Chapter 21
Oh God. They were going outside again.
Geri’s legs didn’t want to cooperate, but she followed the other competitors outside onto the restaurant patio. They hadn’t even had a chance to eat breakfast yet—the moment they’d come downstairs, they’d been herded out here.
Another day of shoveling sand? This time on an empty stomach?
Was it too much to ask for some deity to show up and smite her? Because that seemed like the most merciful end at this point.
When the fuck does this end?
To her surprise—and horror—they weren’t taken to piles of sand that needed moving. Not yet, anyway. Instead, they were herded onto the restaurant patio where Rich was waiting for them.
As much as his charismatic game show host smile usually made her skin crawl, its absence now turned her blood to ice. What the hell was happening?
When Rich spoke, his voice was hard. “I thought I made myself very, very clear.” He glared at all of them. “That attempts to escape will not be tolerated. Or successful.”
Geri’s spine straightened. Someone else had made an attempt? She looked down the line of remaining contestants. Kit, Alan, Paul, Elena, Dan, Char—
Quinn.
Oh, fuck. Where was Quinn? In the haze of fatigue and fear, she hadn’t even realized he was missing.
As if on cue, Kevin and Tyson came around the corner, each holding one of Quinn’s arms. His feet dragged in the sand, and his head lolled with every movement. Dried blood matted his blond hair and covered one side of his face. Fresher blood ran from his mouth and nose. Was he even alive?
Geri stared, hands over her mouth, not even breathing as she searched for a sign—any sign—that Quinn was alive.
The men dumped Quinn at Rich’s feet. The low groan and the way Quinn curled in on himself were nauseating but reassuring; as much pain as he was in, he was alive.
“You’re all here until you are eliminated, or until the game is over.” Rich kicked Quinn hard in the ribs, and Quinn made a choked, pained sound. “Anyone tries to leave early, I promise—there is no third warning.” He gave Quinn’s back a savage kick. “Am I understood?”
Everyone nodded and murmured as Quinn groaned and spat blood on the ground.
“Am I understood?”
“Yes!” the group called out in unison.
“Good,” Rich growled. To Kevin, he said, “Get him inside. The rest of you?” He waved sharply at Tyson.
As Kevin started scraping Quinn up off the ground, Tyson led the group down toward the beach. Geri looked back, wishing she could help Quinn. He was alive, yes, but how bad was he hurt? He could be bleeding internally. He could be concussed. He could—
“Ms. Cole,” Tyson barked. “You’re lagging behind!”
Geri faced front again and jogged to catch up. “Sorry. Sorry.”
Evidently Rich’s men intended to punish all of them for Quinn’s escape attempt—they put the group to work in the hot sun without first letting them eat. Everyone was wobbling and staggering, and even Geri ended up on her knees a couple of times. Not for long, though. Tyson or Kevin would be right there, screaming, “Get the fuck up and keep working! Now!”
Their breaks came, and they helped, but no one was steady on their feet for the entire day. Lunch didn’t even help much when exhaustion and heat drove people to puking. Geri didn’t think she’d ever been dizzier or more exhausted, but fear kept her digging and walking, digging and walking, digging and walking.
Even through the haze and misery, she worried about Quinn. With every step she took on the sand, with every shovelful she scooped, carried, and dumped, her fear for him deepened. Was he all right? Was he still alive?
She needed to get back to the hotel and find out.
Geri finished showering off the sand and blood, put on some clothes over her burned skin, and left her suite. She jogged down the hall to Quinn’s door, and she knocked on it. “Quinn? Quinn, are you in there?” She banged on it again. “Quinn?”
There was some movement on the other side. She thought so, anyway; her heart was pounding so hard, she could’ve been hearing things.
But then the deadbolt clicked. The door opened, and Quinn looked like he was about to collapse. One eye was swollen almost all the way shut. The other was black and bloodshot. The dried blood in his hair and on his skin had been washed away, but there were cuts and bruises all over his face, neck, and bare chest. He leaned hard on the door as if he were barely holding himself up. Angry bruises ringed his neck as if someone had tried to strangle him, either with their hands or some kind of ligature.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Come on—you need to sit.” She stepped into the room and herded him toward one of the chairs.
He shifted direction and went for the bed instead, lying back on the mattress with a painful groan.
