Page 137 of Let the Game Begin

Look not to any god, only one savior exists. Given to us each a devil and I am yours. No man escapes me for long.

Solve the puzzle.

Player 2511

I scrubbed a hand over my face and threw the piece of paper down on the bar. What was he talking about? What did he mean? This was the third warning I’d received in the space of a few days, and the fact that I’d found this envelope when I was alone in the pool house suggested that the son of a bitch was specifically angry at me.

“So now you want to play with me,” I mused, taking the note between my fingers, but unfortunately that wasn’t the only thing inside.

The corner of what appeared to be a photograph, which I hadn’t noticed before, peeped out from the open envelope. I pulled it out carefully and saw that it was a picture of Logan studying in his room.

“What the…?” I muttered in shock as I realized that there were several more photos. There was one of my mother leaving her workplace, another of Matt getting out of his Range Rover to enter the hospital, one of Chloe walking across a courtyard at her school, and one with Selene in the foreground, smiling at Alyssa on the university campus.

A mixture of rage and disbelief filled my chest until I had to take a seat on a stool. I realized that whoever was behind all of this had been stalkingus. He’d been analyzing our lives, watching our every movement. He knew what we did, where we did it, and at what times.

I tried to muster up my courage, which had crumpled like ash when I saw those pictures and examined the back of them, starting with the one of Logan.

“Who will be the first?” was written on it.

It wasn’t just an idle question—it was a warning and a threat. I frowned as I flipped through the other photos of my family members furiously. Each one had a word written on the back, presumably intended to link up with the others.

I lined up the photos, moving them around until I could read the sentence that bastard Player 2511 wanted me to see:

“You are all targets.”

I sat there, dumbfounded with my mouth open and my eyes wide. I couldn’t even feel my heart beating because I was completely petrified. I swallowed hard and stood up off the stool, running a hand through my hair.

I wanted to break something, preferably the skull of whoever thought it was so much fun to do this to me.

I looked over the photos again before sweeping them away across the bar. Everyone was there, everyone except…

“Me,” I whispered, my voice so low it was almost unrecognizable. I wasn’t in any of the photos. Why?

“You’re loving this, aren’t you? Fucking with my head with all these riddles.” I blurted out, glaring down at the photos and that goddamned note. I had no idea who Player was. After all, I had few friends and a lot of enemies, which made it extremely difficult to identify the architect of this scheme from among them.

One thing, however, was now clear to me: the son of a bitch had started his game because of me.

He wanted me for his opponent, so everyone around me had become a potential target for him. But in what way? What would he do to them?

Shit, I needed a smoke and to get some air.

I dressed in a hurry, pulling on black track pants and a hoodie, and went outside, flicking the hood over my head. I sat down on the chaise longueand stretched my legs out in front of me, crossing my ankles.

I wasn’t just in shock; I was also pissed off. I now had this enormous weight hanging over me.

I had an entire family to protect.

I would have died if anything happened to any one of them, especially because of some unresolved issue that bastard had with me. Whatever this was about, it was clearly my fault, and if he wanted to play, he should have come to me instead of dragging them into it, too.

Fuck, even Selene.

There had been a photo of her as well. She was also a potential target, and all because I’d allowed her to get close to me. I didn’t mean to, but I had dragged her into my shit.

That, after all, was what being around me meant: certain doom.

“I knew I’d find you out here.” Logan approached me at a leisurely pace. He was wrapped in a gray sweatshirt due to the cold.

Lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t realized how late it was. When I isolated myself like that, time seemed to lose all meaning.