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Two.

Three.

Fou—BANG!

The door gave almost instantly. Not a surprise, but a bit of a bummer. I was hoping just for a little bit more time before the five men in black were filtering into my bedroom, hardly even glancing at the posters of scantily clad women lining my walls.

Click. The unmistakable noise of five loaded guns cocking as they were pointed at me should’ve been terrifying. Would’ve been, if I didn't know that the last thing they wanted to do was actuallykillme.

Fuck, they came prepared.

Hands reached for me, masked faces blending together as I fought them, enough to seem like I was actually afraid. And, in part,I was. But not hard enough to warrant being knocked out.

I screamed, kicked and spat all the way downstairs and out of the empty house. Devoid of any furniture or personal items, save for my bedroom that I’d left as a sort of shrine.

Or maybe a serial killer’s murder room.

There was an unmarked van waiting for me, it’s sliding door swung wide into darkness.

Didn’t really matter who’d send these cunts anyway, they were either Devil’s Playground, Government or the Company.

If I was honest, it was the same monster in different clothes anyway.

Night had fallen, so there was no one out to watch as the men took me kicking and screaming out of my house. They could do what they wanted, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for them by going quietly. Not that it fucking mattered, the cowardly dickheads I called neighbors didn’t even have the guts to peek through their curtains.

I wanted them to.I wanted the whole world to see what they were doing. But that just wasn’t the neighborhood we lived in. Wasn’t the society we lived in. If anything, their eyes were probably glued to the screen to watch Hide n’ Seek.

The people around me were scared. Cowardly. They would never step in if they knew their lives were at risk. And for good reason, I guess. Most people weren’t into the idea of being forced into a murder game. Or prison.

Honestly, if I was given the choice, I didn’t know what I’d pick either.

Many of them vocally aired their disgust for the Games. But they were the same ones who watched it in their rooms at night when they thought no one knew. The glow of screens behind closed curtains told me that.

The men pushed me into the back of the van with so much force, I barely had a chance to hold my hands out to soften the blow. I tried to grab onto the opening, but they saw what I was doing and forced my hands to my side.

I’d expected the typical fabric or leather seats of a civilian vehicle, my back and hips aching as I was forced to sit on a cold, hard metal bench lining one side of the van, its twin sister against the opposite wall as hands forced me to stay put. Cold, metal snapped tightly around my wrists, the chain between them clipped to another that was bolted to the floor.

Fucking shit damn it.

With nowhere to go and no real chance of escape, I surveyed the people there, chest heaving with the effort to force air back into my lungs.

Turns out that screaming that long, while also fighting like hell was harder work than I thought.

Two helpers and one man off to the side. They were all wearing the same all-black outfits, like some type of wannabe SWAT team. Silver threading through the top of his rapidlythinning hair, a dinged up left ear that was missing a chunk from when it was grazed by a stray bullet in the maze—hewas the obvious leader and a person I’d researched well.

Daimen Fox.

The other two were insignificant, bullet fodder on the off chance I’d decided to really try and fight my way out of this.

Daimen was an Architect for a while before he became an over compensated lapdog to the top of the top. He appeared to be as fit as his social media profiles boasted, but without the carefully selected filters and good lighting it was obvious that he was aging after so many years on the job. Wrinkles kissed the corners of his eyes, the dark circles under his eyes damn near purple.

He’d gotten complacent, thinking that some money and a nice title would save him from everything.

How fucking wrong he was.Cunt.

“Undress,” one of the helpers said.

“I haverights?—”