Page 83 of Let the Game Begin (Kiss Me Like You Love Me #1)

“Clean up the mess you made of the pool house before Mom gets home,” Logan ordered, following her.

Fortunately, Matt and my mother were away on a business trip, and they’d taken Chloe with them. Otherwise, there was no way I’d be able to explain everything that had happened in the last two days.

I glanced back at my brother, who still stood in the doorway of my bedroom. He gave me a saddened look and sighed again.

“Your angry outbursts are getting more and more frequent. You realize that, don’t you? Maybe it would do you some good to talk with Dr. Lively…” He ducked his chin and concluded, “Just think about it.” Then he walked out and left me alone to consider his words.

***

The next day, I cleaned up the pool house with Miss Anna’s help.

My mother and Matt would be coming back that afternoon, but since I’d thrown out and replaced everything I’d broken, they shouldn’t have noticed anything.

My credit cards had come in handy, and I’d never had a problem using money to fix the damage I’d done.

“I’d say we’re finished,” Anna commented after we wiped down the bathroom. It was the one I’d been using most often lately.

“You’re an angel, Anna.” I smiled at her and put the new vase on the living room table before glancing around. The pool house gleamed and smelled clean, like it was brand new. It had taken us a good five hours to put everything right, but we’d gotten great results.

“Why have you been using this as an apartment and not your room anymore?” asked Anna, who was fussing with the pointless fake flowers my mother loved to use to brighten up the decor.

“Because this is more private.” And it was the truth.

The women I took to bed were too loud, and bringing them up to my room was no longer sensible.

Chloe had suffered from insomnia after what Carter had done to her and could have easily heard what was going on in my bedroom.

Plus, now Selene slept next door, and it made me feel oddly uncomfortable to know that I was causing her sleepless nights.

I couldn’t help but imagine her listening in on me when I was with someone else, which only made me think of her at inopportune moments.

“Oh, I understand… Your habits haven’t changed then?” Anna glanced at me, and I detected a hint of reproach in her tone.

“Why would they change?”

I needed to do what I did. It might have been psychologically questionable and morally unacceptable, but my survival mechanism was the only thing that gave me moments of slight relief from the memories that constantly tormented me.

Miss Anna didn’t answer but only heaved a great sigh and left me by myself.

I spent most of the rest of the day in the pool house, and not because I’d summoned a blond to fuck, although the thought did cross my mind a few times. No, instead it was because I needed to be on my own.

After a few hours of solitude, I’d taken another one of my long showers and stretched out on the sofa to stare up at the ceiling, still wearing just my boxers. My hair was still damp and my skin still red from the heat of the shower.

Abruptly, I tucked my chin and gazed down at my body. With my index finger, I tracked the edges of my tattoo on my left flank, just as Selene had done. I thought about how delicate her touch had felt on me. Even when she was trying to pleasure me, she did it so gently that it made me smile.

God…how could she be so gentle with me?

I thought back on her luminous eyes, her full lips, her pale skin, her hands that shook at my slightest caress, her shocked expression at my teasing, her shyness, her innocence, and for the first time, I thought about how things might have gone differently for us.

If only I’d been a less complicated person.

But I wasn’t. And I knew that if she ever found out everything there was to know about me, she would have run like hell in the other direction.

Thus, I decided in that moment that the best course of action was to get completely out of her life. I needed to stop wanting her, stop touching her, stop trying to protect her, because the only person she really needed to be protected from was me.

She was a moment of perfection, and as such, had always had an expiration date. Yes, I needed to move on from her and do it so gently that she didn’t even notice.

This thing between us would remain just a brief but intense period in my life that I would remember forever.

One of the few positive memories in the swamp that was my mind.

Still absorbed in these thoughts, I let my head fall to look toward the enormous window that overlooked the patio, because I had felt eyes on me.

And I wasn’t wrong.

I caught a glimpse of a figure in the twilight of the evening, a figure in a hood, but I saw them for such a fleeting instant that I wasn’t completely sure. I leaped off the couch, still half-naked, and ran for the door, throwing it open.

“Who the fuck is out there?” I demanded, seeing no one. The freezing air combined with the heat from indoors had hit my exposed flesh, making me shiver.

Maybe I was starting to see things?

Dammit. I didn’t use drugs, but I really felt like I’d just had a hallucination.

Worried, I took a step back inside, but before I could retreat completely, something caught my attention.

A sealed black envelope lay on the doormat at my feet. I frowned and retrieved it. I flipped it over to read the sender’s information, but there was nothing written on the front except a name that was, oddly enough, not unexpected: Player 2511

I looked around the darkness that surrounded me, examined the swimming pool, the long walkway that led to the entrance gate and to the front stoop of the house.

Nothing.

There was no one there.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” I whispered to my imaginary conversational partner. Someone I couldn’t assign a name or a face.

With one last cautious look, I retreated into the pool house and closed the door behind me, staring at the envelope in my hands. I headed for the kitchen bar and tore it open angrily, eager to see what was inside.

I pulled out a sheet a paper with a padlock drawn on it and an almost poetic composition written on it:

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 stalking us. 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 longue and 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.