Queen of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #4) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,222

the show though Troy wasn’t among them. A guard stepped up behind me with his hand rested on a machine gun at his hip and jerked his head at me in a command to sit down.

“It’s a dog-eat-dog world, Tatum,” Karen said icily, taking her seat just as I was shoved down beside her by the guard. “And I’d rather be a pitbull than a chihuahua.”

“If you hurt them, I will hurt you so bad that you’ll beg me for death,” I swore, fear sweeping through me in an overwhelming wave.

Karen smiled cruelly at me. “Or perhaps when they are dead and you accept that no one will come to save you ever again, you will realise that you never stood a chance of taking on a palace of gods.”

T he taste of blood flooded my mouth from my busted lip, and I spat a wad of it onto the floor as I squinted against the bright lights which were aimed right into my fucking face.

My muscles bunched as I tried to lift a hand to shield my eyes but the restraint on my wrist stopped me.

The giant cross I'd been strapped to was rough and hard against my spine and the metal cuffs that held my wrists cut into my skin painfully. My feet barely touched the floor and I muttered curses as I slipped an inch, making the cuffs bite into my wrists with a slice of agony.

"Nash?" Blake called from my right and I grunted, still squinting into the light as I tried to make out the figures in the room beyond it. Tatum was there somewhere, I’d heard her, I was certain of it.

But the figures were little more than indistinct silhouettes with the light shining so brightly, so it was impossible to put faces to the men I was vowing to kill.

"Where's Tatum?” I bellowed, my throat raw from the amount of times I'd screamed those words at the dark room in the past half hour while we'd been left strapped here like this. “Is she up there?” I squinted up at the balcony, but it was no good, the lights were too bright.

I still didn't get any answers. They hadn't spoken a single word to us since we'd been dragged away from Kyan's body and hauled in here, strapped up like a pair of pagan sacrifices and left to fucking wait until now. The pain of his loss was like a shard of ice being driven into my heart and I didn’t know how to handle it. He was my brother, my dearest friend, my family.

"Place your bets," a man called out as a door opened somewhere behind me and I cursed as my position made it impossible for me to turn and see him.

The most I could do was meet Blake's gaze as he strained against the restraints holding him to his own cross, his dark hair spilling into his eyes and sticking to his temple where blood trickled down his face from a wound in his hairline.

There was a big blue cross painted over his bare chest and I glanced down at the red cross they'd painted on mine, wondering what fucked up games they had planned for us.

Kyan had told us the stories about the things they did at Royaume D’élite and I had no doubt that this was likely to end really fucking badly for us if we didn't manage to escape.

"Red or Blue? Last bets now," the man called and the sound of something being wheeled across the wooden floor reached me just as he stepped into view, pushing what looked a bit like a roulette wheel into place between me and Blake on a large cart.

The bottom of the cart held a shelf filled with various things and I counted a knife, hammer, hacksaw and poker amongst them before he stepped into my line of sight and blocked my view.

"Let us go," Blake demanded furiously, rattling the metal cuffs that held his hands in place like he was aching to break free of them and kill this motherfucker here and now. That would make two of us then.

"You're going to wish for death before I give it to you," I snarled.

The man ignored us, taking a silver ball from his pocket and holding it up before setting the wheel spinning and tossing the ball inside.

The sound of cheering voices sounded beyond the lights and amongst them all, I thought I heard Tatum's voice raised in fear, shouting my