Chapter 2

“No,” Nero shook his head, his gaze instantly deepening into a frown.

“Yes,” she counteracted.

“No, no, no, no. This is a bad idea. Vince, tell her this is a bad idea,” Nero turned to Vince.

“Yeah, Jessie…we have to stay together,” Vince shrugged.

“Ow…come on, Vincenzo,” Jessie whined, using his full name and even adding the Italian accent. She twirled her red hair and smiled sweetly. “It’ll be fun.”

Vince licked his lips.

“No,” Nero wailed in disappointment. They were definitely going to play the game.

“So the rules are simple,” Jessie started. Nero shrugged absent-mindedly, even though he was listening with rapt attention. “Vince, you and I both go and hide anywhere, so long as it is within the building. Nero would try to seek us out.”

“Together?” Vince quizzed hopefully. Jessie rolled her green eyes. “No, dumb-dumb. Separate ways.” His shoulders sagged.

“If you get lost or fall into a bottomless shaft still under construction, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Nero spat.

She continued. “We get a five-minute head start, and since the building is really big, you get a chance to video call us to try and pinpoint our location. Got it?”

“This is a terrible idea,” was Nero’s reply.

“Well, if you can find us before the seminar starts, you get a healthy portion of our lunch.” Jessie chided.

“I don’t like that reward prize,” Vince whined.

“What if I lose?” Nero asked. He genuinely wasn’t interested in the game. He just wanted to play more Call of Duty on the giant screen and on the PlayStation 5. He wanted to make sure that his stakes weren’t high in case he wanted to give up early.

“Nothing. You get nothing,” Jessie shrugged.

“Yeah, I get that part. What do I give,” Nero probed with mild irritation in his voice.

“Nnnnotthhing?” Jessie offered. “You don’t need to give anything. Your play is already the sacrifice.”

“Ohh…he gets to give nothing?” Vince sneered.

“Deal,” Nero smiled and opened the timer app on his phone.

“Wait, wait, wait, hold on! I want to trade places with Nero.”

“4:59…4:58…4:57…4:56…4:55…”

“That’s the timer, Vince, go, Go, GO!”

Before long, the both of them were situated in their first hiding place and waited for Nero’s video call.

Having explored literally everywhere, Nero believed that finding them would be easy. He placed the first video call to Jessie, and she answered it and threw a peace sign. All that was behind her was a wall. Gold accented wall. He turned to look behind him and saw the exact same color of paint on the wall.

Rough start.

“Hey, uhhh… Jessie? Could you do a twirl around for me?” he requested as sweetly as he could muster. She nodded and did the fastest 360° twirl he had ever witnessed. It was as if the background just blurred in some kind of camera effect and came back to normal again. 

He gave her a bored look.

“Ha-ha. Very amusing. A little more slowly, please?” His patience was wearing thin. He needed to find her before the seminar so he could get back to playing his video game. She obliged after a fit of laughter and turned in the opposite direction, revealing the hallway to the conference room the seminar was to hold.

“Gotcha!” He turned off his phone without even ending the call and sped off toward the direction of the hall. When he got there, however, she was nowhere to be found. He tried to recreate the exact position she was in the video call to make sure he was correct, and when he was sure, he put another call through.

“Really!? You’re moving?” he scolded her.

“Oh…yeah! That was another part of the game I forgot to tell you. Of course, we’d move! If we didn’t, you’d have found me by now. No fun in that.”

Through video call, her face didn’t seem as freckled as it actually was in real life. She had light red spots everywhere. That just added to her beauty, though.

Nero groaned and growled at the same time, letting out the candid sound of a frustrated person. He hung up on her and called Vince. When he answered, he gave away his location too easily. He was in the kitchen! 

There were food utensils everywhere, and he himself was trying a food sample. Nero sprinted for the elevator and went directly to the ground floor, where the kitchen was. Innocently scuttling around staff, they took the cue to understand that he was looking for Vince, having seen them together earlier. Without him asking, one of them pointed to a door at the far end of the kitchen. After waving an appreciative thanks to the round smiling man who tossed him a pastry, he darted out the door to look for his 6’4 friend. The door led to a wide storage area that had a garage door at the end where trucks came in to offload their bulk. After searching the entire storage unit with no sign of his friend, he ran outside the garage door. What he saw horrified him. 

