Everyone huddled around Rousseau as he cleared his throat and cleaned off my leg with alcohol. I knocked back another bourbon and inhaled deeply.

"Conversion therapy is an extreme way of 'curing' a person of their homosexuality."

I snorted, "What?"

He nodded gravely, "Oh, yes. It was very commonly used way back in the day as a traditional method. See, most people who were doctors were also Christians. Since psychologists could not explain the origin of a person's sexuality, the people who were gay were thrown in mental institutions or killed."

The room was heavy with tension. How fucked up. Rousseau continued, "I'm these institutions, the doctor believed that a person could be cured by giving the patient a pill which caused them to throw up and forced them to watch several different types of gay pornography. The goal was yo get the brain to react negatively to the homosexuality, thus curing them."

I raised an eyebrow, "Did it work?"

Rousseau shrugged, "Not really. See, being gay isn't a disease you can cure by giving someone a pill, it's a mixture of internal and external factors. Hormones have a lot to do with if a person will be or is gay."

No one spoke. We all waited for his story, and he told it so well.

"Like the medicine that they use to make the patient sick to punish them for enjoying the show they're watching, Mathias gave me medicine to praise me for doing his goddamn dirty work."

Jason glanced at me, "How did it work? If the scolding pill makes you throw up, how does the pleasure pill work?"

"The pill would create artificial feelings in my brain. Taking one look at the dead woman in front of me, the pill caused me to see the beauty in her death. It was almost like my brain enjoyed what I was looking at and wanted to get more of this feeling by doing what Mathias told me to. And every time I put a scalpel into someone's flesh, it was euphoric. Hearing their screams made me smile, like I was listening to music." He hung his head, "I knew it was wrong when I first started out. But with more pills they gave me to praise my cruel, torturous acts, I loved killing and hurting for Mathias." He paused, then added, "It was erotic."

It was somewhat comforting to know that I wasn't the only sadist in the room.

He looked at my leg one last time then his eyes met mine, "You're all set."

I looked down at my leg. The stitches were perfect and it looked like Rousseau was careful about it, too. I swung my leg off of the couch, hoping that I was able to apply pressure without it hurting too much.

"Now, now, love. Take it easy," Jason worried aloud. I rolled my eyes at him and stood up. There was sharp pain where the bullet was, but I wasn't planning on giving up because of a little bit of pain. I took one step with the fine foot, not too bad. But when I put the other foot forward, I cried out and fell forward, nearly landing on my face.

I groaned, "Fuck, that hurt."

I stayed on the ground for a little longer, rolling over so I could look at the ceiling. There wasn't much to look at, but I glanced around anyway. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something flash. Then, it hit me.

"Do we know where Mathias is?"

"No." I didn't know who answered.

"Does Jackson?"

"No, love. Why?"

I sat up and stared right at the destroyed camera, the red light flashing still. "I think I know how to find him."

Jason directed his attention to where my eyes were. He furrowed his brow, then looked back at me. "How?"

Everyone paid more attention now than before, like I had actually said something helpful for once. It was nice filling into my smart heroine role.

"You see that camera?"

Everyone else directed their attention to what I was talking about. The red light flashed on, oblivious to my ploy.

"It's still working. Normally when something is shot out with a gun, especially something electronic, the system shuts down. Someone must have fixed that camera or hacked into something to make it still function, even with a huge ass hole in the middle of the lens."

Jason muttered, the gears in his head turning with my words. "Meaning someone wanted that camera to work, and someone on the other side of those wires..."

"Is watching us," Jason finished.

Layla beamed, "Mathias is on the other side of those wires."

Heffburn made eye contact with Rousseau. Emily blinked away the tears, knowing now that something was going to happen.

Silas helped me up, holding me tightly until he was sure I could stand alone.

"I'm afraid there's a few problems with your thoughts, beautiful. We're so far underground that in order to follow those wires, we need to dig outlet way through at least 35 feet of solid concrete. And we can't even be sure that Mathias is on the other side of that screen."

Heffburn cleared his throat, "Actually, the underground thing is all a scam. The walls are made of a sound-proof, light-proof material which gives the impression that we are underground. Every day you get into an elevator and press the button to get down here, sure, the elevator moves, but it moves down, then back up and down again. You're actually only going down one floor."

Everyone hawked at him. He chuckled, "I may have seen a blueprint for the building a while back."

I cleared my throat, "Run that by me again."

"Well, um, when you get into the elevator, it feels like a long journey. Your brain assumes that you're moving down twenty floors when really you're moving down eleven and back up ten. It's because you're only feeling the movement and not really understanding the way that you are moving.

