Burning Choice (Trevor's Harem #3) Read online

  I don’t like it here.

  Yesterday, I was exploring the east wing. Lights came on ahead as I walked, then died behind me. If I stayed in a room for a few seconds, music would start playing. And not just any music. Some of my favorite bands, my favorite obscure albums. We’re allowed to pilfer any foods we want from any of the many rooms where it’s offered, and more than once I’ve approached a refrigerator and heard something rattling inside as I reach for the handle, then opened it to see my favorite foods waiting inside.

  We know we’re being watched. We were told that from the outset. But more and more, I get the feeling that the house itself is responding to my whims.

  So I’m not exploring today. I’m staying in my room, where it’s easier to pretend I have privacy. I pace and pace, thinking of those who might be watching me, deciding that Bridget Miller in Zoo Enclosure Number Seven is losing her motherfucking mind.

  But I keep right on walking, heedless.

  And I think: I get to stay here, in this place.

  Get to.

  Trevor chose me over Erin, whom Jess and I were rooting for. He chose me over Blair, Kat’s friend — or at least countryman — who I suppose will now finally be able to go home and find out if she “fed cat.” And he chose me over four other girls who (let’s be honest) are a far better fit for this place, this contest, and Trevor himself than I am. Six girls who offered soft applause when I walked up to take that final rose, though I’d swear I saw murder in their eyes. Even Erin seemed to resent me.

  Daniel once told me I’m not supposed to be here, not even for that first round now behind me. He’s said this place will break me. Which was okay because as of this morning I was still unbroken, knowing I’d be leaving soon. I’d earned my elimination, in everyone’s eyes. I’d blabbed about Trevor’s company’s connection to Caspian White — a connection between Eros and GameStorming. A connection everyone had been trying to keep secret. And now I gather that Caspian himself is coming. Everyone has their opinions and theories, and it’s all my fault. Kylie’s frame job was perfect, and the perfection itself is the only reason Daniel believes me. But nobody else does, or should. And yet I’m still here.

  Me, the saboteur. The secret-broacher.

  And Kylie, the devious cunt who was truly behind it.

  I should go. I’ve decided to leave six times by my count. And yet here I am, my mind changed back yet again. I could leave, but damn my price. I just made fifty grand by taking that rose. Jenny’s solution for our mother’s big problem no longer seems like an out-of-reach joke. Not if I stick around. I made it past the first elimination, so how big a deal is it to stay for the next if they’ll have me? And the next? And then the next after that?

  A half-million dollars would solve everything, if I’m willing to admit I can be bought for a little bit longer.

  There’s a knock at my door.

  Jessica and Daniel, here together.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bridget

  My heart leaps. I want to abandon all pretense and wrap my arms around Daniel, but as soon as the door is halfway open, he gives me a meaningful look, turns on the spot, and walks away. I watch him go. Some time later, Jessica snaps her fingers in front of my face.

  “What?”

  “Earth to Bridget.”

  “I’m here.”

  “No you’re not. You’re in Daniel Rice’s Ass World.” Jessica turns. Watches him round the corner. “I don’t blame you. It’s a nice ass. And so well dressed.”

  I take Jessica by the wrist, pull her inside, and shut the door. I know she’s joking, but something in me doesn’t want her looking at Daniel like that.

  “I get why you’re into him, but — ”

  I cut Jessica off, pulling her close, putting my finger in front of her lips. She shifts the wrong way, and her lips press against it, like an unintentional kiss.

  “Shh!” I say.

  “Do that again,” Jessica says, looking at my finger.

  My eyes flick around. To think I was nervous before. Now here’s Jessica, who’s not the best at discretion.

  “Or do something else with that finger,” she says.

  I sigh then turn into the room. Jessica follows.

  “You sure you’re not into girls?”

  “No, Jess. I mean yes, I’m sure.”

  “Because — and I hope this doesn’t compromise our friendship — you’re kind of turning me on right now.”

