He touches a place on his shoulder, and I wonder what kind of bruises were left on his skin.

There’s a rap on the door, and Garrett’s head jerks toward it.

“Take turns doing what?” Oliver leans forward, ignoring the knocking until it dies.

I hear his footsteps before the door to the observation room opens. Truman’s backlit, but the outline of his shoulders tells me all I need to know. He steps into the room, folds his arms over his chest, and stares at the boy in the window. All the swagger has gone out of Garrett. His face slumps, and he blinks at the grimy table. I look at Truman’s reflection in the two-way glass. His eyes have hardened and he’s grinding his jaw.

“Take turns doing what?” Oliver repeats.

The boy in the chair is silent.

“Garrett,” Oliver says softly. “This will all be over soon. We’ve talked to six of your brothers,” he lies. “There are twelve more after you. At this point, we know a good deal about what happens in the basement.”

Garrett shifts but says nothing.

“What we’re trying to do now is confirm whether the stories match. I know it’s hard to talk about—”

“We crawled on the floor on our hands and knees,” Garrett says, his voice barely more than a whisper.

Next to me, Truman is completely still.

“We all took turns with the whip.” Garrett sounds bewildered as he hears it said out loud. He rubs his shoulder again. “It was so dark. You couldn’t really tell if you were hitting the guy or the floor.” A sharp inhale. “Except for the sound.”

His hands are shaking now—like Ryan’s—and he balls them into fists. I taste something like bile in my throat. I think back to last night at the party, stalking Michael with Cindy by my side. I’d been so focused on looking for predators baring their teeth and sharpening their claws that I hadn’t noticed how many of them were already bruised and bloodied and dancing toward oblivion.

“Who wore the handcuffs?”

“There wasn’t a key. So only one person could go in the handcuffs.”

“Who?” Oliver’s edged in so close, their faces are almost touching.

I’m leaning in, too, wanting so badly to hear it was Jay—that this would explain his fear and paranoia, that I don’t see the obvious flaw in my wish, that Jay wasn’t a pledge, that he was a junior, the social chair, and that, if anything, he was on the other side, holding the key.

“We called him ‘Chains,’” Garrett says.

Oliver’s eyebrows lift at this obviously cruel sobriquet.

“But his name was Colton something, I think.” He shrugs. “I don’t remember his last name.”

I inhale. Colton. The name means nothing to me.