He doesn’t manage to say anything because Blake suddenly screams and wakes up, scared, looking at us and at the rope around him.
“Really? Again? I’m already bored of waking up tied up,” Blake nervously says. “What’s up with the long faces?”
“Bianca modified it,” I say to myself, but Paul clearly heard me, his face turning red with anger.
“I will kill her,” he simply says, a profound hatred spreading on his face.
“What exactly is happening here?” Blake asks, but nobody minds him.
We are in deep shit. Deeper than I would’ve wanted to be.
“Why the hell didn’t I know that? How could I trust her so much?” Lucas asks, pacing through the room.
It’s enough for him to stare at the hole in the wall not to make another one, even if I can see on his face how much he wants to hit another wall.
“You couldn’t have known, and neither did I,” I say. “Her reaction from the motel seemed a bit exaggerated, but I never thought that she could betray us so badly.”
In that moment, reality punches me hard in the face.
I didn’t hallucinate. The small reactions she had… were fucking real.
“Then why didn’t I notice? After all this time spent together…” Paul says, closing his eyes and letting his head fall back.
“Believe me, I’m in a far more similar situation than you can imagine,” I say, making him open his eyes and look at me.
“What do you mean?”
I laugh at the situation, and he frowns even more when he gazes at me.
I tell him what we found out about Marshall, about the drug he created, and what side effects the stolen version has. I even tell him what’s under him just now. On his face are exposed so many feelings that not even I can keep up with them.
“Also, Bianca modified the dose she gave you, so who knows what kind of side effects it could have?” I finish the story.
Then I realise how big an idiot I have been. And not just me, because Lucas puts my thoughts into words, instantly making me jump out of bed.
“We left her with Marshall.”
Chapter 23
Rack and ruin
“I have to finish, I have to write, I have to help her. I have to…”
We open the door and see Marshall, full of blood, sitting at his desk, desperately writing in his journal, which I don’t even remember bringing. One hand is on his stomach, and he is writing with the other one with an unimaginable speed, while he’s constantly repeating the same words. He doesn’t even see us when we enter and close the door behind us.
“Too much…”
“Marshall?” I ask in a small voice, scared of what Bianca could’ve done to him, but also happy that a small revenge was taken upon him.
When he hears my voice, he quickly turns his gaze to mine, and for the first time, I can see an intense fear in his dark eyes, full of prominent vascularised lines.
“What the…” I start, getting closer to him, having his gaze still locked to mine.
I end up one step away from him, and I realise that I’m no longer afraid of him. It’s like we switched places, because hisbottom lip starts to tremble and his eyes grow wider as the panic is slowly capturing his being.
I look around and stop at the only thing that could’ve intervened with Marshall’s feelings: an empty syringe, with its needle as big as my palm.
“That fucking bitch did it…” I say, laughing in panic.