She sat carefully beside him, making sure not to jostle him. Once she’d settled, she took his hand and squeezed it. “Are you okay?”
He drew the tip of his tongue along his split lower lip. “I’m alive.” The way he made that sound like an admission of defeat made her heart ache.
“What happened?”
He closed his eyes and absently ran his knuckles along an unbruised part of his jaw. “I thought I could get away. Thought I could get farther this time than we did because I knew the terrain a bit better.” He exhaled as he shook his head. “Rich’s thugs brought me back, and they spent the whole damn night working me over.” He laughed bitterly. “I’m surprised he didn’t send me out there to work on the chain gang with the rest of you.”
“Could you even stand up?”
He eyed her. “Do you think that would stop him?”
She exhaled. “Good point.”
Quinn sighed, and he winced as he rolled his shoulders. “We’re gonna die here, Geri. There’s no way out.”
Arguments of “no, we’re not” and “yes, there is,” surged to the tip of her tongue, but they fell away as her own hopelessness sank in.
She clasped his hand tighter in hers. “Then we go down fighting. We keep—”
“There’s no point.” He stared down at their hands and shook his head. “They’ll just keep working us to death and”—he gestured at his face. “They’re going to kill us one way or the other.”
It hit her in the gut, seeing him this destroyed. She couldn’t even say if it was the whole debacle that had done it, or if the men who’d beaten him had broken his spirit. Either way, it hurt to see what Rich and his minions had done to him.
“Look, someone might survive. My dad’s colleague—I think he went through this too. Made it back after everyone else”—she made air quotes—“went down when that storm sank the superyacht.”
“But he didn’t say a word about what happened.”
“No, he didn’t.” She held back that he’d killed himself; Quinn had hit the end of his hope, and she didn’t want to drive him over the brink. “We can’t run. We can’t talk our way out of this. The only thing we can do is try to win.”
He swallowed painfully. “Only one of us will.”
“I know,” she whispered. “But I don’t know what else to do. Try to win. Try to get the hell out of here and get back home. It’s… the only alternative is to lay down and surrender.”
He winced, and she wasn’t sure if it was because of what she’d said or because his throat hurt.
She squeezed his hand again. “We can’t give up. We have to keep trying to survive.”
“I know.” He closed his eyes and exhaled. “But I just can’t help thinking that’s off the table for all of us.” He met her gaze. “Even if we do, look what it’s done to us. One way or other…” He shook his head, and his voice was barely audible as he added, “We’re never going home. Not completely.”
Geri’s chest hurt as his words sank in. He was right. She knew he was right. The people they were when they’d set foot on this island were already dead and gone.
She wasn’t even sure who she was trying to convince as she whispered, “We have to try.”
Quinn nodded. He didn’t argue.
He probably didn’t have anything left.
The torment was relentless. If they weren’t shoveling sand, they were moving huge rocks. If they weren’t in the boardroom, never knowing if a challenge was just a mindfuck or something lethal, they were waiting for someone to tell them what fresh hell was next. If they weren’t trying to sleep through horrific projections, they were eating cold, congealed food in smaller and smaller portions. Some of it tasted a bit off, too, and it often didn’t sit well in people’s stomachs.
Another challenge came and went. Geri was almost numb to the horror by the time she watched one of Rich’s men inject Kit Mason with strychnine. Kit had lost a challenge relating to class action lawsuits and settlements, and her company had turned out to be the one most aggressively paying people to shut up about cancer, birth defects, and deaths associated with her products.
The most disturbing thing about Kit’s protracted and agonizing execution was the empty chasm in Geri’s chest. She was so beaten down in so many ways, she was emotionally flatlining even as she watched another human being convulse and froth at the mouth before breathing finally ceased.
What the fuck has this place done to me?
Kit was still on the floor beneath the windows when the remaining competitors were dismissed from the boardroom. As everyone got up and headed for the door in silence, Geri couldn’t help but drift to one of the windows across the room from Kit.
Standing there, body aching and mind still reeling, she stared out at the inescapable island below. The airfield that would take her nowhere. The marina without boats. The endless sea. She may as well have been bobbing in a lifeboat the middle of the ocean, far beyond the reach of electronics and the notice of passing ships. A cracked, sinking lifeboat surrounded by sharp, patiently circling fins.
