Page 109 of Heartless Sinner

I pushed myself upright, my bare feet sliding against the freezing floor.

Sitting around waiting for something terrible to happen wasn’t an option.

I made it a few steps before walking straight into a wall. “Ow.”

I recoiled and ran my palm over the cold surface.

Glass … or plexiglass.

I knocked on it.

A harsh light flooded the room. I threw an arm over my face, every headlight from the Hunt rushing back into my memory.

When my vision cleared, a scream climbed up my throat. I swallowed it as I stared at the man strapped to a metal chair on the other side of the glass.

A black hood covered his head. Dark blood stained his white button-up and streaked his bound wrists.

His side of the glass was nothing but concrete. No doors. No windows. A microphone hung above him.

I turned. My cell matched his.

An old box TV sat in one corner. A table in the other.

I walked over to the table to find a pitcher of water, a note, and a gun. I carefully picked up the note as if it had anthrax on it.

If you hit your breaking point, there’s a single bullet in the gun.

I tossed the note back onto the table and ignored the gun before returning to the glass.

“Hello!” I pounded on it.

The man suddenly thrashed against his restraints.

I jumped back when a hidden panel slid open in his concrete wall.

Who walked in wasn’t what surprised me.

It was what he wasn’t wearing.

His mask.

Brooks stalked into the room dressed entirely in black. He didn’t even look at me. The man in the chair was the only person who mattered.

My mind raced through the horror stories Blair had shared about old Fawn diaries. A Son never participated in this phase of an Initiation. They sure as hell didn’t show their faces.

Dread crawled through me. Brooks wouldn’t expose his identity to someone he planned on letting walk out alive.

The man in the chair would be a dead one soon.

Brooks walked across the room, slamming his palm against the glass hard enough to make me jump before waving at me. A little wiggle of his leather-gloved hands.

I wanted to break every one of those fingers.

“Welcome to the show, Daphne.”

The tied-up man behind him stopped fighting, as if my name had already put a bullet through his heart.

Brooks winked at me, pulled his mask over his head, then turned away.