Page 72 of The Masked King

They’ve won again.

I’ll pass out. They’ll dress me up and feed recordings of Brian’s voice to my subconscious and repeat the pattern until they’ve gotten what they wanted.

Brian.

But I haven’t come this far to give into them now. They want Brian, they’ll have to find another route, because I’m not helping them.

I stop struggling and hold my breath, waiting for the blackness to claim me completely.

I open my eyes to brightness.

This is like an episode of Black Mirror, one where the main character wakes up in the same moment, over and over but with subtle differences, tiny clues to how she might escape and get back to reality.

This time, the clue isn’t in what I’m wearing. I’m in bed with the towel wrapped around me just as it was before they tried to drown me in gravy. There’s a sealed bottle of water on the nightstand and no plate.

There’s a handheld device instead.

I glance around the room, certain it must be a trick. Why would they give me a tablet to use unless it served their purpose?

I pick it up though and touch the screen; it comes to life instantly, no PIN required. Rather than opening onto a menu screen, it takes me straight to a video recording, the arrow in the bottom left-hand corner waiting for me to press play.

I swipe the screen to close the video and locate a search engine or email account and find that the device has no other apps. It’s completely wiped, apart from the minimalized recording. My instincts are screaming at me to put the tablet down, take a shower, sing my way through my repertoire of song lyrics, go to sleep, anything but watch the damned video…

But now that I know it’s there, I can’t forget about it.

It might give me a clue to Brian’s whereabouts. This might be a new game, one in which I solve the riddles and find the way out like a fucked-up escape room and end up in his arms. Not that I want to be in his arms. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’m not foolish enough to believe it was anything deeper than it was meant to be. But I still want to know that he’s safe.

I pick up the tablet again and press play.

The footage is grainy, filmed in the dark outside a residence I don’t recognize. I can hear the wind buffeting the recording equipment and the operator. Leaves flutter across the screen suggesting that the photographer is hiding in a bush or behind trees, but the camera remains focused on the entrance to the property in the distance.

There are no lights on behind the windows; the occupants must be sleeping.

I feel like I’m sitting in a cinema auditorium, watching a horror movie, waiting for the moment when everyone in the audience jumps.

The minutes tick by. I stare at the screen until my eyes water.

“Keeping the lights on now, assholes!” I yell at the spotlights around the bed, because I can’t resist, and because I came too close to abandoning the fight earlier.

Then I spot a figure leaving the building on-screen.

I bring the device closer to my face, squinting to bring the figure into focus; this is clearly what the Bratva wanted me to see. As I do, I spot a flicker of light in one of the downstairs windows.

Not light, a flame.

Bile rises in my throat as I realize what I’m watching, but still, my eyes remain fixated on the screen like this is a form of self-punishment, and I won’t stop until I’m broken.

The figure walking away from the huge property is Enzo.

He set a fire in the home of a Bratva pakhan and left the family inside to die. There were children inside that house. They went to bed that night with full bellies and smiles on their faces, filled with anticipation for the day that would surely follow, and they never woke up. Enzo’s arson started a war amongst the minor Bratva families resulting in more bloodshed than the city had seen in a long while, and it wasn’t only contained to New York. It reached Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston too.

But the worst part of it was that when I questioned Enzo, he didn’t deny it.

He claimed he had no idea the children were there; he’d been informed that they were at boarding school in Europe. He said the fire was deliberately contained within a secret den on the lower floor. A warning. Not a massacre.

But he didn’t deny it, and this was the moment that changed everything.

I knew I couldn’t live with a ruthless killer.