1
CECILY
This is a mistake.
The worst of all.
The most disastrous of all.
Maybe even the deadliest.
I shift in place, sweating behind my mask. My T-shirt and jeans stick to my heated skin until it’s almost too unbearable.
I inhale sharp breaths into my starved lungs, but I might as well be consuming smoke. My fingers itch to touch the mask or readjust the wig that digs into my skull.
After careful consideration, I don’t.
This place must be filled with surveillance cameras, and the last thing I want is to catch these people’s attention.
Not when I’m not supposed to be here. Behind enemy lines.
My gaze flits sideways discreetly as I methodically alternate between breathing through my nose and mouth.
The sledgehammer of dusk starts to tilt on the horizon, splashing a hint of orange behind the gray clouds.
An eerie sensation coats the thick air and trickles into my bones. No one aside from me seems focused on the sun’s ceremonial descent or the bold silhouette of danger this place is coated with.
On either side of me stand people wearing similar white masks with black numbers written on their foreheads.
I was one of the first to be allowed inside the Chamber of Decadence and my number is twenty-three. I stand in the second row that, like the first, has twenty people.
No,students.
There are four rows, and the fifth is steadily being filled by the other participants who’ve been directed inside the gothic-like mansion by burly men in black suits and grotesque bunny masks.
Slashes of red crack their masks at the mouth and surround the holes where their blank eyes show. But the part that made me stiffen, aside from their sharp, dirty teeth, was how the one at the entrance double-checked the invitation QR code on my phone.
I was so sure he’d figure out that I stole someone else’s invitation and was trespassing where I shouldn’t be.
Despite the brown wig I wore to cover my attention-grabbing silver hair, the gray contacts, and thick-framed glasses, I wasn’t confident I’d go unnoticed.
Still, I didn’t speak to avoid giving away my British accent.
After all, The King’s U is an all-American school, and we from Royal Elite University are easily picked out from a crowd.
Especially one we’re not supposed to be part of.
Like this initiation.
The bunny gave me a hard stare, definitely longer than the one he directed at the other participants, but he eventually strapped a numbered mask on my face and a tag on my wrist with the same number.
I had to leave my phone, keys, and glasses with his bunny friend before I was allowed inside.
And now, I wait, with about eighty-five others. Make that eighty-seven.
I know because I counted.
That’s what I do when my nerves are about to slice open my veins and spill my blood onto the ground. I count.