The Mask and the Message

CHAPTER THREE

LAUREN’S POV

Julian stopped moving completely. He just froze.

For one very scary second, it felt like all the air left the room. I could not breathe. I did not step back. I stood right where I was. My chest moved up and down very fast. I thought he was going to take out a gun. I thought he was going to break my neck right there on the nice rug. I waited for him to kill me.

Very slowly, Julian turned his head back. He looked right at me, the phone still pressed to his ear.

His dark eyes were wide open. He raised his hand. His long, rough fingers gently touched his face. They touched the red mark growing on his sharp jaw that had been created from my slap. He did not yell at me. He did not hit me back. He just looked down at me.

He was completely stuck in pure shock.

I did not let myself step away. I pushed my chin up. I looked straight into his cold, dead eyes.

"Do not ever put your dirty hands on me again, you horrible monster," I warned him. Although, my voice shook a little bit, the pure hate in my words was very clear. He could not miss it.

Julian did not say a single word. His hand still stayed up near his face.

I turned my back to him. Turning my back on the most dangerous man in the city felt like a death wish. But I did it anyway. I walked fast across the big bedroom. I headed straight for the attached bathroom. I pushed the heavy wood door open. I stepped inside the bathroom, and I shut the door hard behind me.

Right away, I pushed the lock. The metal lock clicked into place.

I fell back against the strong wood of the door. I let out a very long, shaky breath. I did not even know I was holding my breath until then.

My legs finally became too weak to stand. I slid down the door until I was sitting right on the cold stone floor. I pulled my knees close to my chest. My hands were shaking so much. I could not stop them.

"You are going to get yourself killed, Lauren," I said in a soft whisper. "You are going to die in this place."

I made myself stand back up. I walked over to the large sink counter. I leaned hard on the cold metal sink. I turned on the gold tap then, I threw freezing cold water onto my face. I wanted to wash away the feeling of his rough hands on my skin. The feeling was still there, but I tried to wash it off. I took a very soft towel. I gently dried my face with it.

Then, I looked at the person in the mirror. She looked like a stranger to me. My perfect, styled hair was a little messy. I opened the drawers by the sink. I looked fast for Serena’s makeup box. I needed to do her makeup routine for bed. I knew my twin sister very well. She never let any man see her real, natural face. She wore makeup even when she was sleeping. If I wanted to stay alive, I had to keep acting like her. I had to wear the mask.

I found a heavy makeup case. It was full of costly creams, powders, and lip colors. I took out the face makeup. I started putting a new layer on my pale skin.

I rubbed the costly makeup into my skin. As I did this, my chest moved up and down. A new wave of fear hit me hard. I looked around the room. I looked at the big sink. I looked at the fancy bathtub behind me. I looked at all the rich things around me. Was this the true story of Serena's perfect marriage? Was this the bad, violent treatment she had to face when the doors were closed?

I stopped moving. I held a makeup brush up in the air.

I thought about the night before her big wedding. My mother and father had made me come to their big house. They made me help them get ready. Serena had been sitting in her rich bedroom. She was wearing a fine silk robe. She looked very happy and lost in a dream.

"I love him so much, Lauren," she had said with a happy sigh. She spun a piece of her curled hair around her finger. "He is so strong and powerful. Every person bows down to him. I cannot wait for our wedding night."

"He is a bad man, a criminal, Serena," I had said in a low voice. I was leaning against the wood frame of her bedroom door.

She had just laughed at me. It was a sharp, mean laugh. "You just do not understand. You do not know what it feels like to be picked by a king. You will just be stuck with a cheap liar like Jake for the rest of your life. Your life will always be sad and poor. You will spend forever dealing playing cards in a dirty basement."

Now, I looked at my own face in the mirror. I actually felt sad for my sister. She had lived in a fake dream world. She could not see the real monster she was about to marry. She really thought she was marrying a king. But she had tied herself to a cold-blooded killer.

