What would “good faith” look like to them? Fifty pounds? A hundred? Enough to fix her tooth?
Among all the logical thoughts racing through her head was one reckless voice that wouldn’t shut up.
Just do it.
You have nothing to lose.
Whatever they do to you, you can handle it.
You can handle anything.
It’s only one night.
Twelve hours.
The life she’d been living, if one could call it living, already stretched several dreary lifetimes long. This was a chance to be something more.
Daisy couldn’t fathom a million pounds, so she tried to imagine what she would do with less. Fifteen-thousand pounds could get her a car. Imagine a life where she didn’t have to walk everywhere. Two hundred thousand could get her a house. No more rent. And for what? A few hours running around in the dark?
This could be her way out. How often did someone get an offer like this? Never. The fact that she’d been given this chance at all seemed a miracle of some sort.
Three minutes left. If she didn’t choose soon, the decision would be made for her. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to do this or not, but she knew having the opportunity ripped away would be an unbearable outcome that would likely haunt her for the rest of her pitiful life.
00:02:26
00:02:25
00:02:24
Her clammy hands gripped the phone as she stared at the cracked screen. Without thinking beyond the fact that she didn’t want this feeling of possibility to end, she signed her name.
“Oh, God...” She pressed SUBMIT.
The screen went black, and her heart stopped on a gasp.
She refreshed, and the browser crashed, booting her back to her home screen as if the last two hours had never happened. Daisy frantically tried to reload the site, typing the address with trembling fingers, but the familiar error message stared back at her: Page not found.
“Shit!” She hurled the phone onto her mattress, rubbing her head and rocking through the twisted nausea knotting in her belly. “What did I just do?”
Tears of frustration pricked her eyes. They knew where she lived. She just agreed to do God knows what with who the hell knows. These people were powerful. That much was clear. And she just signed herself over to them under some foolish belief that this could somehow lift her out of her little grey life.
“Idiot.” She was a fool. A desperate, pathetic fool who deserved exactly what she got, which was either nothing—probably just some hack job into her empty life that would disappoint anyone hoping to find something of value—or exactly what the site said. A hunt.
She shook her head. Things like that didn’t actually exist. This was England. Where would something like that even take place?
She accepted then that this was nothing more than a big, fat waste of time that would amount to nothing. Always nothing.
Tomorrow, she’d go back to the laundry. Feed sheets through the press. Count the hours until she could collapse into bed and pretend her life belonged to someone else.
Ping.
The soft, almost apologetic chime broke the silence. Daisy frowned as her phone cast a faint glow through the blankets.
Lifting the device, she read the text on the screen, unsure how this was happening. She hadn’t given anyone her number, and the sender field was blank. Completely blank.
Her finger trembled as she opened it.
A good-faith deposit has been made to your account.
