I woke up in cold metal chair with my hands suspended in midair. I gasped in panic, looking around at the dimly lit room before me. The lights flickered as i took in my surroundings. I was in a spacious room with a stone floor and bricked walls with the dirty white paint peeling off. My first mistake was getting up. The thin wire around my wrists that had been keeping my arms in the air unraveled and I heard a click which sounded oddly like one of those old cassette players. I ignored it and moved forwards- or tried to... My back felt very stiff and I glanced down and saw a corset tightened around my figure. The ribbons that should have been laced through the corset, holding it together, had instead been by firm metal wires that extended to the wall behind me and went through it even. I was about to investigate further when a voice called from behind me.
"H-hello?"
I jumped and squinted and saw the outline of a cage with a man clutching to the bars of it in the middle of the room.
"Who are you? Where am I? Did you do this?" I tried to step closer but the corset stopped me from doing so.
"You really shouldn't have done that." He chuckled, slightly manically.
"Wha- what?" I whispered nervously as if a raised voice would be the start of something very sinister.
"Fuck you're dumb!" He smashed his knuckles against the iron bars. "Look!" He pointed at the wall behind me and I turned round as far as I could in the corset.
The wire that had been suspending my arms ran along the wall till it reached the center of the wall to my left. "I- I don't..."
"As soon as she gets up." The man said glaring at the opposite side to me.
I heard a groan from the other side of the room and my head snapped in that direction.
"Who's there?" I called out, trying to make out any movement from the opposite side of the room.
"The she I was talking about." He mumbled. "D-don't get up!" He yelled at the person across the room.
"Urrr..." I said, my mind blank.
A shriek came from the woman and I heard a lot of movement.
"No, no stop!" The man snarled at her.
"Please don't-" But It was too late. I heard the click and the clash of knuckles on bars.
The dim room lit up slightly so I could at least make out the woman on the other side of the room.
She looked like she was in her late thirties, with sickly yellow hair which may have just been the lighting but still. Her blue eyes skimmed the room, nervously. Her pale completion and sallow cheeks added to her ghost- like appearance.
"Hello, you won't know me but I know all of you. I wanna play a game. You all have something in common, you are all thieves. Michael, you open your legs to get what you want. Open them again to save your own life and the others. The items you have wrapped around your wrists are bombs- where your handcuffs should be. As soon as the timer is up they will detonate."
I looked to Michael who was in the cage, with a look of pure terror on his face as he looked down at his thigh which had a bleeding stitched up wound.
I covered my mouth with my hands- the sight of blood made me queesy.
Did what the cassette said mean that Michael was a rapist?
"- Annette, you have stolen the lives of four of your former husbands with their inheritance and gotten away with it. This time it's your life that may be taken. The key is in the same place you used to poison them. June-"