At one point, she’d analyzed this view for a means of escape. Today, with Quinn still battered and bruised from his second attempt to flee, and her own body just healed from their first try, all she saw outside the windows was forbidding terrain and hopelessness. Their captor had thought of everything. He was, at every turn, several steps ahead of them.
Which made her wonder—how many times had Rich played this game so far? How many safeguards had he put into place because of trial and error after previous contestants had tried to outsmart him? How many people only existed in fake videos for weeks, months, maybe years before they met tragic and unexpected ends on mountain expeditions, helicopter flights, and deep-sea explorations?
How many body bags had been thrown onto trucks on the hotel’s loading dock?
Jesus Christ. How deep did this go?
Someone appeared beside her. She sensed the presence of a person, and there was a transparent reflection on the glass, but she didn’t look. She was aware that the room had gone quiet in that way that suggested it was empty. No one remained except the two of them and the stuffy air that tasted of copper.
“It’s quite a beautiful island, isn’t it?” Rich’s voice sent ice down her spine.
“It is,” she acknowledged cautiously.
They stood in unsettling silence. She half-expected him to chastise her for not following the other competitors out of the room as ordered, but he said nothing.
She was afraid of him, but also intensely curious about him. And hell, she was probably dead soon anyway, so why not satisfy the curiosity before she joined Kit and Art and…
She cleared her throat. “You own a private island. With an airstrip and an enormous hotel.” She turned to him. “You’re one of us, aren’t you?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that, like you, I was born into more wealth than anyone could spend in a dozen lifetimes.” He met her gaze. “Where we differ is that I saw the injustice of what I had and how I lived.”
“And this is your solution to it.”
He shrugged unrepentantly.
Anger flashed through her, but she kept her tone even; as doomed as she was, survival instinct still kept her treading somewhat carefully. “So instead of helping people on the bottom, you’re eradicating the people at the top?”
“Who says I’m not doing both?” He laughed quietly. “Who says I’ve never anonymously paid for GoFundMe pages on the very same day I kicked a human parasite off this mortal coil?”
“Have you?”
“I’m not the monster you think I am. I can dispatch a man whose mining company contaminates millions of gallons of drinking water, and then go home and make sure a dozen children have their cancer treatment paid for.”
She shifted on her sore feet, unsure what to make of his answer. Of… well, of anything he did or said or thought. Sometimes the light hit him just right to make him look like Ted Bundy. Then the shadows would shift and he’d be Robin Hood. Now and then, both would shine through.
The impulse to draw away from him and widen this space between them was almost irresistible, but she couldn’t move. It was like standing in the crosshairs of a predator—a sudden move could make it attack, but too much stillness could also make it see an opportunity for the killing blow. Blood pounding in her ears, goose bumps prickling on her sun-scorched skin, she was paralyzed in his gaze as if hypnotized by a snake.
“It’s really not complicated, Geri,” he said after a while. “Every one of us—every billionaire and even millionaire—has the means to make the world markedly better. And yet… most don’t. We have more than we could ever want, never mind need, and yet we keep pushing for more, more, more on the backs of people who don’t have enough. When does it end?”
Geri chewed her lip. “So you just… kill us until there aren’t any left?”
“Seems to be the philosophy of your clientele.”
She winced. Not long ago, she’d have argued and shut him right down. But she was too exhausted and overwhelmed to think. “How do you live with being the villain?”
He huffed a laugh. “I could ask you the same thing.”
She pressed her lips together, hating how little she could gainsay him. How bright and loud the projections on her hotel room wall echoed inside her mind right now.
Beside her, Rich shifted his weight. “There was a mass shooting in your hometown a few weeks before you came here. The shooter was killed before he reached a more crowded area. Shot by a bystander carrying a gun.” He paused. “Do you believe the bystander was the villain in that story?”
“That’s not the same,” she snapped. “The shooter was actively killing people, and he was looking for more victims. And the bystander was a potential victim, too—it was self-defense.”
“Even if he wasn’t in danger himself, I don’t think many would argue that his decision to take that shot was unjustified.”
Geri gritted her teeth. “So that’s how you see yourself? As someone taking out a mass shooter?”
