The Altruism Effect: Book One (Mastermind Murderers Series 1) Read online

  “You don’t have to tell me.” Arie croaked.

  She didn’t. “Enough about me. How was the yard?” she asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “I spent some time with Megan when everyone was gone. She came to me.”

  He was quiet. “She used to come to me.”

  “Maybe she goes to those that need it most, Arie. Maybe she doesn’t think you need her encouragement right now?”

  “Encouragement? Is that what you got from her?” he asked.

  He was right. She hadn’t necessarily given Raine hope during their visit. If anything, she hinted that she shouldn’t try and escape again or things would get even worse for her. She told Raine that she’d been there for two years, and pretty much any attempt she’d made to get back to her normal life was shot.

  “The yard was fine. I never quite understand it. It’s disorienting. We’re given something by the guards.”

  “Given something?”

  “A capsule. A pill to take, in little paper cups. We stand in line, they administer it. If we don’t swallow and show our open mouth and tongues, then we can’t go outside.”

  “You think he gives you drugs to confuse you as to where you are?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what it is. But the breath of fresh air is worth it. But even though I’m aware of what’s going on, everything is quite disorienting. It’s a muted brightness. Cloudy. Foggy. That’s all I know.”

  “How did you know a new prisoner was being put into that cell after me?” she asked.

  “I heard two of the guards talking about how they had a new one at receiving and he was fighting them. It was only a matter of time before they went straight to solitary confinement.”

  She leaned back in the cage and listened.

  Arie continued, “We’ll see soon enough who the next victim is. The only problem is, whenever somebody new comes, he always gets rid of one.”

  “Like, kills them?” she asked, her voice shaky.

  “We don’t know what happens to them. Someone always disappears from the cages.”

  Her mind worked furiously at the possibilities of the new situation.

  “Do we have another plan?” she asked, hesitant.

  “Me? I always have a plan.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  She’d forgotten how cramped these cages were. Her legs were beginning to fall asleep, and she tried a few different seated poses to stretch them out and try to bring circulation back to them. She reached up and touched the tender area above her cheekbones, the pressure in her head pounding. The area around her eyes was sensitive, and for once she couldn’t wait for the guards to shut off the lights and make the prison pitch black. Usually that was a time of anxiety for her, but this time she welcomed it.

  It wasn’t long after, her wish was granted. The lights went out and her eyes adjusted to the dim light.

  “G’night Arie,” she mumbled, and placed her hand on the wall between them.

  “Goodnight Raine,” he reciprocated, “I uh, I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. She wasn’t expecting that.

  “I’m sorry. I just thought you should know.”

  She sighed, her muscles relaxing. “No, same,” she whispered. Her eyes fluttered closed once more, for just a moment, when the door to the warehouse screeched open. A guard she didn’t recognize burst through the door, flashlight in hand. Since it wasn’t Buck, and it wasn’t the guard that returned her to her cage, they must have switched to the night shift.

  He didn’t bother to turn on the overhead lights, but many of the others in their cages stirred in the beam of the flashlight.

  Raine ignored the commotion and tried to close her eyes again when she heard her own cage rattle. She opened her eyes to see the shadow in front of her door. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  He rattled the keys in her door, “Let’s go. He wants to see you.”

  Her heart raced. “No,” she said firmly.

  The guard turned his head. “Don’t make this difficult.” He narrowed his eyes and patted the side of his belt where the baton was stashed. She turned and crawled out on her hands and knees.

  Without bothering to cuff her again, he grabbed her arm.

  She winced as his hand pinched the sensitive area under her arm, and she left the warehouse with him.

  It all happened so fast. She had no clue where they were headed. “What did I do? Why does the Warden want to see me?” she pleaded.

  He choked on what she thought was a laugh. “The Warden? Naw, that’s not who I’m talking about.”

  They stopped outside of the door to one of the holding rooms.

  “Who then?” she asked. Her brow furrowed.

  “He’s been asking for you ever since he was brought in. Asking for you through his entire intake. He won’t shut up about it.”

  He unlocked the door, grabbed her by the back of the neck and threw her into the small room. The door closed and the sickening scrape of the lock clicked.

  TWENTY-TWO

  She choked in the guard’s grasp as she was tossed into the room. She rubbed her neck, leaned forward, and clutched at the doorknob.

  Locked. The room was small; the size of a walk-in closet, even smaller than the room with the bed and camera.

  He sat restrained to a wooden chair in the middle of the room. Leather straps bound his arms and legs.

  “Troy?” she heaved.

  His face was close to unrecognizable. His eyes were bruised blue and purple, and his lip was swollen. He had a huge gash on his upper cheekbone.

  “Raine,” he lisped.

  “How the hell did you end up here?” she asked. She didn’t move. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She couldn’t believe that even though he was the one in restraints, she still didn’t trust him.

  “Look at you. You’re alive.” He took his time, and his words were slurred. His bloody teeth poked out from under his lip.

