Page 51 of The Player

“This.” I threw my bottle onto the floor and stared at the locked door. “It ends today.”

Bryony reached forward, touching my arm.

“Please, Will. Just think about it. Think about what you’re doing. We don’t know what he’s got planned today. All we can do is take each moment as it comes.”

I turned to face her.

“I’m getting you out of here,” I stated. “Even if it kills me.”

“And I’m not leaving without you,” she replied stubbornly.

The sound of the door unlocking, sliding open to guide us to the hell he had planned for us made us both take a sharp breath.

We stood up, and I held my hand out to take hers.

“Will.” She squeezed my hand. “Please don’t do anything stupid.”

“There’s nothing stupid about fighting back.”

“There is if it means you die and I get left in a world without…” She couldn’t finish her sentence.

I swallowed down the lump that’d formed in my throat.

“Let’s just get this over with,” I snapped, feeling like wild horses were pulling me forward, egging me on to go to that room and do whatever I could to force his hand, make him come out and face me.

“Or we could just stay here. Forget his games. Stay in this room.”

She knew we weren’t going to do that. What was the point?

“And spend more days stuck in the darkness rotting away? No. We’re in control. We say how this ends.”

I walked forward, pulling her along with me.

Her movements were slow, reluctant; she didn’t want to leave, but we were seeing this through. That was the only plan I had left.

We walked into a side room attached to the main task area, and I spotted him first, through the glass partition, strapped to a dentist’s chair. There was a leather strap over his forehead to hold him in place and tape over his mouth to stop him from crying out. Metal cuffs were wrapped tightly around his wrists and ankles to immobilize him.

At the side of the room, against the wall, was a table with the usual tools and weapons piled on it. But when I heard her scream as she pulled her hand free from mine, and her legs gave way from under her, the bottom of my world fell away. I felt physically sick seeing her drop to the floor, curling into herself, screaming as tears streamed down her face.

What the fuck was going on?

She buried her head in her hands, unable to look at the man in the chair or me.

I bent down to comfort her as she wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth, chanting, “No, no. Please, no.”

Then she looked up at me, and the pain in her eyes shattered my heart into pieces. She was broken. Totally and utterly broken.

“It’s playtime.” His fucking voice cut through the room as she tried to speak to me as I held her, her mouth unable to form the words she wanted to say.

“Meet Paul. Mister Masters. Or as you like to call him, Daddy.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and she started to sob, agonising heartbreak pouring from her as she held my gaze.

It obliterated me.

I wanted to scoop her off the floor and get her as far away from this room as I could. Wrap her in my arms and shield her from what was about to happen. Wipe the filth from her mind, just take it all away. We’d lived through a nightmare, but today, he was dragging us beyond hell, to a realm more wicked than anything I could’ve imagined. He’d brought her father here, and that was beyond fucked up. It was unbearably evil.

“But to me…” he carried on, and I couldn’t stand to hear his voice any longer.