I leaned in closer to the bathroom mirror. I pushed my head back. I looked very closely at the skin on my neck. That was where Julian had just choked me. I used my fingers to gently touch the sore skin. There were no dark marks or bruises growing there. The skin was only a little bit red. He knew exactly how hard to squeeze my neck. He knew how to scare me to death without leaving a single mark on my body.

My heart broke right then and there in that cold, bright bathroom. I realized I would have to face all of this every day. I would have to face the deep fear. I would have to face the choking. I would have to feel this total hate. I had to do this every single day until my parents finally found Serena.

I picked up a light pink lip color. I needed to put on the last bit of my makeup.

I finished and reached back into the drawer to put the lip color away. As I did, my fingers touched something hard and cold. It was hidden all the way in the back of the drawer. I moved a pile of face masks out of the way.

Then, I pulled the item out to see what it was.

It was a phone. It was a smooth, pink-gold phone. It had been hiding in the dark corner.

I frowned and dried my hands on a soft towel. I pushed the power button on the side of the phone. The screen lit up right away. It threw a bright light on my face. The phone did not ask for a secret code. It did not ask to scan my face. It opened right up to the main screen. The background photo was a picture of my sister's face.

It was Serena’s phone.

Why did she leave her personal phone behind when she ran away? That did not make any sense at all to me. Why would she do that?

My heart started to beat faster. I tapped the green phone button on the screen. I looked straight at her call history. My stomach felt sick. The whole list of calls had been wiped clean. There were no calls coming in. There were no calls going out. There were no missed calls from the last week.

But there was just one exception.

There was one single missed call sitting at the top of the list. It was from a phone number I did not know. I checked the time of the call.

The call had come in exactly three hours ago.

"Three hours ago?" I said out loud to myself. Serena had already been missing for more than a whole day. Who was trying to call her hidden phone right now?

I did not even stop to think about what bad things might happen. I tapped the unknown number on the screen. I decided to call the person back as I lifted the pink phone to my ear.

My heart was beating so fast and loud against my ribs.

Ring. Ring. Ring. On the third ring, I heard a click on the line. Someone picked up the phone.

"Hello?" I whispered in a rush into the phone. "Who is this?"

I only heard heavy quiet on the other end of the line. But it was not totally empty. I could hear someone taking soft breaths. Then, I heard a sound in the background. It broke through the quiet. It was a local clock making a sound. It was a deep, metal ringing sound.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

"Serena?" I asked. My voice was shaking a lot. "Are you there?"

Click. The call was cut off right away. The phone screen went back to the list of calls.

"Damn it," I said in a sharp whisper. I quickly tapped the number again. I wanted to try calling one more time. But a robot voice from the phone company filled my ear right away.

"The number you are trying to call is turned off right now."

I pulled the phone away from my ear. I stared at the screen feeling very angry and stuck. My hands were sweating a lot now. I left the call list and opened her text message app. I looked through her messages. I hoped to find a clue. I hoped to find a street name or anything to tell me where she went.

I found nothing at all. The message inbox was completely wiped clean.

I moved the screen all the way to the bottom.

There was only one message chat left there. It was a talk with a person saved only as a single dot. I tapped on the dot. The messages in there were sent two days ago. They were sent right before my sister went missing.

The first text from the unknown person was very short and very scary.

“Did you give him the poison?”

I stopped breathing for a second. My eyes moved down to the next text message. It was a reply from Serena. She sent it just one minute later.

“Yes, I crushed it up with his coffee beans. He drinks one cup of coffee every day. In seven days, he will be a dead man.”

The phone slipped out of my sweaty fingers. It fell and made a loud noise against the stone sink counter.

My eyes opened very wide in deep fear. I held onto the edges of the sink very tight. I stared blankly at my own scared face in the mirror.

Serena did not just get missing. She was definitely just taken away by bad people.

Serena had poisoned Julian.