Friends With Benefits | Chishiya x Reader

Chapter Twenty-Seven

☆ In which the final game begins. ☆

"Thank you for staying at Seaside Paradise Tokyo. As a token of our appreciation, we will now commence a game for all the guests in the hotel. Difficulty: Ten of Hearts. We will now be explaining the rules. All players are to assemble in the lobby.

"I repeat. All players are to assemble in the lobby."

You push open your door as the announcement continues to sound overhead. Immediately, the panic in the air is palpable; it stretches like a thick layer of dough over every corridor, every room, making it difficult to breathe as heavy pastry fills your lungs instead of air. Players run before your eyes like ants, calling and scrambling over each other in their haste to get to the lobby. You follow the masses, moving swiftly through the crush of people. 

The elusive Ten of Hearts has finally made an appearance, and you marvel at how quickly the buzz of anticipation allows you to swallow previous self-pity. Instincts kick in and you are grateful for the sudden clarity that descends over you - the unexpected game has temporarily averted you from your earlier crisis, although amidst the relief the familiar acknowledgment of how you could also potentially die tonight resurfaces. 

You pass a phone table at the entrance, sliding one of the devices off the surface towards you. The phone flashes white in recognition at the press of its power button, and you feel that strange calm pass over you again. In a Hearts game, all you have to do is play by instinct. Although you hadn't played too many games of higher numbers, you believe you could most likely make it through - so long as you keep your wits about you.

After all, Hearts are your specialty, even if you don't have much control over your own at the moment.

You look up. All around you phones are being distributed by the players closest to the table, and you duck under a throng of arms to see that a crowd has already formed at the back of the lobby, where hushed whispers shoot back and forth. Just for a second, your breath hitches; from where you stand, through a parting in the sea of bodies, you see the cause of all the commotion.

The corpse of a young girl lies at the foot of the lobby.

"Momoka!" 

A girl cries as she shoves her way through the crowd, moving desperately towards the body that lies on the red-carpeted floor. Your eyes follow the girl as she stumbles further away. When she stops before the Hearts game's first victim, trembling with disbelief, you catch a glimpse of the knife handle that protrudes from the body's chest.

You look away.

Amongst the crowd you spot Usagi, frozen in front of the body, just as she is pushed aside by the distraught newcomer. You slowly make your way towards to the back of the lobby, the phone you had taken cold in your hand, weaving carefully through the onlookers and stopping just short of the front row audience to the young girl's death. As you brush past countless Beach members, you can't help but skim the heads for a white hood - the force of habit pricks you, threatening to tear down your current composure, but you quickly pull the invisible arrow from your chest. 

Now is not the time for distractions, you remind yourself.

You see the executives emerge slowly, silently from the depths of the assembly. The woman with the long black hair you'd seen the other day by the shaft, accompanied by a man with a pointed face and glasses, does not smile this time; she looks emotionlessly over at the dead girl, and the man beside her grimaces. From afar you see Ann come forward, arms crossed solemnly.

It doesn't help that all the executives stand before you, except for him.

You brush away the thought, before the archer of which the previous arrow had flown from could take aim once more.