Of course that was what he took away from it.
"Whatever you want to do, with consent, is up to you," I said. "Are you trying to tell me you have a chair kink, Edward Bonegard?" I arched my eyebrows at him. “Or bondage?”
Boner sighed. "Honestly, before that night I would have said I'm open to anything and everything. Now, the idea of being tied up to a chair isn't all that appealing, believe it or not." He glanced down toward the top of the table, his eyes glazed. That night must have been more traumatic than he let on. He kept it hidden behind his usual cheerful demeanor, pretending he was okay when he wasn't.
I put a hand over his and squeezed. "I believe it," I said gently. "It must have been scary."
"Part scary, part boring as fuck," Boner agreed. "If it wasn't for Archer, I might still be attached to that chair, waiting for someone to find us all. Our corpses half-rotten. Bugs eating us. Our…"
"All right. We get the picture." I said quickly, putting my hand up in front of my face.
That was a visual image I didn't need in my brain. I knew one day we'd all die, but I didn't want to think about lying dead in an apartment for six months, no one knowing we were there.
Although, was that possible?
My staff would notice if I didn't turn up to work. So would Boner's. Someone would come looking for us. Would they have found us in Archer's place? The whole idea of staying there was so no one knew where we were. No one but people I thought I could trust.
"If you don't have me cremated when I die, I'm going to haunt you," Jules said to Cass.
"Same, bro, same," Cass said back. His skin looked slightly green. Evidently thinking of himself decomposing like that was sickening for him, too.
"So, you had a suggestion for a playdate after the opening?" I said, directing the question to Boner, hoping to put the grisly thoughts behind us.
"I did," Boner agreed, pouncing on the change of topic with glee. As glad as the rest of us to move on to someone else's grisly death instead of ours.
Boner pulled out his phone and opened the screen. "Lionel Gammage was a teacher…"
"Someone beat us to it," I said, although the words were redundant.
Lionel Gammage lay on the floor in the middle of his apartment, eyes open and staring.
"Not by much." Archer crouched beside him to take a closer look at the blood pooled around Gammage's open throat. He placed a hand on his wrist. "He's barely started to cool."
"So what you're saying is we snuck up a fire escape and into this guy's apartment and barely missed whoever murdered him?" Jules asked, lingering near the window.
"They might still be here," I pointed out. A fact which immediately put everyone on edge.
"I'll take a look around." Boner slid out his knife and made his way through the apartment. Looking behind doors. Inside closets. Even under the bed.
"There's no one here. No oneelsehere," he amended, as if we were about to be smartasses and correct him the same way he would have done if it was one of us speaking.
He put his knife away and grimaced down at the dead man. "I have to admit, this is disappointing. This isn't the date I promised my woman."
I put an arm over his shoulders. "It's okay, it's the thought that counts. At least someone took care of him."
"Yeah, but who?" Cass picked up Gammage's phone and started to look through it.
"We might have some competition," Boner suggested. He actually seemed to like the idea.
"We're not starting a game between us and another killer," I told him.
"Wearen't, but what about them?" The Englishman gestured toward Gammage. "They're the ones who started it."
I gave him a stern look. "This isn't the playground. We can't run off to teacher and say, 'They started it.'" I raised my voice to a child like pitch.
"Who do we run off to, then?" Boner asked, grinning.
"I vote we get the hell out of here and call this one in to the cops," I said.
