Chapter 16 #5
She drew a slow, shaky breath and went on.
“When I saw the List that day, I wasn’t afraid.
I’d heard all the rumors, of course, but I thought they were exaggerated.
Like an urban legend. So I honestly thought it was just a game.
” Her voice went hollow. "I didn't even try that hard to hide. I just went to the Chapel of Saints and wedged myself under a pew. My hunter found me pretty quickly, and then he took me down to the ossuary tunnel.”
“So that’s how you learned about it,” Cherry said, nodding slowly.
“Yeah. He told me about all the other tunnels while we walked,” Jennifer said. “We reached the estate in… maybe fifteen minutes. The exit’s on the east side of the property. And from there—”
She broke off abruptly, eyes glazing over.
“What happened after that, Jennifer?” Cherry asked, voice soft. “What did the Dionysus Club do to you during those two months?”
Jennifer’s lips parted, but no words came. Her chest rose and fell unevenly. Then she shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “You can’t understand.”
“We want to understand. Please, just tell us.”
Her hands came up to her face, and her shoulders began to shake. “They took it from me,” she finally choked out. “And I can’t even tell anyone!”
“What did they take?”
“Everything!” she said, voice rising. “They took everything from me!”
Cherry and I exchanged a startled glance, but before either of us could speak, Jennifer’s composure cracked completely. Her voice climbed in pitch again, raw and jagged. “I failed!” she cried out. “I failed and they took everything!”
“Jennifer, please take a breath and try to—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” she shrieked, jumping to her feet. “You don’t get it! You just don’t get it! I failed!”
“Failed what?” Cherry said.
“I did everything they wanted!” Jennifer screamed. Her hands clawed at her hair as her voice broke. “And they still—” She cut herself off, shaking her head violently. “They still took it all!”
She began to pace in frantic circles, muttering under her breath; disjointed fragments of sentences that didn’t make sense. “He said I would… but then… no, no, no.”
I lifted a palm. “Jennifer, please…”
Her voice cracked into a sob. “It was my fault!” she cried out again, over and over, each repetition more broken than the last. “My fault, my fault, my fault.”
The door burst open, and two staff members rushed in, their movements swift and practiced.
“Jennifer,” one said gently. “It’s all right. Take a seat, sweetheart.”
But she didn’t seem to hear them. She pressed her fists against her temples, her voice rising to a scream. “They took it from me!”
The nurse’s tone shifted. “Get her arm.”
“Jennifer, it’s okay,” the second murmured as they reached for her, but she thrashed against their hold, crying out incoherently. Then, with a quick, practiced motion, one of them slid a needle into her arm.
Within seconds, Jennifer’s body went slack. Her head fell forward, a faint whimper escaping her lips.
Cherry’s hand found mine as the nurses carefully guided Jennifer out of the room. “I think we should leave now,” she said under her breath. “We’ve been lucky so far, but that luck is going to run out pretty soon.”
We hurried out, barely looking back as the nurses disappeared around the corner with Jennifer’s limp form between them.
Neither of us said a word as we passed the nurses’ station, just waved when one of them glanced up and smiled. The elevator doors slid shut with a soft chime, and I let out a shaky breath.
We still didn’t speak on the way down. Not when the doors opened into the lobby, not when we crossed the linoleum, not even when we handed back our visitor badges to Margaret at the front desk.
I could feel her eyes on us as we stepped through the sliding doors into the cold afternoon air, but I didn’t look back.
Once we reached the parking lot, Cherry dug her keys out from her purse with trembling fingers. “Jesus,” she muttered. “That was intense.”
“Yeah, but it was helpful,” I said. “Do you remember what we were saying earlier about kismet?”
Her brow furrowed. “Yeah. Why?”
“Think about the date Jennifer told us. For the initiation ceremony.”
Cherry frowned deeper, eyes flicking to the ground. Then I saw the realization finally hit her. “The second Friday in October,” she said slowly. “That’s this Friday. The same night we planned to check out the tunnel.”
“Kismet,” I said again. “It’s like the universe wants this to work out for us.”
She glanced sideways at me. “I guess it does seem that way,” she said softly. “But… aren’t you scared? Especially after what we just heard in there?”
I bit my lip as I considered my answer.
Before now, I’d managed to tamp my fear down to background noise, drowned out by my need for answers.
But after seeing what the Dionysus Club had done to Jennifer Albright, after watching her crack in front of us, that fear was roaring back to life.
It filled my chest, made my hands shake, whispered that I was making a terrible mistake.
Whispered that I never should’ve set foot in Blackthorne Harbor.
But beneath the fear, burning even brighter, was that same old determination.
They'd broken Jennifer. They'd killed Cal. And I was going to make them pay for it.