EMMA

It would have been nice the following morning if I hadn't woken to flashing lights and alarms blaring so loud that they were like a taut chord snapping me up into a seated position on Ethan's bed. The blanket dropped from my body as I threw my legs over the side, my head pounding as soon as the sudden movement caught up with me. With a hand pressed to my head, I stumbled toward the bedroom door, opening it to find Ethan rushing from around his desk to run out into the hall.

I threw him one panicked look in question and he returned a silent command to stay in his suite quietly. Fear tightened the muscles across my bones, my body frozen in the doorway and my head pounding harder from the blaring sound and increased blood pressure assaulting my veins.

Tears welled in my eyes, part fear and part pain, my arms wrapping around my naked abdomen as I struggle to break free of the anxiety holding me in place. What was happening? Why were alarms going off that made me worry that the building was on fire or some other horrible thing?

Drawing in a deep breath, I clenched my teeth against the pounding in my head and forced myself to walk back to Ethan's bureau to grab a shirt. What would they do if the building were on fire? Would they attempt to rescue the women, or would they simply save themselves and watch the rest of us burn?

Dread rolled in my stomach with the remnants of the alcohol from the night before. Swaying on my feet, I sat down on the edge of the bed, covering my ears with my hands to block out the horrendous noise.

It must have been a minute or two before the alarms stopped blaring, their silence a miracle that sent me tumbling backwards onto the mattress. My eyes closed as I waited for the pounding in my head to stop.

A door opened in the living room and I turned my head to watch Ethan walk into the bedroom. Leaning against the doorframe, he stared down at me with sad panic in his grey eyes, his hands tucked in his pockets and his white shirt unbuttoned at the top. Even disheveled, he was suave. But I didn't like that look in his eyes. Didn't like it at all.

"What is it?" I asked, pushing myself up to sit on the end of the mattress. "Is something wrong with the studio? Do we need to leave?" The volume and pitch of my voice grew with each hastily asked question. Ethan simply shook his head, his lips pulled into a tight line.

Pushing away from the doorframe, he walked slowly to stand in front of me, eventually squatting down, pulling my legs apart with his hands and shuffling forward to wrap his arms around my waist. Leaning his head against my body, he breathed deeply, the slow rhythm a drumbeat that warned of sorrow.

My palm slid over his head, my fingers playing in the thickness of his hair. "Ethan, what happened? What is it?"

His shoulders tensed as the questions poured from my tongue. Finally looking up at me, he gripped his hands over my hips, his expression so shadowed that the dread inside me grew to become foreboding. "Ethan?" I asked, my voice a whisper.

Squeezing my hips with his hands, he parted his lips to tell me what I wanted to know. The words wouldn't make sense the first time I heard them, and when they finally did, they would tear through me with crushing fingers and razor sharp claws.

"I'm sorry, Emma. So sorry I have to tell you this." Pausing, he searched my eyes, waiting for what, I wasn't sure.

"Just say it," I finally demanded on a hiss, too afraid to hear whatever it was now that Ethan had started with an apology.

Ethan Cole never said he was sorry.

Never.

For him to do so could only be a sign that whatever those alarms had been for was detrimental.

Swallowing, he blinked his eyes slowly before saying, "Emma, there was a problem in the cages. An emergency, which is why the alarms sounded."

No...

I was shaking my head with disbelief even before the words could leave his mouth.

"I'm sorry, Emma, but Melanie killed herself during the night. They found her body this morning while pulling the women from the cells to walk to the showers."

No, I thought again, the bottom falling out from beneath me while agonizing sorrow traipsed through my body curling its deathly tendrils over my bones and pulling me in all directions. Not Melanie. Please, not her!

"No," I said, mirroring my thoughts by the denial leaking from my throat. My eyes pleaded with him to tell me he was lying. My heart barely beating as I begged him to tell me he was wrong. "Not, Melanie. Sh - she wouldn't have done that," I argued, sobs rumbling up my throat to burst from my mouth. "She couldn't have done it. There's no way -"

Oh, god, it hurt. Every part of me. Every single part was pounding now, closing up, tightening to a point where I feared I would shatter if anything touched me. "Tell me you're lying!" I yelled, tears streaming down my cheeks to drip into my lap.

Standing up, Ethan dragged me with him, wrapping his arms around my trembling body as he tucked my head to his chest. He was talking so softly that I couldn't make out his words muffled by the violent heartache in my sobs. I cried so hard that I couldn't catch my breath, my mind conjuring images of Melanie's young son as if I had been there to witness the memories she'd told me.

Holding me between the steel bands of his arms, he stood patiently while I crumbled into pieces, while I accused him of lying before calling him every rotten name in the book, while I begged and pleading that he would tell me he was wrong, while I shook against him as every bitter emotion that I'd felt in this godforsaken place poured out of my eyes, my mouth, and my lungs.

