He looked worried, and I wanted to know why. Michael, Adam, and Julian all stood up with me. Adam grabbed the set of keys that I had accidentally left sitting on the table.

“Yeah, thanks for, uh…” I stopped talking.

I couldn’t bring myself to thank them for anything, especially not my father.

“But we haven’t had dessert yet,” David said as he stood up as well and pulled out his hands toward us. “Just wait one second; I’ll be right back with it. I made it myself just for tonight.”

The growing feeling of weirdness and unease was suffocating.

“Well, I’m glad we at least had this night to talk,” my father said.

He didn’t get up from the table, though. He knew that nothing he said would make me want to stay even a single moment longer.

I turned to walk away from the table with all the guys standing and ready to follow me out. David suddenly rushed back into the room with a platter in his hand and a chocolate cake sitting on the top. The cake literally looked as if it had been smooshed together by hand. It was a dark and muddy looking glob, carefully placed in the center of the platter alongside a large cake knife. As soon it registered in my head that there were no plates and no forks, it was too late.

David set the platter down on the table, grabbed the knife in his hand, and before any of us knew what was happening, he sliced my father’s throat open.

David stood there, holding my father’s head up with his fist wrapped around a handful of his hair, and watching the blood spew out of his neck onto the cake in front of him.

“Fuck!” Adam said as he grabbed me, and the three of them tried to get me out of the room as fast as possible.

We didn’t even make it to the door before an entire crowd of men blocked our way. Michael spun around on his heels and shouted at David.

“What the hell is this?” He yelled. “What are you doing?”

David looked perfectly calm, and his face looked utterly empty as he looked over at us.

“This is my birthright,” he said. “This man, my father, stole many things from me. He stole a mother that I never knew, and a woman that I thought of as a mother. He stole what was supposed to be rightfully mine, and any chance I had of knowing my sister that I thought was only a random childhood memory. I can’t have any of those things now. But I can have this school, and all the power and money that should have been given to me.”

I looked down at the folder in my hand.

“Here,” I shouted as I tossed it onto the table. “Take it, it’s yours. I don’t want it. You can have all of it and do what you want with it.”

Adam followed my lead and dropped the keys back onto the table too.

“Now let us go,” Michael said.

David blinked. “I can’t do that.”

The men standing at the doorway all pushed their way through and started to surround us. Michael and Adam and Julian were good fighters, but there were at least forty guys here. There was no way we could take them all.

“I don’t understand,” I said to David. “What is it that you want with us?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” David said plainly.

I screamed as the men started to grab each of us. The guys tried to fight them off and managed to get a few hits in, but it was only a matter of moments before they had each of us down on our knees on the floor with our arms behind our backs. When they pulled us to our feet, I saw them drag Michael away first, and then Julian, and lastly Adam. I tried to push toward him and tried to bury my head against him, but it was no use. I cried as we all got separated and the last thing that I saw before everything went dark was the image of my dying father in David’s hands.

When I woke up, everything was dark, and I didn’t know where I was. But somehow, it felt strangely familiar. My head was throbbing as if I’d been hit with something blunt and heavy, and I struggled to try to see something, anything, in the dark. I felt around me and immediately recognized where I was; it was the stone room. My hands felt more than just the stone floor and walls this time, though. I ran my fingers across the bodies that were slumped next to me and laying on the floor in front of me. All three of the guys were in here with me too. I reached for their faces and listened to make sure they were alive.

“Lisette?” Michael asked.

“Yes! I’m here, oh thank god you’re okay,” I cried.

“I’m okay,” he said. “How about the others, are they ok?”

I felt both Julian and Adam move next to me. “They’re okay too.”

“Where are we?” Julian asked.

“I know exactly where we are,” Adam said. “This is the place you told me about, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling too scared to be guilty about what happened in here with Michael.

“How do we get out of here?” he asked.

“We can’t.” Michael answered him. “The only way out is with the key that none of us currently have.”

“Why would he do this?” I cried. “Why are we here?”

I felt all three of the guys wrap their arms around me. Their hands overlapped, and I felt myself sink into their chests and tried only to focus on the sound of their heartbeats surrounding me.

“I don’t know,” Michael said as he gently kissed my cheek. “But we’re going to find out.”

And even in the darkest pits of desolation and despair, I trusted him. I trusted all of them.

I loved all of them, fully and completely.

And I hoped we all got out alive so I could spend the rest of my life showing them exactly that.

Twisted

1

Dreaming was always an escape for me, even when the dreams turned into nightmares.

Sometimes my dreams lingered right on the brink between the two, and when I tried to push the dream in one direction or another, I would end up just waking up instead. So, I usually just let the dream play out as they wished, accepting either way it would go and realizing that whether it was dark or light, at least it wasn’t reality.

The dreams of my mother were my favorite. I cherished every moment that I was able to spend with my mother, even if the moments were only in my head. But this time, there was someone else in the dream with us and I didn’t like it.

And I didn’t like sharing my time with her because I had such precious little of it as it was.

David was there in my dream, and he and I were kids. We were playing in the backyard again. Mom had spread out a blanket on the grass so that we could put together puzzles and we tried to make the pieces stick even though the surface of the ground was too bumpy. David was really good at puzzles and my mom was always buying new ones for us to do together when he came over.

I think she saw that it helped to calm him, except I didn’t really understand back then that he needed calming. He would sit for hours trying to match the corners of pieces and the shades of the variant colors. I would end up getting frustrated and giving up long before he did, and sometimes my mom would have to coax me to go sit back down with him instead of running around in the yard chasing butterflies.