"The trick is that when you move in an elevator, you're more focused on how your brain responds to the stimulation of blind movement instead of what direction you're actually moving in. Mathias made sure that you knew that when you got into that elevator, there was no easy way back up."

"So, he lied to us? Why?" Jason glanced at Heffburn, a puzzled expression on his face.

Silas scoffed, "Respect. There wouldn't be a chance in hell that we were going to argue with him, and he knew that if we thought that we were twenty floors down, no one would have the balls to even question it, either."

I glanced back at the camera in the corner of the room. It was the only lead we had, and at this point, I was running on the idea that this small glimmer of hope was going to get us out.

"We have to try," I muttered. "I mean, if we're really not as far down as we thought, then finding Mathias just got a whole hell of a lot easier. We have to follow those wires, they're going to lead to monitors, and most likely, people who know where Mathias is."

Jason pondered this for a moment, rubbing his chin. "Hmm, well we could follow the wires, what harm could come?"

A sense of importance seemed to wash over the room because the intensity radiating off of everyone was starting to make me giddy. It sucked that Jackson wasn't here to console me with merely his presence, but just the thought that I'd see him when this was all over was enough to calm my nerves.

I looked around at the men, all carrying some sort of weapon and I felt a little left out. It was strange that Emily wasn't given some form of weapon, but then I realized she probably didn't know how to shoot which was why she didn't have one to begin with. And Layla had been captive in a cell for God knows how long. When did she have the time to pick up shooting?

I glared at Jason, "Where's my gun?"

He smirked, "It's our job to protect you, love. You don't need a gun."

I rolled my eyes and reached out for his, "I'm not playing around, Jason. Give me."

He shook his head, his expression serious. "Sorry, love. Not this time."

I looked at Silas who shrugged and Heffburn who merely laughed, obviously finding humor in how helpless I felt. Jackass...

I scoffed and headed for the door. I followed the cords with my eyes. Fortunately for us, the pretence that we were too far underground to escape this fucking hell meant that the cords weren't going to run upstairs right away, if at all. And, because they needed to keep the rooms sound-proof and light-proof, they couldn't drill holes through then and shove wires where those holes were. The monitor room should have been easy to find, in an ideal world. Unfortunatly, the world was not ideal, nor was my situation.

It was like Mathias thought of everything. The cords were basically a maze that led down hallways with no ends. It was almost like this fucking place was meant to be a death trap.

And then I kicked myself for even thinking the thought. Of course it was, it was Mathias, the most eerie man on the planet. And I didn't even know his last name. He was like Cher or Beyonce, but way more disturbing.

Eventually after leading the group down several dead trails with absolutely no gain, Jason groaned and threw his arms in the air, "This is hopeless."

Emily, who had remained silently sobbing to herself throughout our perils, finally spoke up, her voice hoarse with sadness "Mathias isn't stupid. We're doing exactly what he wants us to. He wouldn't put dead ends in a torture chamber if they weren't intended for something."

And almost like I was struck by the lightening of her words, I stopped in my tracks, gasped and spun around. "That's it!"

Everyone gaped at me, their eyes wide with confusion.

"Did you not hear what she just said?! These walls are intended for something!"

Silas muttered, "Yeah, to confuse us and get us lost."

I groaned. "No, these walls aren't dead ends, they're important for something." I turned to Heffburn, "Where would I find a blueprint to thus building?"

He pursed his lips, "The archive room?"

"And that is?" I inquired, rolling my eyes. Was everyone this clueless?

"It's by the operating room."

I turned back around and spoke as I stormed down the hallway, "Mathias isn't stupid, right. So putting a bunch of dead end hallways would be a pretty dumbass move, right?" No one answered my rhetorical question, so I continued, "But what if the dead ends were actually more than just a hallway with three walls and a ceiling? What if the walls were actually-"

Jason interrupted, "Let me guess, the walls aren't actually there and we just see them?"

I glared back at him, "Don't be a smartass. No! The walls are there, they're just hiding something."

No one said anything, it was like I was speaking Swahili or something.

I stopped abruptly and turned to a wall. It was black, the total opposite of my room. There didn't appear to be anything out of the ordinary about the wall, but after staring at it for longer, the outline of a door presented itself and a door handle appeared out of thin air. I turned to the others, raising an eyebrow. "See?"

Jason looked between me and the wall, and blinked. "Um, are you sure you're feeling well, love?"

I rolled my eyes again and grabbed the black door handle. I turned it and flung open the door. The room was grey and easily distinguishable between the midnight black hallway we we're standing in.

I looked back at Jason, his eyes wide and his jaw lying somewhere on the floor.

"Mathias isn't stupid," I said again. "But we are..."