Eventually, even the strength in the body that comes with unrelenting trauma and sorrow failed me, my knees weakening, my body collapsing until I was lying on the bed, curling over myself as Ethan crawled up behind me to tuck me to his chest. Tremors still shook me like aftershocks following a massive earthquake. I never knew when they would come, but it seemed every time I opened my mouth to ask him what happened, more agony would pour out of my chest, a dam bursting without any conceivable guess as to when the deluge would stop.

I hated this place all over again. Hated the unrelenting horror and inescapable pain that seemed to seep from the walls to drown me. The shadows stirred so deep that even those pinpoints of light I'd once found were now smothered out by eternal midnight.

Eventually, the fits of violent sorrow drained from my body, and I was left dismantled across the bed, weak and useless, decimated by having lost the one person in this place I could take credit for helping.

"How did she do it?"

The questions had already echoed in my head, over and over again until I couldn't make out one from the next. But on that question, I'd only come to the conclusion that she must have willed herself to die, or done something as stupid as drowning herself in the bucket.

There was no other way...

"She hung herself with the blanket," he answered, his voice gentle yet firm.

Except for that.

My heart clenched harder. Not only had I lost her, but I'd given her the means to succeed in her surrender to the ether.

I didn't answer, couldn't answer, couldn't find a single word inside me that was strong enough, or even soft enough to hold a flame to what I was feeling. Guilt was too simple. Anger was just wrong. How could I be angry with a woman who had lost the will to endure this prison?

Ethan's deep voice rolled through the air to fill the silence, to ease me away from an edge so that I wouldn't fall to be shredded by the jagged teeth of reality. "I know it hurts, Emma. I know you cared about your friend. But in a way, it's better like this. Every woman here dies eventually. Every light that is walked through those doors has expired and gone dark by the time their body leaves the studio again. Every single one of them." He paused, letting the words sink in so that I truly understood the consequence of them.

More gently, he said, "At least in this way, your friend met death on her own terms. She wasn't being raped or beaten. She didn't suffer the violent abuse of the others. She simply faded until she wasn't strong enough to go on."

I wasn't sure one was more preferable than the other. Being beaten and raped, at least you knew you'd done something to survive. You were able to hate the person stealing the life away from you, able to blame them as the darkness swept in to swallow you whole.

But to simply fade? To lose the strength to go on and have to make that choice on your own? It was the same thing as giving up, the same thing as relenting to routine because those were the cards fate dealt you. You had no one else to hate, no one to blame when you closed your eyes that final time and let go.

She would never see her son again, and she'd died knowing it.

"You would have killed her?" I asked, the final, cold tears slipping down my cheeks as I felt Ethan's chest move against mine. Tucking his arm tighter, he pulled me so close that his face rested against my cheek, his breath a comforting warmth brushing down my neck.

His tone was delicate but unapologetic when he answered, "I would have. If the order had arrived, I would have had no choice. That's how it works, Emma. I've been warning you of that."

Hot tears returned again, new and revolting, angry and soul crushing. "Will you kill me, too?" I asked on a whisper.

Ethan stilled behind me, the muscles in his arms like steel again as they tightened against me. Breath steady, he didn't immediately answer the question, didn't want to give me the answer I already knew he would give.

Of course he'd kill me. Every woman in this place has a time limit. It doesn't matter how the death occurs, just that it does. The timing is chosen by the studio heads, and Ethan, their faithful puppet, would choose the method.

The continued silence disturbed me. Turning until I faced Ethan, I looked him in the eye to find only sorrow and secrets that he'd done a good job of hiding. Searching his hard expression, I didn't have to ask, didn't really want to know, but I asked anyway. Despite my better judgment, my curiosity would always win.

"Do you know when I'm going to die, Ethan? Has an order been sent for my head?"

Blinking once, he released a soft sigh over his lips, his palm sliding up my arm, over my shoulder, until his fingers could touch my jaw and trace its shape.

"Tell me, Ethan. At least give me that courtesy."

For several long seconds he battled whether he would answer me or not. But eventually those lips parted, and a deep voice that had always been able to seduce me revealed the answer I didn't want to know.

"Yes," he breathed out. "Your final performance has been scheduled."

My heart was crushed, and yet, strangely, I felt relief. This nightmare would end and I'd be free of the routine, free of the films I was forced to watch, free of the stage where I'd abandoned civility and had become a warrior in order to survive.

Brushing my fingers over the fullness of his lips, I dropped my hand down to the mattress beneath us. "When? When will I give my final performance?"

There was pure heartache in his grey eyes.

"In three days, Emma. I'm not returning you to the cages. You'll stay here for the remainder of your time. But in three days, I'll take you to Stage B, and we'll be forced to say goodbye."