Page 198 of Fighting Chance

“An interactive one, so let me be interacted with. Put me the hell down!”

Kicking down a door I find in the back corner, I step inside, slamming the door shut behind me right as an actor tries to charge into it. I put my shoulder against it, Layla sliding down my body, loving the way her figure feels against mine.

She huffs, pointing an accusatory finger in my face. “What the hell was that?”

“Protection. A thank you would be nice.”

Her lips part, but she’s suddenly cut off by a dark chuckle. We both turn slowly to face the room.

I’m not afraid of much, but my god, my heart utterly sinks at the large boiling pot in the middle of the room. Cages line the walls, filled with actors covered in wounds. A mad scientist drenched in blood walks toward us, cleaning a dirty knife.

The actors in the cages begin to scream, banging on their enclosures, pleading to be let out while blood pours from their mouths.

Fake or not, I’m fucking petrified.

“Layla.”

“Yeah?”

“Start running, sweetheart.”

“Oh, right.”

The second the words leave her mouth, the scientist pounces. Layla and I both scream.

“What the fuck, dude?” His hand wraps around the back of my shirt as I try to run, and I quelch every instinct I have to pummel the guy. “Take your hands off me or I swear to god I’ll break your fucking fingers.”

“Kieran!”

“I’m a little indisposed, sweetheart.”

Her little frustrated groan is adorable until she lets out a petrified scream. I remove the scientist’s hands from me in an instant, not sorry at all for the way I go about it. That’s my girl screaming.

I take off, then immediately come to a screeching halt, nearly slipping on fake blood. A woman is bent upside down, running on her hands and feet in a bridge position straight for us.

“No! Fuck no! That is not normal!”

Layla’s hands are at my back, urging me to go.

“Stop shaming her and hurry up and get us out of here!” she calls over the shrieks of the actors in the cages.

“That can’t be natural! She’s like a fucking pretzel!”

“She’s about to turnusinto a pretzel if we don’t go!”

I ignore Layla and throw her over my shoulder again before taking off down the hallway opposite the crazyRinglady. She keeps whacking my back, relentless, until I let her down.

“You have got to stop picking—” Layla doesn’t finish her sentence before the door behind us slams shut, the lock clicking. “Who the hell just closed the door?”

“Uh, Layla?” I murmur, my eyes never leaving the room we entered.

Her Ghostface mask tips up as she no doubt glares at me behind it. “Yes, Kieran?”

Oh, she’s definitely glaring at me with the amount of sass she just gave me. “You might want to turn around.”

Spinning so fast she almost topples over, I clasp her shoulders to steady her as she faces what can only be described as hell.

The room is lit lowly, with only a few burning candles here and there, but it’s not the dark that scares me, though. It’s what’s in the middle of the room. There’s a round wooden table with a black cloth thrown over it, the old wicker chairs surrounding it rocking back and forth. A Ouija board sits in the middle of the table, the planchette moving.