Page 171 of Let the Game Begin

Chloe had another appointment with Dr. Lively that afternoon, and like always, I was going to take her. First, however, I needed to solve a puzzle: Who was Player 2511?

The bastard had called me while I was in the hospital and masked his number so I couldn’t find out his identity that way. But I knew that there were ways to trace even anonymized numbers, and Luke happened to know a lot about that. So I went to him, and without telling him any details about the situation, I asked him just to try to figure out where Player’s call had really come from.

“You have to give me your phone.” Luke held his hands out to me, and I gave him a flat stare. We were sitting in his car, parked outside the house.I’d asked him to meet me without Xavier because we needed to take care of this by ourselves.

I handed over the phone and leaned over to peer at the laptop he’d brought with him.

“What are you doing?” The vibe between us was different, the tension in the air was as palpable as the awkward silence that filled the car.

“I’m jailbreaking your cell for this program. It’s pirated software that can be used to catch mobile and landline numbers,” he explained, plugging the phone into a cable and typing in a series of numerical combinations.

“Hmm…” I murmured thoughtfully as he continued to avoid looking at me and cleared his throat in obvious discomfort.

“Now we just need to wait a few minutes for it to download,” he added, staring at the black screen where a loading symbol had appeared.

While we waited, I dug out my pack of Winstons and pulled one out with my teeth, feeling around in the pockets of my jacket for a lighter. I was outwardly calm while Luke kept silent, clearly unsettled.

I lifted one side of my mouth and said nothing because I knew he’d start talking soon. I’d known the Krew for years, and I fully understood the character of each one of them, Luke included.

The blond guy beside me was someone who couldn’t bullshit. The foundation of our friendship was honesty, which is why I often preferred him to Xavier, who was underhanded and calculating.

“Listen, Neil…” he began, right on time. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do now. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened to us before. The girl’s hot and everything, but if you’re interested in her, I’ll never let what happened yesterday happen again,” he said, all in one breath. Then, he continued, “She’s not even a very good kisser, not like the girls we’re used to, but she is fucking stunning and she smells nice and she has a picture-perfect ass and who knows what else she’s hiding under those baggy clothes, but hey, if me talking to her is a problem for you, just let me know. She caught me off-guard yesterday, I wasn’t prepared to…” He stopped when I casually propped open the car door and blew out a plume of smoke before taking another drag off my cigarette. I didn’t look at him, though I heard every single word of his little speech.

“It can’t happen again. You’re not to touch her. I want her far away from our group and all our bullshit,” I ordered pointedly. Then I turned to fix him with the stare of someone who would not be contradicted.

Luke considered my answer for a few moments. Maybe he’d been expecting me to say the kind of thing I usually did: “Do whatever you want. Fuck her. Hell, let’s have a threesome.” Or maybe he thought I’d ask “heads or tails?” the way I so often did when we were about to share a woman.

“Okay, I won’t touch her, but…”

I didn’t want Selene to become like the blond from the night before, like Alexia or Jennifer. I didn’t want her to piss away her innocence and be contaminated by a world that ran on appearances and degradation. Selene was different, and she needed to stay herself, no matter what.

Of course, I knew that she enjoyed the sex, though she never would have admitted it aloud, but she liked it with me, because I’d been the only one, and for whatever reason, she felt a powerful connection to me. What would have happened if she decided to give herself to Luke? Or what if she started sleeping with other random guys?

She wouldn’t be the Tinkerbell I’d gotten to know.

That innocent stare would have given way to a feline look of seduction, her willowy body would become soiled and experienced, her natural smile grown sly, her mind poisoned with profane desires. She wouldn’t want to make love the way she dreamed about. Instead, she would have taken men to bed not out of any emotion but out of perversion and need, just the way I did. Just the way I’d been taught.

And wasn’t that exactly how I was now wrongly teaching her?

If Selene changed, got mixed up with the scum that surrounded me, it would have been no one’s fault but mine. All the more reason to push her away from me as fast as I could.

“Neil?” Luke prompted me because I gotten completely lost in my thoughts about Selene. I was thinking about her and Luke or her and some other assholes, and I wasn’t understanding shit at the moment. I looked over at him and put out my cigarette, brushing some ash off my jeans.

“I’ve got bad news for you,” he said when I looked him in the eye.

“What is it?” I sighed.

“The dude called from a coffee shop, Brooklyn Bagel. He probably didn’t want to be traced, so what better way to do that than to call from a landline in a public business?” He shot me a cursory glance, his words smooth as butter now.

“Shit,” I swore.

“Hey, don’t punch the car,” he broke in, trying to prevent me from venting my anger on the dashboard of his Bugatti Veyron, a particularly beloved gift from his father.

“How did he alter his voice?” I asked him, watching as his eyebrows lifted in surprise. He clearly wasn’t expecting me to give him that kind of detail.

“Well, the voice modifier doesn’t have to be incorporated into the phone. All kinds of tech exists to do it,” he explained, sounding detached. That was another thing I appreciated about Luke: his lack of curiosity and good sense of discretion. He just did what I said without poking around, unlike Xavier, who always wanted to know every little detail before he did anything.

My two friends were total opposites, for all that they were cut from the same cloth.