  It’s not going to compromise my friendship. On and off, Jessica keeps saying things like this. But it’s like Troy, Logan, and Richard. There’s nobody in this house whose genitals I haven’t seen, usually in congress with someone else’s genitals and/or mouth. I’m getting desensitized to it all. Maybe if stay here long enough, she’ll break me down, and we’ll end up naked together. I kind of doubt it, but stranger things have happened. Most of them over the past two weeks.

  “Thanks, Jess.”

  “You can break in slowly, you know. Like, we could do a threesome. I was talking about it with Daniel.”

  My head whips around. I glare right at her, hard. I’m not sure what I like least: the fact that she won’t stop talking about me and Daniel for whoever might be listening, or the fact that she was talking to Daniel at all about … that.

  Jessica raises her hands and turns away: Fine, you prude.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Do you want me to leave?” Thankfully, she doesn’t add, or do you want me to stick my hands down your pants?

  “No, but when you came to the door you seemed like … ” A frown touches my lips. “What were you doing with Daniel?”

  “Nothing. He was coming down the hall; I was coming down the hall. Might as well both say hi.”

  Except that Daniel didn’t say anything.

  “Why didn’t he come in?”

  “Dunno. I think he was headed to the lower kitchen.”

  “The lower kitchen is in the other direction.”

  Jessica shakes her head. “It’s that way.” She points.

  “But the stairway is the other direction.”

  “There’s one down the way he went. Turn right three doors down, past Dining Room Four, between the bathroom and a broom closet.”

  “I’ve never been down that way,” I say, wondering why I care. But it’s strange that Daniel would come to my room and say nothing. With Jessica.

  “I haven’t either.”

  “Then how do you — ?”

  “The house blueprints are up on the wall. You’ve seen them.”

  I have. They’re in the Great Room, behind the piano, elaborately decorated and matted, enclosed in massive gilt frames as if they were art. And they look like art, too: a magic trick of this place, putting the extra in ordinary.

  I’m about to ask Jessica more, but she flops on my bed. I realize with horror that my end table drawer is open, with my vibrator inside it. I haven’t used it recently, but I was considering it. A girl can only pace for so long, and sometimes sex makes the unsavory fade for a while, if I can clear my head enough to enjoy it.

  I rush over, trying to be casual, and nudge the drawer closed. Jessica’s eyes watch it shut, and I’m sure she’s just seen what I don’t want her to, but for once she’s discreet enough to say nothing. Her body says something else. She has one knee up and the other leg straight, the top knee pulsing slightly to the open side. She’s wearing a short black dress, and I think she’s seriously considering flopping her legs akimbo, reaching for the drawer, and further testing my moral and personal lines.

  I almost want to laugh, but there’s an uncomfortable stirring in my gut. I like Jessica a lot, and for the past few hours I’ve come around on Kat. Still, thinking of them reminds me how out of place I am, how much I didn’t deserve to advance in this competition. As much as I try to duck the abundant sex play, I’ve seen both of my current friends in action. Their bodies are flawless, and their faces are beautiful. They make me feel inadequate, like a prude. I’m the one girl in the ci
rcle who won’t pass the joint. The nerd who won’t dance. If the whole world were girls like this, no man would ever look twice in my direction.

  Except that for some reason, Daniel has.

  “I want to show you something.” Jessica flops sideways, grabs one of my pillows, and then pulls me down by my wrist so I’m lying beside her. She puts the pillow on the bed and rolls so she’s perched on it. Her head ticks, nodding halfway, as if to beckon me closer. I come, and she doesn’t stop gesturing until I’m close enough to smell the almond in her shampoo.

  Her mischievous eyes watch me. Then she reaches for the covers, which I’ve piled to one side after rising. I’ve never been a bed maker. Because fuck that.

  She drags the covers over us. We’re facedown on the bed, our faces above the pillow. Jessica shoves her face into the pillow and moans.

