Page 86 of Cup of Lies

“Bermuda’s in the conference room with Halo. They’ve been crawling the internet looking for any sort of activity with our marks. Gideon and Bastian are on the move. Both their social media accounts were deleted. Reporters are camped out at their building, but neither of the men has shown up.”

I rub at my temple as I ponder where those two could have gone. They’re definitely on the run now that they’ve been caught lying to the masses and attempting mind control through subliminal messaging. Even if people didn’t believe the mountains of evidence and testimonies against them, their sudden disappearance proves their guilt. Just like Huxley’s suicide proves his.

“Now what?” I guzzle the hot liquid, eager for the jitters to hit. “What do we do?”

“The chips are falling as we speak,” Koyn says with a grim smile. “Now we see where they land. We’re getting closer.”

Only a few steps away to a simpler life with my girls.

It can’t come soon enough.

It’s been a week since Huxley’s suicide. Romy handled it a lot better than I thought. He’s her biological father and one of her tormentors. I’d assumed she’d want a little more justice out of him. She was just glad he’s dead and can’t hurt anyone anymore.

She yawns and offers me a sleeping Nova. I eagerly take my daughter, letting her rest against my chest so Romy can take a bathroom break. I’m stroking Nova’s dark hair and kissing her soft head when my phone buzzes with an incoming text.

It’s a video.

From Dragon.

I stiffen as I play it. Dragon’s handsome but completely psychotic face comes into view as he grins devilishly.

“Found him, Johnny.”

I’m no longer annoyed he calls me that. I figure all these guys have nicknames and that’s the one they gave me.

“He was hiding,” Dragon reveals, making a tsking sound with his tongue. “But he went to the funeral. He was easy to track from there.”

I hear muffled screaming in the background and it turns my stomach. Thankfully, Nova sleeps deeply and Kaitlyn has been out for a couple of hours. To be safe, though, I lower the volume on the phone.

“Once we found the house he was staying at, me and Katana snuck in. I knocked him out like I did you that one time.” He winks at me. Fucker. “Then we wrapped him in a sheet and threw him in the back of the SUV.”

The background is dark and doesn’t look like a house. Maybe an abandoned building or something.

“We saw those torture chairs they had at that place he ran,” Dragon says, breathing heavily as he walks toward the sound of the screaming. “So me and Kat built one of our own. Wanna see?”

He flips the screen around and I can see light in the dark, cavernous room. There are two figures. One stands stiff and unmoving. The other is strapped to a chair, screeching with terror.

As Dragon nears, everything comes into view. Doc Junior is sitting in a chair, pinned to it with knives driven through his thighs and into the wood. He’s been wrapped with barbed wire around his bare chest, the rusty metal piercing every piece of flesh it touches. Red rivulets of blood leak from each hole.

“Don’t worry,” Dragon says, gesturing to a pile of tiny used containers. “He won’t bleed out of his thighs. I superglued his skin to the blades.”

Bile creeps up my throat because this is fucking gross. I’ve seen horror movies, but this is too real for comfort.

I can hear the shower running and am thankful Romy isn’t witnessing this sick shit.

“We couldn’t figure out the head device they used, so me and Katana got creative.” He walks around to show the back of Doc Junior’s head. “I hammered a few nails in the back, just deep enough to pierce the skull. His brain’s safe for now.”

Doc Junior screams in horror. Something is in his mouth, keeping him from really belting out in pain.

A board that has been nailed to the back of the chair is what the nails going into his head are coming through. I don’t even want to know how much that hurt. Sure enough, I can see three nail heads hammered all the way into the wood. The other end of them must be poking through his skull. It’s a twisted version of how they kept us trapped and immobilized in the head contraption.

“We want him to see everything,” Dragon explains, coming around to view Doc Junior from the front. “That’s where the stapler comes in handy.”

Katana approaches with a stapler. The camera jiggles as Katana takes the phone. Dragon flips open the stapler and grips a handful of Doc Junior’s blond hair.

“Hold still, fucker,” Dragon says with a grunt.

The screams are deafening as Dragon pulls Doc Junior’s eyelid up over his eyebrow and staples it into the muscle and flesh there. His eye is grotesquely widened and now his lid drips with blood. Dragon wastes no time making the other side match, but it takes a few staples for him to get it to stick. The whole thing is gory and gross.

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