Enslaved by the Others by Jess Haines Page B

what end, but I could play that game, too. Who said Others were the only ones who could be manipulative?
    Then I remembered that I wasn’t exactly human anymore, and had to swallow down a sick feeling of inevitability. I didn’t want to turn into the kind of monster I’d always been afraid of, but if that’s what it took to escape, I couldn’t afford to be squeamish. I would be as careful as I could be, bearing in mind what Gideon was and what he’d done. He wasn’t just a manipulative asshole. He was a cold-blooded murderer. Letting him help me was a risk I was willing to accept if it meant escaping this place.
    “We’ll get out of here,” I said, not sure if I was trying to convince Iana or myself. “Whatever it takes.”
    She didn’t answer, padding away on quiet feet to leave me alone with my thoughts of curses, death, and whether I might not be letting circumstances bring out an evil in me that maybe had been there long before I started turning Other.
     

Chapter Eight
     
    After the initial meeting with Fabian, Gideon, and Sara (I didn’t think zombie-Tiny or the other zombie guy counted), Max didn’t return for days. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but by the third night, it was getting hard to stay on the razor’s edge of readiness to face whatever evil might be waiting for night to fall.
    There were a couple of touch-and-go moments where I nearly flipped out. One was when a trio of suited guards came in. I rolled off the bed I was lounging on and put it between us, looking for something to use as a weapon. They just stood by the door and smirked at me, sharing amused looks at my confusion and panic. A minute or two later, a couple of women in leather collars and, incongruously, neatly pressed maid’s outfits, came in with a cart of supplies to clean the rooms and change the bedding. Apparently this was something they did every two or three days.
    Talk about awkward misunderstandings.
    The constant, fearful jitters faded by the end of the week. Instead of jumping at every unexpected sound and intrusion of Max’s security team and cleaning crew, it became too commonplace to worry about. Aside from telling us to get off the furniture they needed to clean or to lift our feet so they could vacuum a patch of carpet, they left me and the rest of Max’s captives alone.
    It was so odd to see how he had set up his private harem. We were treated relatively well, given pretty much anything we wanted, and left alone by Max’s minions. We weren’t starved, by any means. The cabana I’d noticed on my first tour of the place provided meals as well as drinks. Lots of iron-rich foods, like vegetables, nuts, shellfish, and steak, along with daily vitamin supplements, most likely to combat the frequent blood loss the others suffered from Max’s attentions.
    We were supposed to return our dishes through the same slot they were provided through. It was too small to squeeze through and escape, but big enough for plates, bowls, and small glasses to be passed back and forth. I couldn’t see much of the kitchen through the slot, but it looked like the people who ran it were all collared and uniformed. Trapped like the rest of us. The forks and spoons they passed us were plastic, and all our food was already cut up, so we didn’t need knives. The design was clever but chilling in its efficiency.
    My presence didn’t change the routine a bit. The other captives might have been a tad nervous around me, but even they didn’t treat my arrival as unusual for long. For the most part, the others avoided me the way they avoided Iana; not making eye contact, scooting away or getting up to move to another room if one of us got too close, keeping responses monosyllabic and hushed, like they were afraid of being punished for talking to us.
    Maybe that wasn’t so far from the truth, since they figured from my conversations with Iana that I might be the one to save them. Or maybe they thought that getting too close