  She nodded. She crossed her arms over her chest and bit her lip to keep from showing emotion on her face.

  “Ever since you were taken, I was blamed for it. Especially by Marcus.”

  “How’d you know I was taken? The Warden told me you all thought I was dead.”

  “We did. But then I looked into it. Sure, your car was found burned up. But they would never answer questions about your body. The evidence has been impounded, obviously. They won’t tell the public anything. I think—I think the conspiracy is that law enforcement is embarrassed they couldn’t straight-out say they didn’t find a body. Who would suspect that a monster would replace your body… with another?” he coughed, hacking over his chest. He wore a gown identical to hers, though his was stained with fresh blood. “I think I’m here because I was close to solving the case. And look at that-I found youuu.” He grinned. There was something chilling about the way he sung the words.

  A pang of intuition told her something was seriously wrong. The constant harassment and threats he made to her when they worked together. The sandalwood. The scratches on his arm that night. The fact that there was a possibility he knew she’d be leaving late from Marcus’. Troy was one of the only ones who knew they’d been seeing each other, apart from her friend Melita of course.

  And there was the fact that she still couldn’t clearly see the face of the shadowy image in her memory of the car wreck.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “Cut the shit, Troy.”

  He laughed airily, the swollen lip not impairing his smirk. He looked up at her with narrowed eyes. “I’ve been beaten and strung up to a chair. My dick has been sprayed down by a water blaster, and you think there’s a possibility I might have something to do with this whole charade? I may call out a nice piece of ass when I see one, but I ain’t this twisted.” His head dropped, as if to recover from the energy it
took to impart that message to her.

  She let her arms fall to her sides. “The Warden said he was one of your patients. Who is he?” she asked.

  “The Warden?”

  “The man responsible for all this. Now who is he?”

  “I’ve been here a total of one night. You’re telling me you don’t even know who kidnapped you?”

  “Do you?”

  Silence.

  He squirmed in the chair. “He was my client. A while back he stopped coming for sessions. Disappeared. He’d talk about… ” He stopped to catch his breath, tried to lean forward and then lifted his head again. “He’d talk about psychological experiment archives. He was particularly fond of the professor who conducted the prison experiment. He talked a lot in our sessions about how he could do it better.”

  She contemplated that. “You said you were close to cracking the case. Do you at least have any idea where we are? How did you find it?” she asked, her eyes round. She was surprised a guard hadn’t come back for her yet, after all these questions. Perhaps they were preoccupied. Or perhaps Troy still had something to do with this.

  “Oh you know. Went and found his file, sought out all the places in the city that I knew he owned.”

  “Wait. Why didn’t you go to the police?” she half whispered the sentence in a desperate plea.

  He looked up at her with drooping eyes. “Because I’m their number one suspect.” Each word was carefully articulated.

  She sighed. “So you know where we are?”

  “Yes. I think so,” he grunted.

  She raised her hands. “Well?” Her eyes widened and she put her hands on her hips. He’s playing games. He likes having control over me.

  He mumbled something underneath his breath.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I said, come here and gimme some tongue, and I’ll tell you.”

  “You disgust me.”

  He laughed, a raspy sound that turned into a small cough. He looked back up at her. “You want to know, or not?”

  She looked around the room before she returned his stare. “I can’t believe this,” she whispered. She needed to know. Any information she could glean outside of what she already knew about this place could mean the difference between trapped and escape, death and life. “Why would you withhold information from me? What difference does it make to you?”

  “Absolutely no difference.” He laughed under his breath.

  “You think this is funny?” She moved closer to him. As pathetic as he was, he still infuriated her.

  “You better hurry. My time is limited.”

  She tilted her head in question.

  “He made me swallow a pill. Told me, some sort of poison that would rupture my… “ he coughed, “… internal organs.”

  She backed away from his chair. “Wha-you’re bluffing.”

  He smirked. His sly smile was interrupted by another fit of coughs.

  “Troy, please. Tell me! Tell me where we are so I know. You came here to find me, right? You came to help me escape?”

  “I came for my kiss.”

  She slapped her thigh in rage and let out an exasperated sigh. She walked up to his chair. She stood and thought for a moment. I could beat the information out of him. But she was a lover, not a fighter. And he was pretty beaten already. She bent down to his face and looked him in the eyes. He parted his lips, revealing the small gap between his front teeth.

  “You’re all… “ she whispered, looking at his swollen lip.

  “Haven’t you ever tasted a little blood before?” he slurred.

  “I hate you.” She swallowed hard, squeezed her eyes shut and moved in, reluctantly placing her lips on his.

  He pushed his head forward and shoved his tongue between her lips. He tasted metallic.

  She backed up quickly and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then spit onto the floor. “Ugh!”

  “We’re still in San Francisco. The city. This part of the building is concealed from the general public. There’s people walking with shopping bags on their arms and coffees in their hands right underneath us.”

  “Do you know who the Warden is? Have you seen him?”

