Gamed (A Standalone Romance Novel) (Bad Boy Romance) (2 page)

A detective in a
gray suit looked up as I barreled through the door of Sienna's dorm room. His
bright badge and ashen face stopped me.

"Is it
true?" I asked.

"You're the
sister?" he asked. His gray eyes swept towards the bathroom door. "I
wouldn't."

He made no move to
stop me, seeming to understand that I had to see for myself. I lurched towards
the bathroom and stopped two feet short of the threshold. A wet puddle of bath
water mixed with dark blood inched towards the door.

Sienna was gone. My
perfect sister with her flawless beauty and driving ambition was gone.

I sank to the
floor, unsure gravity could keep me from spinning away. I clung to the rug with
both hands – Sienna's outrageously-priced woven rug she had begged our parents
for last Christmas. I gritted my teeth and swallowed hard. Sienna would never
forgive me if I threw up on her rug.

#

Sienna's
dorm room was not more than a small box. The forensic photographer worked
around me while two police officers joined the detective. They spoke at a
regular volume, fully aware that shock had rendered me deaf to their words. I
could not understand what they were saying.

"Everything
seems to line up: high pressure major, friends say she was
very
focused, her schedule is intense. There's no major event, no tipping point so
far," one of the uniformed officers said.

"Pretty
typical," the detective agreed.

I gripped the rug
so hard I felt my knuckles creak. The tears were building, a hard pressure
pounding in my head, but they would not come. Only ragged breaths escaped, and
each one hurt my throat. I wanted to cry, I had no idea what else to do, but I
could not.

Sienna always knew
what to do next. I always joked she would have made an excellent cruise
director. At home, she had all of us scheduled down to the next five minutes
during the holidays. I needed her to tell me what to do now.

I gasped for air. The
detective stepped to the door of the dorm room and waved an arm down the
hallway. In a moment, one of the EMTs sat on the floor next to me.

"Here,"
he said. "Take this. It’s a low dose anti-anxiety pill. It'll help calm
you down."

It was something
to do, some small action to get me off the rug and standing on shaking legs. I
took the pill and let the EMT help me up. He stood firmly between me and the
bathroom and held out his arms to usher me out the dorm room. Two men and a
black stretcher waited in the hallway.

They were going to
take Sienna's body away.

"Can I go
with? I want to go with," I asked the EMT.

He shook his head.
"Stop talking like that or you'll be overnight in the psych ward. You're
going back to your dorm room to call your family."

A warm numbness
spread through my body as the EMT escorted me downstairs to the campus security
guards. Everything seemed far away and soft. I imagined my life becoming a
video game, the origin story of some dark superhero. The flashing lights of the
police cars, the open doors of the ambulance, the arrival of the coroner's van,
they were all on a screen. I was safe on the couch in my dorm room, dozing as I
watched the introduction.

If only it had all
been a bad dream.

And then, I was on
my dorm room couch. My roommate paced the floor in front of me. Her long,
delicate fingers weaving together and squeezing with nervous energy. She spoke
to me, occasionally sat next to me and tried to talk, but I could not hear
anything she said.

"It's all
over campus by now. I'm not sure you should stay here. People are going to be
coming by and
now's
not the time. Right? Quinn?"
she asked.

Darla kept going
to the door. She never opened it, just called through, but the knocks kept
coming at regular intervals. I could feel Darla's nervousness growing. She
wrung her hands and stood exhausted in the middle of our small room. In my hazy
mind, she became the gatekeeper. Was I a prisoner or the hidden princess?

Sienna had been
the princess. My father called her Princess all the time. There was no way she
would be sitting in a fog during a crisis like this one. She would have had
everything organized by now.

I felt like I
could not even blink without a colossal effort.

The next knock on
the door was a rapid, insistent rap. Darla leapt to answer it and this time she
pulled the door open. Alice
Bonton
slipped in our
dorm room and locked the door behind her.

"She hasn't
called her parents yet. She hasn't even moved," Darla told Alice.

"Quinn,
honey, we need to call your parents. Let's do it now so they can come here and
get you," my advisor said.

I shook my head. Somehow
this was all my advisor's fault. If I had not answered the phone call from her,
none of this ever would have happened. Sienna would still be alive and studying
her night away. And, I would be slipping into the world of
Dark Flag
with Darla at the gamer party.

"I'm going to
dial the phone and hand it to you, alright?" Ms. Alice asked.

"What I am
supposed to say?" I croaked. "They are never going to believe
me."

"Believe
you?" she and Darla both asked at the same time.

"Sienna would
never do something like that," I said. The images came back to me and the
room in front of me faded away to darkness. Every time I tried to think of why,
how Sienna could do that to herself, a giant chasm opened in my mind.

"Do you want
me to tell them?" my advisor asked.

The phone was
ringing and my mouth went dry. I nodded just as I heard my father's voice.

"Hello, Mr.
Thomas? I'm sorry to be calling so late. This is Alice
Bonton
from UCLA. I'm your daughter Quinn's advisor. What? No, she hasn't done
anything. Quinn is fine. I'm actually calling about Sienna."

There was a long
pause on our end. I assumed my father had launched into a righteous lecture
about the rudeness of the late night phone call. He was a busy man, probably
due in court early the next morning, and he did not put up with such
thoughtlessness from people.

If I had called,
the lecture would have been the same.

"Yes, I did
say I was calling about Sienna," Ms. Alice said.

