“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray.”
Evan removed his pants with effort, attempting to hold in his groans of pain, but damn, he hurt. He hurt everywhere. He didn’t think he had any broken bones, but he had at least two lacerations that probably needed stitches, one on his cheekbone, and one he felt gaping open along his jaw. He pressed the flap of skin closed, grimacing against the sting, doing what he could to get himself back in order. His body would have to do the rest.
His father had hit him over the years when he’d been displeased with him. And he’d often been displeased with Evan. They were so different. Evan had this sense that his father considered him weak, and the physical abuse was his way of “toughening him up.” But he’d been careful not to leave marks, careful not to hit his face. Evan almost laughed. Maybe his father had done him a favor after all, because he’d learned how to take some hits.
“You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away. Hey!”
As he began removing his underwear, he paused for a heartbeat at her overly exuberant added lyric, smiling slightly despite his present state, then continued undressing.
“The other night, dear. As we lay sleeping, I dreamed I needed you in my arms. When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken. So I hung my head and a plan.”
He let out a small huff of breath, what would have been a chuckle if it hadn’t been swallowed up by a grunt of agony as he dabbed at the cuts on his bruised ribs, wiping the mostly dried blood away. Noelle obviously didn’t know all the lyrics to that song, even though it was simple.
She sang softly as he completed his cleanup tasks to the best of his ability. The song died away, and she turned, sitting across from where he was. “Better?” she asked.
“A little, yeah. Do I look better?”
Her eyes washed over his face, and she gave him a sad smile. “Not much.”
He let out a pained laugh, squinting over at her.
She gave a slight wince. “I don’t know that my ear was worth all that.”
“I meant what I said, Noelle. We leave here whole. It’s a promise. It belongs to us.”
She bit at her lip, and he had the idea that she was thinking what he’d thought earlier: that appearing “whole” from the outside could be misleading.
“Can I tell you about my mom?” she asked.
He tilted his head, surprised. Her mom was the very last topic of conversation he’d expected Noelle to bring up. They’d agreed to leave all that aside so they could work together. Why was she willing to talk about this now? Was it because she felt indebted to him for taking a beating rather than allowing her to be physically hurt again? She shouldn’t. She’d endured a rape, for Christ’s sake, so that his fingers remained attached to his hand. She’d had her virginity stolen by a disgusting predator.
“Noelle, you don’t have to—”
“I want to,” she said, flaring her eyes slightly as though communicating some message. “I want you to hear who she was from me. Not from your father, or some court transcripts, or a news story, or whatever else you might have read about her. I want you to know who she was to me.”
“Okay.”
She pulled in a breath and let it out slowly. “My mom . . . she was a really great listener. She had this ability to read between the lines.” That slight eye flare again, there and gone, and followed by a casual shrug. “And then after she listened, really listened, she gave great advice. She had this way of sprinkling just the right words in to get her point across in the simplest way. It was like music, the way she did that. Her message always felt so perfectly strung together.” She looked away on a sigh as though picturing her mom. The skin on the back of Evan’s neck tingled. What she was saying . . . it sounded reminiscent, but there was something else mixed in there. Was she sending him a message? Saying something secretive under the guise of sharing memories of her mother? “I miss her,” Noelle said. “I still talk to her in my head. These private conversations.” She let out a small embarrassed laugh. “I guess that’s hard to understand.”
She read between the lines . . . sprinkling just the right words in . . . like music . . . perfectly strung together.
Evan stilled, understanding dawning.
The song. He’d thought she had forgotten words and was inserting the wrong ones to make up for what she didn’t remember. But no. She’d been inserting words for him to pick out and string together. A secret way of speaking that would be just between them. Because she believed, as did he, that they were being watched and listened to. “No,” he said, meeting her eyes. “I do understand. Perfectly.”
Their gazes held, his head tilted so he could see her clearly out of his one good eye. “I’m so glad,” she said, her voice slightly choked and a tempered excitement shining in her eyes.
He searched his mind to recall the words that had stood out as wrong to him, the ones he’d chuckled at as she’d sung. He couldn’t remember them now because he really hadn’t paid much attention. Songs became such background noise. It was why he’d started singing when she’d asked him to create noise. The mind naturally drifted into its own thoughts, in essence tuning out the specific words of the music. She was fucking brilliant, and despite his aching body, he felt momentarily elated. And he suddenly remembered one word he’d picked out as she’d murmured the song he knew well. It was another one his own mother had once hummed to him as he fell into dreams. A plan. Noelle had put the word plan into the song.
She’d been telling him they needed to come up with a plan.
He had no idea what remote options they might have, but he did understand that if they were going to implement anything at all, they needed to be able to strategize discreetly.
And though he had no access to pain medication or soothing salve, for the moment at least, his discomfort faded to the background as his thoughts took flight.
CHAPTER NINE
It’d been a week since the Collector had logged on and checked on the contestants. The boy. The girl. Evan. Noelle. He’d had a work commitment that couldn’t be delayed and, because of it, had been away from the computer in his home office where he watched the game. He felt a small buzz of excitement but tamped it down. He never allowed his emotions to control him. He’d had many long years of practice, and he used it still. He’d found that, in all matters, both consequential and not, a much cooler head prevailed when one could remove their own feelings and sympathies. Not everyone could master the ability, but it came naturally to him. It always had.
He sat down, turning on the monitor and going through the many steps necessary to join them where they were, locked in a building, in some room that had been prepared just for them. From what he understood, the locations were chosen months in advance and set up not only for the purposes of the game but in such a way that if it became necessary to disassemble them, it could be done in record time. In this business, he supposed, all sorts of contingency plans were necessary. The point of the game was that anything might happen. The more unlikely, the better, as that’s where players stood to make the most money.