Hey, guys. So, as promised here is the new chapter a little bit earlier. Everyone sounds so excited in their reviews, I must say. Can't wait to read about your theories and predictions!

Chapter Dedication: CTHEWOODS - because I loved your style of suggesting me the song in the review of Chapter 9, LOL!

WARNING : 'The Cinder' contains all sorts of wicked and horrific imaginations with a bit of sexuality too. YOU MAY FIND DISTURBING, VIOLENT AND GRAPHIC SITUATIONS AT TIMES. CONTENT SUITABLE FOR MATURE READERS ONLY. IF YOU HAVE A SENSITIVE HEART, READ AT YOU OWN RISK. THE MAIN PURPOSE OF THIS STORY IS TO PUSH YOU OUT OF YOU COMFORT ZONE. 'THE BROOKE TRILOGY' IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER STORY THUS, READERS MIGHT FIND SOME PARTS EXTREMELY DISTURBING AND DEPRESSING.

10.

Christian

She was gone.

I had done it. I had sent her away.

Relief. Relaxed. Reassured.

All those there were what I should've felt.

Instead, I felt the worst.

Guilty. Pained. Remorseful.

The look in her eyes when she had slapped had destroyed me.

It had traumatized me with pain much more than her slap actually had.

The hurt, the distrust that had crossed her face was much worse than any attack the Brooke could've planned on me.

I had expected her to fight against it, made a chaos for wanting to stay.

But instead, she had drunk up all the raging emotions inside her and slapped me calmly before turning her back to me.

She did what I had wanted her to do.

Then why was I feeling as if I had been wounded?

I had watched her leaving, the Saab going further until it diminished out of my view.

Since then, I had to look down in every few minutes at my chest or my gut to make sure I wasn't bleeding.

Because I felt like I was.

As if a huge gash was drawn across my body the moment she left me.

Correction, the moment I made her leave me.

Hours must have passed before I felt Brandon's hand over my collar.

He didn't say anything. Neither did Jose.

Perhaps they knew how badly I needed my own space.

What hurt me the most were her words just before parting.

I'm leaving you. And I am never coming back!

Fuck.

I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping that would block the pain entering me.

I couldn't feel this... this helplessness anymore. I was growing tired of it.

There were more important things to be dealt with.

For example, the fucker currently tied to a chair in my home at Sandy Springs.

We had left immediately after Anastasia's departure, with the exception of Brandon stopping by at his place for packing few of his clothes.

I had driven the whole way back while the other two kept a watch on Troy.

What should've been at least an eight-hour drive was completed in six hours.

No stops were made, no need to rest, no need to go slow. This was not a leisurely road trip anymore.

I wanted answers and I wanted them yesterday.

No one asked me to switch. No one asked if I needed to rest.

Maybe they knew better than to let me sit idle.

Sitting freely would have led me to think of Anastasia. Not that my mind still didn't wander back to her in every fifty seconds.

Throughout the drive my insides were screaming at me to turn around, to go to the airport and drag her back. Make her stay with me.

Or better yet go to Barbados with her. Get away from all this and spend time blithely with her.

But I couldn't forget my brother. Christopher was still there, trapped in my place. Being tormented instead of me.

I couldn't be selfish anymore. I had to save my brother.

Sending Ana away was perhaps the best decision I'd made so far.

I wouldn't have to worry about her being in danger. I could focus better. And I could torture answers out of Troy here without her witnessing this side of me.

I just needed to keep reminding myself of these benefits to stop from losing myself over her.

And thank fuck none of them had told me to leave my driving seat and keep an eye on Troy.

He would've died out of my hands then. He still could die out of my hands.

I wasn't above killing the rascal who had been a part of this shit. He had been a part of the reason I hated myself. The reason I drew Ana away from me.

My fists pummeled into his chest tirelessly as Troy became me personal, very much alive, punching bag.

The ghosts of frustration and rage lurking inside me were happy to finally find and outlet.

Troy's screams fell upon deaf ears, his bleeding wounds were seen by blind eyes.

Rage had consumed me and I allowed the beast inside me to let lose.

For the first time in last seven hours, I felt a little free.

