“Is this what a genius chemist looks like? Bald, beer belly, and piss stench?” Lori makes a disgusted expression.
“I want answers. All of them.” Linda looks at Uriel, and he nods with a cold demeanor.
“I’ll take him in,” Hunter offers, throwing the man on his shoulder before making his way inside with Linda and the others.
Uriel stays behind and, with a hand on my arm, keeps me back.
“What’s up?” I ask nonchalantly, but my curiosity is piqued. My brother was salivating to get his hands on Marlon Finch, so why the fuck is he here with me?
He goes back to his car to grab something, a plastic bag, and hands it to me.
I raise a questioning brow at him as I look inside. A book?The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success. “What the shit is this?”
“Meg bought it for Raphael. He became less of an asshole after reading it.” His tone sounds bored.
“He was more of an asshole than he is now?” I snort.
“He was a fucking bastard.” He huffs.
I smirk. “Did you steal it from him?”
“No, I stole his desk. I bought the book,” Uriel confesses. “Look, it was Linda’s idea. Read it. Don’t read it. Do whatever the fuck you want.”
“Why did you buy it if it’s all the same to you?”
“It’s what Meg would have wanted.” He looks me straight in the eye and then starts walking toward the front doors.
Dr. Bear-Stone surely holds my brother’s respect and the others’. I always liked the saying, you reap what you sow because trying to cheat on the reaping part sounded like fun. But maybe there’s more to it than I thought.
I follow Uriel inside, and after passing Serena’s security, instead of turning right to the training area, he takes me through the kitchen, down a corridor, and then stops in front of a door. We go through more security checks before it opens into an elevator.
There are twelve numbers on the control panels, even though there are only three floors in the building. Uriel pushes five of them in a sequence: eleven-three-seven-zero-ten, and the elevator, instead of going up, starts to descend.
“Interesting,” I mutter. The ride is short. When the elevator opens, Lori is waiting for us.
“Welcome to Chateau Donor,” he says in a terrible French accent. “Me torture es su torture.” His Spanish is not better.
“Where’s the shitbag?” Uriel asks him.
“FUNS room number three.” The FUNS room is where they torture their donors; it stands for Fucked Up Nasty Shitheads. I remember seeing the golden plaque over the old one before Nine burned it to the ground.
Uriel moves around him and heads toward the room.
“How many FUNS rooms do you have now?” I ask Lori as we walk together.
“Three. Each one with a different nightmare show.” He grins at me pointing toward them.
The FUNS rooms like the old one have smart glass front walls and doors. We pass the first two, one looks like a butcher shop with a thick wooden table, blades and tools hanging from the ceiling on thick chains and more lined up on tables—the plastic sheets all over the walls are neon pink. The other one is more eerie, reminds me of an operating room with a metal bed frame in the middle, round adjustable lights, and a rectangular table, holding surgical tools perfectly arranged—here the plastic sheets on the walls are white with red skulls on them. In the third room, there’s a single metal chair, where Hunter and Gabriel are tying the now-naked poisoner—Linda keeps a watch on him. The small, cheap plastic drawer cart with wheels takes my attention for a moment. It looks out of place in this state-of-the-art torture zone.
“Ramiel still buys those weird-as-shit sheets?” I ask, pointing at the blue ones with Hawaiian hula girls.
“Donorslovethem,” Lori says, adjusting the plaque outside the door that saysFUNS Room 3.
“If you keep walking through the door on the left, there’s the lab, and on the right, Ramiel’s techwing. Then the crematorium room, two bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, and at the end a living room/kitchen.” It’s like a serial killer bunker in here.
“But this is the best part,” he continues when I’m already fed up. “The wall of records. Ta-da!” He makes the jazz hands movement to show me…a wall with some words written on it.
“It’s the list of our records. I like to write down the most incredible, disgusting, frightening, disturbing, and so on things we have done with or for donors.”
