Trueblood 01-The-Consolation-Prize Read Online Free PDF

was unlikely that was still the case. The alterations to the building had probably sealed up most of them. She thought back to the very last time she’d played there. She’d heard her grandfather and his new wife arguing and it was her grandfather who’d been crying. Something to do with sex and Chloe hadn’t listened to more.
    What had been fun, suddenly wasn’t.
    She’d never been able to figure out why the passageways existed. Lots of old houses in England had priest holes where members of the Roman Catholic clergy hid from soldiers, but why have secret walkways that roamed the whole house? Chloe wondered if the man who had it built wanted to spy on his wife. She had visions of craftsmen being put to death after its construction, like the workers who made the hidden chambers in the pyramids. She imagined skeletons hidden behind the wooden walls and when she told her sister, Lucy hadn’t wanted to play there again.
    Chloe moved carefully down the dark corridor, shining the light ahead as well as down. The deeper she went, the more memories flooded back. She tried to look through the spyholes in a couple of places to find they’d been covered over on the other side. Maybe that was just as well.
    She was a grown-up now with a more developed sense of guilt.
    She descended two levels to the basement and smiled when she illuminated the wider section of passageway where she and Lucy had set up a den. Chloe shone the light around their secret play place and stopped on a shelf of toys. She bit back the gulp in her throat, picked up the dragon, and gave him a hug. A cloud of dust shot into her nose and she struggled to suppress a sneeze.
    When she’d been carted off into care, she’d not been given the chance to retrieve the toys hidden here. Her favorite trio, and she’d missed them for a long time.
    “Rufus, you need a bath,” she said in a quiet voice.
    She put him back next to Angel, the horse that was sometimes a unicorn, and then moved Phoebe to another shelf.
    “No fighting over the princess, guys,” she whispered.
    There were more treasures in a shoebox: marbles, a compass, novelty erasers that crumbled when she touched them, and a bag of candy.
    As Chloe’s watering mouth and growling stomach contemplated whether fifteen-year-old lemon sweets might still be edible, assuming she could break them apart, she heard a soft groan. Her hand froze around the bag. There was no further noise, and she’d begun to convince herself that the sound had been a creak -- timbers settling, maybe something she’d disturbed -- when the noise came again. A definite male groan. Tiptoeing the few steps to the spyhole to look into what had once been a storage area for garden junk, Chloe swung the hinged circle of wood to one side.
    Darkness. She hesitated and then shone the flashlight through the hole and tried to peer in at the same time. The beam caught something that almost stopped Chloe’s heart. She sprang back. No way. That couldn’t be what she’d seen. Chloe leaned against the wall and rubbed the flashlight on her itching arm, knowing that she’d have to take another look.
    She wasn’t wrong.
    Hanging on the far wall was a naked man wrapped in chains.

    “Phoebe, get back up here. Angel’s annoying me.”
    “Can’t you two behave for a single moment?”
    “Rufus’s dust is choking me.”
    “And you’re not dusty, Angel?”
    “Guys, give it up. We got her here. Now how’s she going to get him free?”

Chapter Four
    Chloe jumped away from the spyhole, her heart clamoring to get out of her chest and run back upstairs to hide under her bed, with or without her. She took a deep breath. What was a naked man doing chained up in the basement of a health spa? Chloe chewed her lip and looked again.
    His eyes were closed, his head pressed back against the wall, the pain on his face unmistakable.
    He was in agony and she couldn’t bear to look at him. She swung the slip of wood into place.
    Then her shoulders slumped.