Not fighting the madness that consumed me, I let it wash over. I bathed in it.

Only when Jose stopped me did I move away to take a break. "Christian, you don't want to kill him before he gives you answers."

He was right.

Stepping away from bruised and hardly recognizable Troy, I willed to calm myself. Telling the beast that the chance will arrive soon again.

"Now, would you like telling us what actually The Brooke is about?" I asked in a very calmed voice.

As if I was completely at ease with myself.

Troy coughed raggedly, spitting the blood from his bleeding lips before he replied me.

"Told you. It's another dimension."

I had let him have his bullshit yesterday in the car in front of Ana.

It wouldn't matter to her anymore because she was out of it. So whether she bought this shit of not was a moot point.

However, none of us was buying his bullshit. He was trying to send us astray.

My foot lifted up from the floor and landed on the side of his face.

Troy swayed along with the chair from the force of my kick, grunting in agony.

Ducking, I grabbed his throat it with my hand, squeezing it tightly.

"Listen, you shithead, I don't have time for all this. You give me straight answers and you'll get a chance to live, you got me?"

Fuckwit just laughed, wincing from what I could bet were his aching ribs.

"Brandon, go straight, take a left. Third door is the bathroom. Bring me a bucket full of water from there. Oh, and some towels too, please. You'll find them in the rack."

Brandon got up without any hesitation to follow my order.

"Jose straight left to the kitchen. I want a chopping knife, few lemons and some salt."

Unlike Brandon, Jose remained silent.

I turned to him, not wanting to deal with this now.

Things were still strained between us and I still hated his guts.

Because of him, Christopher was trapped there instead of me. It had been because of his ideas that they had let me go and captured my brother instead.

Jose hadn't told that to Ana. Instead, he had given her half-truths, made her feel guilty.

He didn't tell her the real reason Christopher has stayed behind either.

Me.

I was the reason.

But he let Anastasia believe it was his fault somehow.

I didn't know what conversation exactly went between them yesterday morning, but the sudden heavy guilt in her eyes when they both had emerged told me enough.

The fact that she wasn't trying to kill Jose only gave me the prove that he had hidden all his involvement from her.

It angered me like nothing else. I hadn't told her to go and tell the truth. In fact, this was the very reason I was ignoring her.

To tell her the truth about what actually went down, to share my burden of torture with her because I knew that was what Ana wanted me to do.

Not only would she have hated me for being the weakling I had been back then but also hated Jose as well.

I was trying to save us both nut he had to go open his mouth and lie to her which only made her feel worse.

My patience was running out of me.

"Jose. Just go. Do it."

"What do you think you're doing man?"

"He has been conditioned too strongly by them. He won't tell us anything." My sight glided back to Troy as I spoke to Jose.

I let Troy see the fire building inside me to destroy him. "Unless I'll have to recondition him."

My smirk left the desired effect upon him.

For the first time since I had caught him, Troy quivered in fear.

Boy, this is just the beginning.

Jose returned first, followed by Brandon a second later.

Without me prompting, Brandon knew what to do. He went behind Troy with a towel spread in his hand.

The moment he started wrapping it around Troy's face, he cried out like a baby.

Struggling to get away from Brandon, Troy jerked back and forth. But Brandon was having none of it.

He snatched Troy's hair and yanked him back so hard I almost thought he had broken his neck.

Troy whimpered as Brandon pulled at his ear and twisted it hard.

"Stay still if you want both your ears intact." He all but snarled and spat at Troy.

There was something dark running inside Brandon. Something that was similar to what lurked beneath my exteriors.

I guess that was why Brandon had been so compliant with my methods of getting answers from Troy.

Ana had been right. We had played the game once while she was in the hospital, recovering from her amnesia.

She had called Jose a coconut. All rough and tough from outside but soft inside.

He wasn't the one to stomach much.

How he had survived the Brooke and the Pinnacle Race was beyond my understanding.

But then he had dwindled in his senior year which made them throw him into the Pinnacle Race and he almost lost there in the very first level.

If it weren't for Anastasia saving him countless times, he wouldn't be standing here.

But Brandon, there was something raw about him that should give a normal person creeps.