  Or, now that I listen more closely, mumbling.

  “Put your face in the pillow.”

  “I’ve heard that line before,” I say.

  “Just do it, Bridget.”

  So I do. And then Bridget mumbles again. This time I clearly hear her say, “They can’t hear sound that doesn’t hit the walls.”

  I don’t know what to make of that. I raise back up, so she pulls me back down, her arm draped across my back.

  “Do you remember how they said there were blind spots from the cameras? The southwest corner of the kitchen, the front lawn, thirty yards equidistant between the fountains.”

  “Between the fountains,” I repeat, nodding into the pillow, feeling stupid.

  “Thirty yards equidistant. Not just directly between them. There’s only forty-five yards between the fountains. You have to come away at an angle, to the south. It has to be to the south because the wall is at the same angle to the north.”

  “I just remember ‘between the fountains.’” And I’m lucky I remember that. That first night, they listed so many rules and details, I stopped listening. But Jessica apparently didn’t. She lists another eight or ten places, most of which barely sound familiar.

  “Were you taking notes?”

  Instead of answering, she says, “The mics also have dead spots — too much ground to eavesdrop everywhere. I was out back and spotted one near the peeing fountain thing. You know the peeing fountain?”

  I nod.

  “Then I found two more. They’re hard to find without looking like you’re looking, if you know what I mean.”

  I don’t. Not really.

  “I got the model number. They seem to all be the same. And that model is semi-directional, probably because if they’re not selective, they’ll hear all the birds whistling and pots banging and clocks ticking and stuff. The noise profile is … ” And for a second it’s like I’m back in my studio, studying technical manuals.

  “Are you a sound engineer or something?”

  “I read a catalog once.”

  “What kind of catalog?”

  “I was bored,” she answers.

  Jessica’s eyes flick toward the ceiling, and she runs her fingers through my hair. “Sorry,” she says about the touch. “But if we don’t do something to justify lying here in bed, they’re going to pay closer attention than we want.” And then her hand goes under the covers, starts disturbing the sheets without actually fondling me — though surely, that’s what it’s supposed to look like from the cameras’ point of view.

  My eyes scan what of the room I can still see, ass up and face in the pillow as I am. I know the cameras are there, and microphones with them. And I have to admit Jessica is probably right. They’d have to use mics with a reasonably narrow profile, or there’d be too much noise to make the recordings worthwhile. Talking into a noise dampener like a big lump of foam and fabric will absorb most of what we say, keeping any little echoes from bouncing around and being heard. It’s a risk I wouldn’t take without research into what’s watching and listening to us, but Jess is acting like research isn’t necessary. She saw a model number and somehow already knew everything about that specific model … and, apparently, everything else in the catalog. It’s fucking weird. But what the hell? It’s not like I wanted to be here in the first place, so screwing up and getting booted now doesn’t bug me as much as it bothers the others. I guess it’s no more risk to trust her than anything else.

  “So,” Jessica says, speaking into the pillow. “Let’s talk about Daniel for you, Trevor for me, and how the hell you’re still around.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Daniel

  Taking the board’s verbal beating has turned on my analytical side, and I don’t like to see things through that particular lens. It makes the world inhospitable — a place of strange, robotic horror.

  In a different world, I could have been in Trevor’s shoes, receiving the adulation and favors of the women we’re supposedly culling to find a bride. But no. They needed me to run the games. To design the tests. To administer the tests, because I of all people understand the need to be impartial, to mind the scientific method. There’s no way to do this as a double-blind; there’s no way for me, as the puppeteer, to fool myself about the results, to close my eyes to the facts of who’s doing well and who’s doing poorly. There’s no way to institute a placebo like in a drug trial, or even use a proper control group. The experiments are fucked from the start. We’re breaking every rule as we conduct our investigations. The failure of my objectivity, in my feelings for Bridget, is but one problem of many.

  We can’t remove ourselves from the experiment, keeping our actions and perceptions from tainting the results. Working with human subjects in this particular lab, there’s simply no way.

