off on those videos?” She leans in closer and drags a nail down my throat. “Did you get off that night? Did you like seeing my cunt getting demolished by all those guys?”