And that was the
difference. When it registered the phone call was about my sister, my father
changed completely. I could almost hear him politely giving my advisor leave to
speak, even though she stood a few feet away from me.

"There is no
easy way to tell you this, but there has been an accident and Sienna Thomas is
dead," Ms. Alice said. She looked as if she had fumbled a live hand
grenade. "No, you're right, I should be more specific. Your daughter was
found in her dorm room bathtub. She had cut her wrists. She was pronounced dead
at the scene."

My father was a
lawyer and must have switched into default mode because Ms. Alice spent the
next ten minutes giving short, factual answers to his questions.

Finally, she
cleared her throat. "Sir, I have your other daughter here. Wouldn't you
like to speak with her?" Ms. Alice did not wait, she just handed me the
phone with a barely disguised expression of relief.

He was still talking
when I took the phone. "I'm going to need the name of the detective and
the uniformed officers. I have her roommate's contact information
somewhere."

"Daddy?"
I asked.

"I'm going to
have to lie to your mother until this is all cleared up. She can't handle news
like this. We'll tell her Sienna was hurt in a car accident. I'll be there in
the morning, Quinn. 8 am sharp in your lobby," he said.

The line went
dead. I dropped the phone on the floor and lay down on the couch. Darla pulled
my comforter off my bed and laid it over me as I curled up in a ball.

Somehow, my body
woke up at 7:30 am. On autopilot, I showered and dressed and walked downstairs
to meet my father.

He was early and
impatiently waiting. "Did you talk to her roommate last night?"

"No."

"But you went
to her room? The detective said you were there," my father asked.

"Yes. I saw,
I saw…" I stopped and clung to the mailboxes in the foyer.

My father pulled
open the front door. He then grabbed my elbow and escorted me out in front of
him. "We're going to the coroner's. Didn't you tell me you went there with
your class? That's my girl, never flinching when there's something useful to
learn."

"That was
Sienna," I said.

My father scowled
as he opened the car’s passenger side door for me. He scowled all the way to
the county coroner's office. He wiped it away when the coroner met us at the
door. The two men shook hands.

"Has the
death certificate been finished?" my father asked.

"Yes, sir. My
findings corroborate with the detective's conclusion. Her death has been ruled
a suicide," the coroner said.

For once, all the
air seemed to be sucked from my father. I noticed how he had lost weight. There
was
more gray
in his hair. The normal command he had
over any room was gone and he followed the coroner without another word.

We stood in front
of a plated glass window and stared aimlessly into a small room. White tiles
reached halfway up the wall before giving over to an institutional gray color. Two
orderlies pushed a gurney into the room. On the coroner's signal, one lifted
back the white sheet.

There was Sienna,
gray against the bleached white of the sheet. Her golden hair was combed back
from her face and still damp from the medical examiner's administrations.

"Sir?"
the coroner called as I swayed.

My father clamped
onto my arm to steady me. "She was going to be a surgeon. She never
flinched, never fainted." His eyes never left Sienna's face. "Her
sister was going to follow in her footsteps but no one could catch up to
her."

"You've had a
terrible shock," the coroner said to me. "Would you like to sit
down?"

"You're not
going to faint are you? Surgeons don't faint," my father said.

"I'm in the
nursing program."

He snorted. "Sienna
was going to be a surgeon."

I wrenched my arm
free from my father's grip and sat on the bench the coroner had shown me. Anger
burned in my chest, and I rubbed at the pain. My father had decided when we
were still toddlers that his daughters would be doctors. Sienna had thrived
under the challenge, basking in my father's approval as she excelled.

I had always felt
constricted, the square peg in a round hole. There was the pressure of his
imperial expectations, the way he discussed it with everyone as if it was a foregone
conclusion and not a hard achievement.

Had
the pressure finally been too much for Sienna?
I wondered.

My older sister
had her ups and downs. Black rages and immobilizing bouts of depression. Sunny
cheerfulness that lit up entire worlds and an infectious joy in her work. My
father said it was a sign of a brilliant and passionate mind. Sienna worked
hard, then needed to recover. Then, her love of the medical field would pull her
back up.

It had always been
strange to me that Sienna never recognized her own symptoms. As soon as the
thought crossed my mind, I pushed it away. There were certain topics that were
never touched in our house.

"Did you tell
Mother?" I asked.

My father finally
turned away from the window. "No. She was not feeling well this morning. I
told her you needed my help and that I would be back this afternoon."

My mother would
never have believed it was Sienna that needed help.

The orderlies
pulled the curtains on the small room. The coroner led my father to a counter
to fill out the remaining paperwork. I sat on the bench and stared at the box
of tissues left on the opposite end. It had barely been touched.

Did
they replace it often or were most people that sat here like me?
I wondered. The tears still would not come; they couldn't fight past the
numbness. Somehow this was a joke, a prank. Sienna was not dead. She was going
to burst through the door at any moment and make me admit I hated my major.

After all, nurses
don't faint at the sight of dead bodies.

#

We
did not say a word the nearly four-hour drive home. My parents lived about
fifteen minutes away from the Las Vegas Strip in an affluent neighborhood
called
Summerlin
. I felt the weight of exhaustion and
grief the entire drive, but I could not take my eyes off the arid and flat
landscape.

My father pulled
into the driveway of our six-bedroom house. The Juliet balcony overlooked the
driveway and behind the window, I saw the shadow of my mother. She disappeared
back into her bedroom suite. I knew she would not meet us at the door, full of
concern. If she was not feeling well it might be 24 hours before she appeared
downstairs.