"To murder me. God, I should have listened to my gut. Creepy letters that keep showing up unexpectedly haveserial killerwritten all over them." My stalker was definitely involved in this. I hadn’t been in my normal spot on Tuesday, so he must have freaked out and gone full serial killer on me. I knew he was nuts.
"Okay, that's one option. What else?"
"To kidnap me. Redheads are probably a hot commodity in the human slave trade in Casablanca."
Chastity shook her head. "Unlikely. Highly unlikely. With over 14 million Berbers in Morocco, redheads are actually quite common there. I'd put my money on natural blondes being worth the most."
"Since when do you know about the demographics of Morocco?"
"I mean, it's kind of impossible to fully grasp the geopolitical climate of Northern Africa without studying the Berbers."
Where the hell is this coming from?
"And I’ve heard the Berbers have really big dicks."
I nodded.Now it all makes sense."Back to the topic of my impending death. What if they're using me as a guinea pig for some new drug? Any minute now it'll probably kick in and I'll suddenly think I'm an orange and start peeling myself."Actually, now that I think about it...I kind of do feel like an orange.I pulled on a strand of my hair and looked at it.Orange!I let go and blew it out of my face.
"If you were their lab rat, they'd need some way of following up. As far as I can tell, they have no way of getting you to ever come back. Especially now that you're pissed at them for injecting you."
"Maybe they just didn't think it all the way through."
"So they didn’t consider basic things like that, but they took the time to make elaborate letters and envelopes? That doesn't make sense."
"Okay then, genius," I said. "What do you propose they injected me with?"
"Maybe it was some sort of relaxing serum. For all we know that's a perfectly normal part of a Moroccan massage."
"Shouldn't you know that, Miss Berber Facts?"
Chastity rolled her eyes. "Berbers are nomads, not wax techs."
"Okay, then you'll have to trust me. Injections are definitely not part of a Moroccan massage. They lured me there for a reason..."
Chastity snapped her fingers. "That's it!"
"What?"
"The letters. The Society. It all goes back to that. If we can find information on the Society, then we'll know what they're up to."
That was actually a good idea. I ran over to my laptop and googledthe Society.
The first result was for something calledThe Society International, which the website claimed was a brotherhood created by a New York Times bestselling author. The site was fairly vague, so at first I thought it might be it, but then I noticed that the branding didn't match the letters. The font wasn’t the same, and there was no sign of the logo that had been pressed into the wax. And there was nothing about injecting innocent women with random drugs.
The next link went to the homepage for a branch of the Church of England.
"I think that's them!" said Chastity.
"The Church of England?"
"Yeah. They lured you to the spa so they could molest you. Those filthy podiatrists."
I stifled a laugh. "First, that's Catholics. Second, podiatrists deal with feet."
Chastity scrunched up her nose. "Ew. I knew they molested little boys, but I didn't realize they were foot freaks. That's just sick. Jesus would not approve."
"It's good to know that Jesus draws the line at foot fetishism. Moving on..." I clicked back to Google and went to the third result, which brought me to the website for some hoity-toity NYC modeling agency. Forcing women to get bikini waxes was most certainly something they did, but I doubted it would be performed in a seedy Moroccan spa. Their models probably got waxed while sipping on Mimosas in a penthouse. Moreimportantly, I was me. I was awkward, short, and had a big ass. Not exactly model material, even if I did believe I could rock it on the runway in my yoga pants and sneakers.
I scrolled through a few more pages of results and then kicked my chair back from my desk. "It really would have been helpful if they’d picked a more specific name thanthe Society."