  “Briefly. I was disoriented. Drugged.” He coughed and looked at her. The red, broken blood vessels in his eyes were desperate. Blood sprayed from his mouth, into her face.

  She gasped and fell against the door. She swiped her cheek with her hand and pulled it away to see the deep crimson smeared on her hand.

  “When he forced the pill down… I told him to eat shit.” His voice was soft.

  She put her hand up to cover her mouth as Troy choked, blood spewing from his mouth and down his chin. She saw his eyes rolling into the back of his head before she covered her face and turned around. She banged her fists on the door. “Help! Let me out!”

  The door flew open and she fell out into the hallway on her knees, face down at the feet of the guard.

  “Get up. I said get up!” he yelled.

  She used what energy she had left to get to her feet. She didn’t dare look back in that room, and the guard slammed the door and grabbed her by her arm.

  “What the hell happened? I leave for one second and-”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  The guard stopped in the hallway, pulled her to one side, and forced her to look at him. “You think that I think you’re capable of something like that?”

  She shook her head.

  He let go and grabbed her arm again, pushing her back in the direction of the warehouse. “Now I have to clean that up,” he muttered.

  She thought she heard unsteadiness in his voice, but she couldn’t tell over her own insecurity.

  He unlocked the warehouse, pulled back the door, and pushed her in front of him.

  Some of the people in the cages started murmuring. She soon found herself at hers.

  “Raine? Oh my god, what happened? Are you okay?” Arie yelled from his cage, rage in his words.

  “Not my blood,” she whispered.

  The guard opened the cage.

  She bent down and crawled in.

  The lock clicked shut behind her.

  She hugged the cement with her hands, and rested her cheek on the cold concrete. She’d never be able to close her eyes without seeing that image of Troy in her mind, ever again.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Raine.” Arie’s voice was soft on the other side of the wall. “You want to talk about it?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. The blood that was caked on her skin had dried, and she felt it pulling at her face.

  “Night guard dropped off our dinner a while back and you haven’t touched it.”

  The thought of eating made her queasy. She moved to sit up and rubbed her stomach with both hands. “We’re going to die.” She found the words, though they sounded weak flowing off her tongue.

  “Of course we’re all going to die. We’re humans. Unless you’ve found some fountain of youth nobody knows about?”

  She wasn’t up for jokes. She could tell he probably regretted it the moment the words came out of his mouth.

  “No. Here. We’re all going to die prisoners of the Warden.” She spoke in a monotone.

  “C’mon now. You sound like the other hopelesses in the cages around us would if they ever said anything. I know some bad things happened to you here Raine, but you can’t give up. There’s gotta be a way.”

  She looked up to see his hand outside the bars, stretching out to her. She reached up to it and wrapped her hand around his fingers, giving them a gentle squeeze before she let go. “I’m not feeling very well,” she whispered, whether he heard her or not.

  It wasn’t long before she heard the echo of boots on the concrete outside her cell. The sound stopped in front of her cage. They�
��re probably picking up the food I didn’t eat, she thought, exhausted. When the boots didn’t walk away, she raised her head up and looked over her shoulder.

  It was the nice guard. The one that freed her from the leather table. He’d knelt down and looked in her cage. When he saw her stir, he nearly lost his balance. He hopped back up and bent down to unlock her cage.

  She didn’t move.

  “C’mon,” he coaxed her.

  She groaned. “I don’t wanna go to any more rooms,” she mumbled.

  “Did I say you had a choice?” His voice was stern.

  It surprised her. She hadn’t heard anything but kindness from this man since she arrived, when he did decide to speak.

  She sighed deeply and pulled herself up to a seated position, turning around.

  When he saw her, his hand went to his stomach, and his face turned as white as a ghost.

  “I know,” she said, as her eyes prickled with tears.

  “Come on. Get out.”

  She crawled out of the cage and used what energy she had to push off the floor and stand. She turned her head and looked into Arie’s cage. She only saw the bottom of his bare dirty feet, the rest of his body in shadow. She walked, one foot in front of the other, out of the warehouse with the guard behind her.

  “Right,” he directed her.

  “Not going that way?” she asked, motioning the opposite direction.

  “No.”

  “I’ve never been this way before.”

  “I’m taking you to the guards quarters.”

  “Is that allowed?” If it had been any other guard, she’d be punished for asking this. But it was different with this one. They shared the connection of knowing the truth about this operation.

  “He’s out.”

  She stopped. “Out? Well then why don’t we just le-”

  “Quiet!” he snapped. “You can’t just be shouting those things out around here! There’s eyes everywhere, don’t you get it?”

  She mashed herself against the wall, wide eyed. “I’m sor-”

  “Save it.” He grabbed her by the wrist and guided her down the hallway, to a door on the left that he needed to unlock. The key was stuck at first and he had to jiggle it to get it loose. The door opened and she went in; he followed and locked the door behind him. They were in a sort of closet, with a staircase behind.