“Something like that.” Rich gazed out the window with unfocused eyes. “I read a lot of fantasy when I was growing up. There were a lot of dragons in those books, each sitting on mountains of wealth, and the hero was always the knight who slayed the dragon.” He turned to at her again. “People like us—we were raised to see ourselves as kings and queens, but the reality is that we’re the dragons. We’re the creatures sitting on hoards of wealth in between terrorizing the townspeople who are already starving.”
Geri pursed her lips as she considered that. “So… kings and queens after all.”
He studied her.
She shifted her attention back to the island beneath them because she couldn’t handle his scrutiny. “The kings and queens live in palaces surrounded by wealth. The townspeople starve.” She swallowed. “And the kings and queens send them into battle to die for more territory, more gold, more power…” Exhaling, she closed her eyes.
“You do understand, don’t you?”
She looked at him, and an odd smile curled his lips. “I…” The rest of the thought stuck in her throat. She wanted to say she didn’t understand killing the kings and queens, but if the kings and queens were more like the dragon than they were the townspeople, then why wouldn’t the townspeople want them slain? It was self-preservation. Survival.
Justice.
Geri shifted her gaze to the window again, and for a long moment, they stared outside in silence. She wondered what he saw out there. What this island and the vast ocean brought to mind for him. What he’d seen that had driven him to systematically—and often sadistically—taking out the people in the social class to which he himself belonged.
She swept her tongue across her dry lips and watched his reflection from the corner of her eye. “What did your father do?”
Rich’s expression shifted to something closer to his game show host smile. “The same thing everyone like us did. He was born into money, and he exploited tens of thousands of people until he had even more money.” He pushed out a breath. “My father believed in growth. Endless, infinite growth. Whatever one had, there could always be more. It could always be bigger.”
Geri nodded numbly. She’d heard her own father talk about that as well. Growth. Expansion. More. Always more .
“Endless growth for the sake of growth is the mindset of a cancer cell,” Rich said. “If it’s not stopped, it eventually kills everything. So rather than being a part of the cancer, I’ve decided to be part of the cure.”
She suppressed a shudder and she wasn’t even sure why. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Didn’t I?”
She studied him. “What did he—what did he do? What business?”
“Every cancer starts somewhere,” he said. “But every cancer kills just the same in the end.” Then he turned to go.
She watched over her shoulder, and he was almost to the boardroom door when she called after him, “Mr. Price?”
He turned around, eyebrows up and an odd grin still on his lips.
She swallowed as she faced him fully. “Did you kill him?”
“My father?”
She nodded.
His eyes lost focus as his expression turned thoughtful. After a moment, he shook his head. “Sometimes I wish I had. And that I’d done it much sooner. Fewer people would have suffered in the name of lining his pockets. On the other hand, I only had my epiphany a few months after he died. If he’d gone sooner, I wouldn’t have had the experiences that paved the way for me to see the truth.” He quirked his lips, then shrugged. “I’m only grateful I had that epiphany one way or the other. I can’t change the past, but I can redirect the future.”
With that, he continued out the door, leaving Geri alone in the empty, bloody boardroom.
Heart thumping, she faced the windows again, gazing out at the most beautiful prison in the world. Shame and regret were anchor chains around her neck. The physical soreness from the hard labor, the beating, and the lack of sleep were dull aches compared to what tore apart her mind. The sun hadn’t burned her skin as badly as the truth blistered her conscience and her soul.
Rich had shown her things she couldn’t unsee. She couldn’t even dismiss it as a psycho killer trying to gaslight her into believing he wasn’t evil. He made no apologies for what he did, but he’d also forced her to see the blood on her own hands. And now that he’d made her look, she couldn’t look away. She couldn’t talk it into something palatable and patriotic with the usual bland corporate buzzwords. The images were seared into her brain; if she ever slept again, she’d be seeing everything from her hotel room’s walls every night for the rest of her life.
All because of Rich Price.
A gun-wielding madman or an errant missile didn’t terrify her the way that man did. He wasn’t just a deranged serial killer who believed he was justified in committing his murders. He didn’t have some warped delusion convincing him that he was doing God’s work or that the innocent people he killed deserved it somehow.
No, he was arguably as sane as anyone Geri had met. He’d thought this through. Planned and executed (literally). Believed to his core that the world became a better place each time he killed.
But the most disturbing thing wasn’t that he believed, rationally and sanely, that what he was doing was good and righteous.
It was that, more and more…
Geri couldn’t disagree.