“This is going to hurt like hell,” I say.
He smiles, even though it doesn’t meet his eyes. “Do you promise?”
I scrunch up my nose, but this gooey feeling is swirling through me, dulling my pain and making me feel like a human lava lamp.
I guide a thin sliver of clear glass from Nico’s heel, and he swears.
“I’m sorry.” I drop the glass with a plink against the floor. “Do you want to talk? To distract yourself?”
“I’m good,” he says.
I try to find the tiny glinting pieces buried in all the blood, but it’s hard in this darkness. His blood looks black. I need the lightbulb, but I don’t know if he has the strength to crawl to it.
So much blood oozes around my fingers, wetting the cuffs of my jacket and coating my hands until they’re slick and warm. When he’s suspended from that pole, any bleeding will get worse thanks to gravity.
I push any thoughts of the pole down because I need to focus on one crisis at a time. A larger shard in his heel makes him hiss through his teeth when I work it free, and fresh blood beads from the wound. Bandages. I need bandages.
I strip off my hoodie and then my T-shirt underneath until I’m only wearing my jumpsuit. The cold hits my skin like a slap.
Nico blinks at me. “What are you doing?”
“Giving you a strip tease,” I say. “What do you think I’m doing?”
I pull my hoodie back on before I start to shiver, then tear strips lengthwise from the hem of the T-shirt. It’s one of Dad’s old NYPD shirts. As sad as I am to rip it up, I’m grateful it’s big.
I ball up a strip of cotton and press against the wound, but the blood keeps coming. I don’t think applying pressure will help much until all the glass is out.
I get my fingernails around a big shard. I know Nico said he didn’t want to talk, but I can’t stop the questions from coming out anyway.
“Were you lying?” I ask. “About wanting to kill me?”
“It’s complicated,” he says.
“You said Billy changed your brain. Is that part true?” I yank another shard out, and he curses.
“Yes and no.” He closes his eyes. “I do get urges sometimes, but I can control myself enough not to act on them. Donny got Billy out before Billy eroded my control to the point of destruction. Another couple months, and…” He scrunches up his face. He must be in too much pain for him to fully push it down. I want to take the pain away from him. I’d do anything to keep him from feeling it.
“I used to be scared I’d snap if put under enough pressure,” he continues, panting for breath. “I put Donny through hell, testing it. We pushed me as far as we could. Tried everything to see what it would take to put me back in that headspace. I got close, but nothing made me snap. Donny wanted to stop. I needed to be sure. Especially after Zoey joined the team. Then DJ and Bonnie. I couldn’t risk hurting them.”
It aches, imagining Nico so terrified of his own mind that he’d put himself through torture to make sure he was safe to be around others.
“I thought if you believed I was an enemy, you’d fight me in the trials, and I could control the outcome better if you were trying to win,” Nico says. “But you kept not believing me.”
“What about at the house?”
In the library, after I found out about Billy, when he described all those murders in graphic detail and said he’d imagined doing it to me? No Game Master was watching then.
“I was scared of what I’d do around you,” he says. “I thought if you believed I was dangerous, you’d leave. It was stupid to think you’d be safer, with Morrow out there.”
I almost laugh at the irony, since Morrow got me anyway. Nico shakes his head, and I wonder if he’s having the same thought as I am.
I pull out another piece of glass. Blood wells up in its place.
“Why didn’t you believe me?” Nico asks. “You kept helping me.”
I lift one shoulder, focusing on his foot instead of his face because I don’t want to overwhelm him and make him stop talking. “I thought Morrow flipped your switch, but I was hoping you were still in there.”
He recoils in confusion, as if I told him a bouillon cube turns into a steak when dropped into boiling water. “You have the survival instincts of a goldfish.”