“I’m never going back to that game,” he said out loud with a cracked voice.

The door opened into an underground parking lot that had levels. From the sign overhead, he was currently on the second. There was one above him and four underneath him.

He tried to reason. If he were hiding from someone, where would he go? Right. Underneath. He decided to go straight down instead of taking the search level by level, just so that Vince wouldn’t see him coming. Before he started his journey, he decided to video call Jessie one more time. When he did, he got the most pleasant surprise of his life. The background behind her was a parking lot. No natural lighting.

She was also underground.

Without much ado, he took off and began descending the parking lot. Just as he was about to enter the third level, he noticed something like a shadow in an isolated corner of the lot. It was a car, but it had managed to arrest his attention so vividly. What he saw made him nearly lose his mind.

“A Lomborghini Sesto Elemento,” he echoed the name of the automobile beast. Abandoning his mission, he stalked as close to the car as he could, ignoring the sound of a passing van. All his senses were momentarily enslaved to the devil, lying proudly in its own space in the lot. He caressed the car when he got to it with tender respect, almost like it was an aero-soft gel, and he was afraid it would decimate if he applied more pressure than he currently did. 

He took out his phone and began to take pictures of the car. He recorded videos of the car with his voice over the video, stating the specs of the car.

“Good evening, guys, Nero, here, I have with me, live in the Cruche des Abeilles Dorées, a Lomborghini Sesto Elemento. There are only 20 models of this beast in the world today, and here, I was lucky enough to spot one lying seemingly harmlessly in the parking lot.” He introduced. He then began walking around the car. “You wouldn’t fathom, while the engine is off and the beast sleeps, that its V-10 engine carries the full form from 0 to 65 miles per hour at a stuttering 2.5 seconds. That’s easily one of the best accelerations out there. You probably didn’t know this, but one of the reasons why the Elemento is such a performance beast is its weight. It is one of the lightest Lomborghinis ever produced, weighing in at around 999 kilograms, engine and transmission included. The secret to such unbelievably lightweight? Carbon. Literally, everything is made of carboooaaaaahhhh!” Nero jumped after seeing a face pop up behind him on his camera when he toggled it between rear view and front view.

“This is your definition of seek?” Jessie asked with a laugh.

Nero was seething inside. “You’re ruining my vlog.” Nevertheless, his face changed, and he said, “I’m sorry, but would you look at this!?” He pointed to the car as if she wasn’t already looking at it. “Lomborghini Sesto Elemento!”

“In real-time, baby!” Jessie marveled. He had the same dumbstruck look Nero had when he saw the car from a distance. “$1.7 mill gets you a lot, baby,” she smiled and touched the car in almost the exact same way that Nero had touched it, making him smile at their similarities. 

“I didn’t know you were into cars?” he admitted.

“I’m into all the good stuff.” she chuckled.

Another voice joining theirs made them jump. “Hey, guys, you gotta see thi…Wooaahhh! This is a Lomborghini Sesto Elemento!” Vince knelt and kissed the car’s hood. He then looked up at them and continued. “You still gotta come see this.” He stood and started down the lower levels of the lot. Reluctantly, they both followed him, taking one last look at the Elemento before it disappeared around the corner they rounded.

They noticed Vince begin to deliberately quell the sound of his steps as they trudged after him, remodeling his posture to that of a cat’s. He urged them to do the same, and they cautiously obliged. He stopped when he reached the threshold of the last level and peered into the lot without entering. He signaled them to stop.

When they peered into the lot, they saw a van. Nero vaguely recognized it as the van that passed him while he was entranced by the Elemento. There were men surrounding the van holding handguns. They counted six.

“Some government security detail?” Nero quizzed.

“No. Look closer. Inside the van,” Vince whispered. Looking closer, they made out a struggling shape through the tinted glass, although it was difficult to tell important details.

“Oh my God, they’re raping someone!” Jessie whisper-yelled.

“Shhhh!” Vince shushed her before she had them caught.

“I think they’re tying her up. When the van stopped, she burst out and tried to run.”

“She’s kidnapped,” Nero realized.