Page 16

“Anchovies.”

Roman must hear it, too, because he turns to me, his muscles bunched.

I glance around, up and down, pace up the corridor and back, and then I see it. What the fuck? In the floor, not easy to spot at all, is a part of the wood that’s different. It’s a trapdoor of some sort.

Could her screams have come from down there?

“Could it be Mal who’s making her scream like that?” Roman wonders.

“No, he would never. This is something else.” My blood runs cold. “Someone else.”

She’s using her safe word, and I can’t think too hard on the reason behind that or I’ll risk losing my mind to my fury. The last man who dared put his hands on her ate his own dick for his efforts, courtesy of Roman. We need to keep our shit together, though, in order to be able to think straight so we can find her.

I go to the trapdoor and crouch beside it, yanking at the handle. It’s got a padlock holding it together with the floor, and it doesn’t budge.

“Fuck. We need to find something to smash this lock.”

“We should have brought a gun,” Roman says, yanking off his mask. “Why the fuck didn’t I bring a weapon? Fuck. This is my fault. I organized this.”

“We didn’t think we’d need a fucking gun at a fairground. What about something heavy—a rock, perhaps?” I follow suit and take my mask and robe off. We can’t fight easily in them, and I think we’re going to need to. I pile mine in a corner, and Rome puts his there, too. We’re shirtless now, but it means we can move more easily.

I look around for a weapon, but we’re inside a funhouse, surrounded by fake things made from plastic and rubber. There’s nothing hard enough to smash a padlock with.

Movement comes from farther down the narrow corridor, and I freeze, but Malachi emerges from the dark, through the flashing lights with a young woman at his side. For a moment, I think it’s Ophelia, as her build is similar, but then I realize it’s the young woman from the rides earlier.

“I can help you,” she says, her voice tiny. She doesn’t make eye contact with me. “I have a key.”

She pulls it from her pocket. “You need to get her out of here. My brothers…” She shakes her head.

“How many of them are there?” I ask.

“Five. But I don’t think they’re all down there or else the padlock wouldn’t be fastened on this side. I didn’t do that. I think there’s a couple aboveground, too, somewhere.” She looks left and right, as though expecting them to spring out of the dark.

Fuck. It means we’re outnumbered, and like Cain pointed out, we don’t have any guns.

“Weapons,” Mal asks. “Are there any around?”

She shakes her head. “Only the ones we’ve used as props...” She trails off and bites her lip hard enough to draw specks of blood on her pale flesh. “My brothers might have some, though.”

If they do, we’ll have to deal with that when we need to. We don’t have time to stand around talking. I grab the key out of her hand and work to unlock the padlock. It clicks open, and I unhook it and toss it to one side.

“Be quick,” the girl hisses then turns and flees, vanishing back into the bowels of the funhouse.

Malachi disrobes, too, and puts his mask onto our little makeshift pile.

The trapdoor opens onto darkness, and I can’t see any lights. I use the flashlight on my cell phone. The view it reveals isn’t any more appealing than the dark, but I don’t hesitate. Ophelia’s scream comes again, and we all rush down the steps into God knows what.

We find ourselves in an underground tunnel. What the hell? The funhouse must have been placed on top of the old foundations of a building of some kind. The building is clearly no longer here, but whatever had been dug beneath it is. When they erected the funhouse, they knew exactly what they were doing. How did they know? Are they in cahoots with the owners of this land, or have they been here before?

Either way, this was planned.

Fuck.

Maybe they hadn’t planned for us, exactly, but they’d planned to fuck someone up. I bet when Roman called, asking to book the funfair out just for us, they must have rubbed their hands together with glee. No witnesses. No one to disturb their fun.

Just like the rest of the funhouse, this place has been decorated, but it’s not been done to the extent of above us, and the fake screams from above are muffled.

Following Ophelia’s cries, we break into a run.