Page 135 of Locked in Wonderland

When that still wasn’t loud enough, I snatched the remote from her and cranked the volume even higher. The problem was that the two people talking in the studio told me absolutely nothing.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Apparently all sorts of shit.”

“Like what?”

“Kidnap. Torture. They found a guy there who’d been missing for ten years. His family thought he was dead. Can you believe that?”

I could believe it. Without Nico, that could easily have been me.

“He said he couldn’t leave,” Hannah continued, “that there was no way off the island. Did you know a dome surrounds the entire island?

“I knew that,” I said absently.

“Yeah. How?”

“I just… I don’t know. Someone must have told me.”

“Who?”

I ignored her as the report cut to footage filmed earlier that day. It featured a far more rumpled version of Queenie and Henry than the one I’d known being led away in handcuffs. I suspected Queenie would have hated the eyes of the world seeing her looking so disheveled far more than she hated being arrested. Henry didn’t look much better. His shirt was buttoned wrong, one tail hanging out of his trousers as though he’d thrown it on in a rush.

“They’re the people behind it all,” Hannah said in a disgusted tone. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? If you met them at a party, you’d just think they were a nice couple.”

Something juddered in my chest as the pictures changed again to a shirtless Kellan Hart being led out in handcuffs.

“That’s the son,” Hannah explained. “Apparently he got wind of his parents being arrested and went into hiding. You’ll never believe what they found when they tracked him down.”

“A man on a leash being kept as a dog.”

Hannah’s mouth dropped open. “Yes! How do you know that?”

I shrugged. “Lucky guess.”

“No, seriously. Are you psychic?”

“He just looks the type.”

“It’s being shut down,” Hannah said.

“Huh?”

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Kellan, savoring every second of the furious expression on his face as his world collapsed around him. I took particular pleasure in knowing he had gone into hiding, glad he spent his last hours before arrest like the sniveling coward he truly was.

“Wonderland is being shut down,” Hannah repeated. “I doubt it’ll ever reopen.”

“Good.” To my frustration, the presenters moved on to another story. “What actually happened?” I asked. “Did someone escape and blow the entire thing wide open?”

Hannah gave me a strange look. “They said an insider came forward. Someone who knew so much that they couldn’t be ignored. For obvious reasons, they wouldn’t reveal his or her name. I guess they used to work there or something.”

“Or something,” I repeated, my lips curling into a smile. “That clever bastard.”

“Who?”

I spun on my heel and headed for the bedroom, my mind racing. Normally, I did everything I could not to think about Nico. This time I gave myself permission to think about nothing else. I didn’t realize Hannah had followed me until she hissed out a curse as I threw off my robe and stepped into clean underwear.

“I could really have done without seeing that,” she said.