Chapter 2
two
-Brynn-
I can’t recall how I got back to the apartment. I’m not drunk, but it sure feels like it. My life is a daze now, and I remember that time, not long ago, when that was all I could feel.
I storm into Elias’s room, but as the door shuts behind me, the emptiness of the place nearly brings me to my knees. He was always here when I walked into this room, lying on the bed, headphones on, listening to some music or scrolling through his computer for a movie for us to watch.
I loved him so damn much, and even though I didn’t love him as he might’ve wanted to at one point, I loved him like he was family. Like the brother I never had.
We were both orphans, castaways of society. But that’s not what brought us together. Pain and suffering, a daytime nightmare, made our roads cross.
We met in a mental institution.
I shake my head, unwilling to let my mind go there, and start searching through his drawers and closet.
He was planning on becoming a big reporter, so he was collecting information on celebrities and different events.
But as I sift through the articles and files he had collected over time; I realize he’d stumbled onto something far deeper than I ever suspected.
It took me weeks to piece things together, especially since some of the materials and files were back in his office at the newspaper where he used to work.
The dumb shit who runs the paper fired Elias for not showing up to work, so it took me a while until I could get the things he’d left on his desk.
It ended with me breaking into the newspaper’s basement, but it was worth it.
I finally had the last piece of information I needed to make sense of the bigger picture.
And it was fucking shocking.
Elias stumbled onto something major. The kind of shit you only see in movies.
Something born out of a fucked-up imagination.
Kharon—a game of survival where people fight to the death for a grand prize of fifty million dollars.
A lot of money for anyone involved. A fortune—enough to drive anyone mad.
Mad enough to put on the ultimate show and kill every opponent in cold blood.
I found half a dozen articles about buildings burning on the 1st of November. Reports of convicts disappearing on Halloween. And a few pictures of those same convicts dressed in uniforms similar to Elias’s, only the numbers on the shirts were different, ranging from one to fifty.
He gathered information from more than eighty trials. Most of the accused got out on parole, or never ended up serving time because they cut deals with the DA.
And they all had one thing in common. They were all guilty of horrific crimes. Murder, sexual assault, even child molestation.
Every single one of them vanished without a trace throughout the years.
All on Halloween. Not that anyone would miss them.
There were a handful of names on the trial list that kept popping up after Halloween, suddenly spending big on cars, even properties. But every one of them ended up dead within a couple of months.
I also found a picture of a hand with a tattoo—an orb in a magician’s hand, with the words: I conjure with commands.
It was one of the things I couldn’t make much sense of since there wasn’t any other information attached to it. I suspect it has something to do with the players, but for now it’s just a theory.
Something else in the files didn’t connect. Or maybe it did, and I just couldn’t see it yet. A photo of a club taken at night—The Breach, and written on the back, a name.
A man who I was beginning to suspect had a hand in running the game.
If that’s true, I’m in deep shit.
This isn’t just any name on a list. It’s a man feared and respected across the entire city. Seattle’s merciless crime lord—Ares.