Page 34 of Locked in Wonderland

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with Wayne.”

“Warren,” I corrected. “His name is Warren.”

“Of course… Warren.”

Something about the way she said it told me she knew full well who he was, but she wouldn’t admit that no matter how hard I poked and prodded at her.

“I should go,” I said. “I need to keep looking.”

“You need to settle your debt first.”

She said it so casually that I thought I’d misheard her. “My what? I paid for the chips.”

“Oh, darling.” There was a pitying look in Dahlia’s eyes. “You paid for half of them,” she explained gently, as though speaking to a child. “We loaned the rest to you. You didn’t win, so now you need to pay them back.”

I stared at her.

“You could have mentioned that.”

“I could have,” she agreed with a careless shrug. “But it slipped my mind.”

Rage bubbled up so fast it almost made me dizzy. “How was I supposed to win? The games made no fucking sense.”

“They make perfect sense to everyone else.”

“Right. So I’m just stupid. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Of course not. It just wasn’t your day today.”

“And how am I supposed to repay this debt?” The question tasted bitter because I already knew the answer. I’d learned Wonderland’s preferred currency in the nightclub just a couple of hours ago. Learned it. Digested it. And vowed not to get caught out like that again. Only to fall for yet another trick.

Dahlia stepped closer, fingers smoothing over the leather stretched across my chest. Her scarlet nails hooked briefly beneath the edge of my vest, exposing the tattoo beneath before she let the fabric fall back into place.

“With you?” I asked. I didn’t even know if I could get it up for a woman. My experiences with the opposite sex comprised a few teenage fumbles before I realized hard pecs did a lot more for me than breasts. I’d never looked back—boys turning into men as I aged along with them. Maybe that was the idea. A debt I could never repay because I couldn’t get hard enough to see the job through. An excuse to keep me here forever.

Dahlia patted the leather the same way you might pat a dog. “No,” she murmured. “Not with me.” Relief and dread tangled unpleasantly together in my gut. “You have an admirer.”

I blinked at her. “An admirer?” The word sounded absurd under the circumstances. “Who?”

Rather than answer, Dahlia guided me toward a door at the back of her office. “Go through here. He’ll be waiting.”

“He? Who’s he?”

But she simply smiled and nudged me over the threshold into a narrow corridor with stairs descending into darkness at the end. The door slammed shut behind me before I could ask another question. At least nobody had handcuffed me. And I could still see.

No sooner had I thought that than the lights went out.

Darkness swallowed everything so completely it felt physical, thick enough to choke on. I spun immediately, fumbling for the handle behind me, but the door refused to budge no matter how hard I rattled it.

Locked.

“Bitch,” I muttered.

No answer came back.

Only silence.

It left me with no other direction to go but forward, deeper into the blackness.