She glares at me as she storms past him to do as he ordered. I glare right back.
Dare has me pulled against his body as he drags me inside. Leaning in, he murmurs in my ear, “You are not being a very good girl.”
I would like to shove him off a cliff, so if he thinks I care at all what he thinks of my behavior, he’s very confused.
Anae is muttering about how stupid we both are as she irritably kicks a can of paint across the floor.
“Can you not do that?” Dare says. “I need you to stop acting like a child for a minute and help me get control of her.”
I try to bite him, but I can’t reach with my teeth.
Anae is irritated, but she still comes over to help him. “What do you need me to do?”
“Get some rope out of the closet over here,” he says. I feel his body shift as he indicates a coat closet behind us.
Anae walks past, glaring at me and muttering, “Stupid cunt.”
Dare sighs, hauling me through the massive marble foyer into a large living area with vaulted ceilings. The place is staged, so there’s top-of-the-line furniture and a big beige area rug spread out on the ground below it. I look around for things it would be easy to kill me with. The end table is glass with sharp corners. Don’t want to fall by that or get my head bashed into it. There’s a big ball sculpture on top of it that could potentially be heavy.
The room is overwhelmingly white which seems less than ideal for a murder scene, but the couch is covered in thick plastic.
Dare takes me over to it, forcing me down on the couch and coming down on top of me.
He has to let go of my mouth for a minute as he positions himself so he’s straddling me, pinning my hips down to keep me from getting away from him.
“Get your hands off me,” I tell him.
He does exactly the opposite, forcing my wrists together over my head and pinning them with one gloved hand so he can put his other hand over my mouth.
I’m shocked Anae manages to enter the room quietly, but she isn’t wearing her heels. She must have realized sneakers were more practical for committing felonies.
She sits down on the end of the couch by my feet and loops the rope around my ankles before tying it so tight, the rope cuts into my bare skin.
“All right, we need to regroup,” Dare tells her.
“Can we just kill her now?” Anae asks. “I’m sick of this bitch.”
My stomach drops. I knew that had to be the plan, but to actually hear it…
Anae stands, smirking when she sees my horror-stricken face. “What, you didn’t think we brought you on a field trip just to let you leave alive, did you? I don’t fucking think so, Aubrey. The funny thing is, this is all your fault. We weren’t going to kill you from the get-go. Dare was supposed to seduce you, fuck away your stupid little virginity, and make you fall for him, sure, but I was going to leave you with a broken heart. Until you kept fucking pissing me off,” she says, her eyes narrowing.
My stomach hasn’t stopped dropping since she started speaking. I look up at Dare. He’s looking down at me, a look in his eye that I’m too scattered to put a name to right now.
“Oh, yeah. You thought he just noticed you because he saved your life,” Anae says, rolling her eyes. “I don’t think so, bitch. He didn’t notice you at all. I asked him to go after you, so he did. All of this was bullshit. A fiction. You’re nothing to him. A game. Not even a game, just an insignificant little pawn on the board. I am the queen here, Aubrey. He is my king, and you? You are nothing.”
“All right, we’re getting a little close to a villain monologue here,” Dare says, glancing back at her. “You want to wrap it up?”
“I want to see you with her,” Anae says.
Dare looks over at her. “What?”
“You already went off plan if you fucked her tonight. You weren’t supposed to leave your DNA on her.”
“I used a condom,” he states.
This is mortifying.
“I want to make sure you don’t change your mind,” she states, watching him. “Why don’t you fuck her face, leave some cum in her belly?”
“I’m not going to change my mind,” he says. “You think I’m going to take it this fucking far and then change my mind?”
“Rape her and leave it in her cunt if you’d prefer. I just want to see you hurt her,” Anae says, her gaze locked on his.
Silence falls for just a few seconds, but it feels like longer.