  That’s why we have Halo. I don’t make the choices as far as who advances and who gets eliminated. Contrary to what the women think, Trevor doesn’t make those choices, either. Even the board decides nothing. Everything goes into the off-site machine running Halo, and Halo makes the selections prior to each elimination. That way, it stays objective: A supposedly infallible algorithm is telling us who’s a good fit and whose traits don’t match what we’re hoping to find. It’s supposed to be an incorruptible system, even in the absence of proper design.

  I’m thinking this as I’m sitting in my office, in the closet, behind the two-way mirror. Watching the girls in bed. I don’t know what they’re doing under the sheets, but I know what it looks like. If they’re touching each other, I wouldn’t be surprised. I just left Jessica, surely aroused. She probably needed an outlet. I don’t think Bridget’s ever been with a girl, but the fact that I don’t know is just another sliver of proof that she shouldn’t be here. We know everything about the other five. But Bridget only came because I had a score to settle. That’s no longer my purpose. Now I have an entirely different reason for wanting Bridget to stick around.

  Two, actually.

  I hate when the switch gets flipped in my mind. When I get analytical, like I am now. It makes me stop seeing people as people and start thinking of them as complicated machines, ripe for programming through experiments like the one we’re conducting in this house.

  Thanks to my chat with the board, my mind won’t stop running the experiment’s details. I think of all the research behind it. In my head, I see chemical reactions that create inevitability. I see brain hardwiring that eliminates free will. I spent time reviewing conversations between the contestants before picking Jessica up — and more importantly, between Trevor and the girls. And in every word of those discussions I could hear flow charts, nested chains of if/then reasoning. When Trevor is doing his job with one of the contestants, he might as well be reading a script. There’s no surprise, then, when the girl responds. Anyone would say she’s speaking her mind, but I know what she’s going to say before she opens her mouth. Like she’s reading a script, too.

  It’s all prompt and response. Input and output. Behavior designed, neurochemically, to produce a reaction.

  When I start thinking like this, life strikes me as one big game. It’s cold and sterile. All of what’s happenin
g in this mansion is a movie I’d swear I’ve already seen. And when something truly unexpected happens, I’m not even allowed to enjoy its novelty. I’m supposed to take notes, in case it’s a lead, and the aberrant subject response means we’re succeeding in our search.

  I watch Trevor and the men. I watch the six women. And it’s all so evident, the way lust, love, and sex all start to seem transparent after a while.

  I don’t see a billionaire seeking a wife. I don’t see a handsome man and beautiful women engaged in a sensuous dance. I don’t see courting and flirting and the nervous back-and-forth that happens behind it all.

  Instead, I see an alpha, in Trevor. I note the way he looks at his omegas, in Tony, Logan, and Richard. The way his eyes meet theirs but theirs they don’t stare back. The way Trevor stands taller, speaks louder, and physically occupies more space than they do, spreading his arms out, taking prime position in any room, subtly dominating the space. The girls don’t consciously recognize what’s happening, but Trevor knows what he’s doing, and the other men know it’s their job to defer. Trevor knows to smile a lot, to demonstrate his mate value, when to pay more attention to one of the girls and when to withhold it.

  It’s all so rehearsed. So rote.

  I see a pack of animals lining up to fuck, not a room filled with human beings who think they’re making choices.

  The world becomes a high-stakes game of poker when I’m like this. I see nothing but the male drive to propagate and the female drive to select her most valuable mate. We even know the girls’ cycles because they respond differently when they’re ovulating. It’s downright clinical. I see everything in this house the way experimenters see rats and prairie voles and even, in one case, leeches. Most female animals present when they’re receptive for sex. Just like how, every night, these girls writhe and twist, making it known to the alpha that their wombs have raised a vacancy sign.

  Now, watching Bridget as she moves under the covers, my analytical eyes can only see her as a mate I must guard.