Not because of his paintings or his forever grim expressions set.

But because how he barely blinked at anything, how he was ready to do anything, take on anything.

It was almost as if there was something dead inside him and he even didn't know it.

Could it have been Emily? The paintings in his room were starting yet haunting at the same time.

The effect it had on Anastasia was the reason I shifted her into Brandon's cousin's room.

But Brandon never left those walls, he breathed her sight. He lived seeing only her face when he didn't even remember who she really was.

I couldn't think of being in his place, staring at Anastasia's pictures for years while not knowing who or where she was.

The look on Brandon's face when Anastasia had told her how the fourth level had ended was devastating.

He didn't know Emily but her death had left a void in him.

What would happen to me if I imagine...

No, I couldn't even finish that thought yet alone imagine it.

It would be Hell on Earth with me being the devil.

So I guess the black abyss swirling around Brandon was justified.

Troy's cry shook me back to the reality. "I am telling the truth. It is another dimension. It had been discovered by them long back and they now work as the staff."

"How can you think this parallel world fuckery would sound believable? Do we look like fools to you?" Brandon hissed.

Troy sighed. "Jose do you have internet in your phone?"

Jose remained quiet at first. His gaze flicker in my way, only when I gave a jerk with my head did he responded to Troy.

"Yeah, why?"

"Google Superstring theory."

Jose did and then read it out loud for us.

"Superstring Theory states that the fifth and sixth dimensions are where the notion of possible worlds arises. If we could see on through to the fifth dimension, we would see a world slightly different from our own that would give us a means of measuring the similarity and differences between our world and other possible ones.

In the sixth, we would see a plane of possible worlds, where we could compare and position all the possible universes that start with the same initial conditions as this one, i.e. the Big Bang. In theory, if you could master the fifth and sixth dimension, you could travel back in time or go to different futures."

Jose paused. His face growing thoughtful.

To be honest, it made me think of it too.

"The world slightly different from ours." Brandon said. "The landslides going up instead of down. Quicksand with blood."

"Poisonous rain. Rivers with eels not freezing despite the frost weather." Jose continued.

"The man-eating trees. The meadow with grass and sun in the middle of snow and mountains."

I finally caught up with them. "The time travel."

Holy shit it was true. The Brooke was another dimension.

Anastasia thought all those levels were built by the scientists, that they were illusions.

They weren't. Not all of them.

They were natural, just not in our world.

Jose must have been thinking the same when he met my eyes.

"The advanced technology is the disappearing gadgets and time machines. They are not creating delusional weapons, they are using another world in their favor."

"Thank fuck you believe me now." Troy huffed. "Now can you please untie me?"

"Not so soon. Tell us more about it."

"I told you everything. BMHS is in fifth dimension and BLU is in sixth. You're lucky you having been there. It's a fucked up place."

"Why and how they discovered these dimensions?"

"They didn't discover it. They created them. The fifth one was found accidentally but the sixth one was created by them."

"How?"

"The same way they can be destroyed."

That got my interest. "Again, how?" I asked.

Troy let out a chuckle that came more like a flinch. "Like hell, I'm going to tell you."

This time, Brandon didn't waste a second tying the cloth around his face.

His eyes were blazing with a storm as he forcefully bent Troy's face in the water bucket.

Jose cringed as Troy struggled to come up for breath.

"You should go and take some rest, Jose." I told him without taking my eyes off Troy's scrappling form.

From my peripheral view, I saw Jose shaking his head.

"No, I want to stay here."

I didn't say anything. It was his choice. He needed to be stronger, quit acting like a sensitive pussy.

But if he did walk out on this, I wouldn't blame him either. He had been through enough.

Being in senior year and a Prefect, he definitely had to have endured more there.

What mattered was he came out alive out of it. Broken or not.

Troy fell back into his chair as Brandon let go of him, gasping and coughing.

Now it was my turn. With a knife in one hand and a lemon in next, I moved forward.

Troy was still heaving. Watching me with his blurry eyes, fear clear in them.

Good.

A quick swipe of it on his arm and the skin cut open, bleeding dark red.

Troy hissed. Of course, it wasn't a deep cut. I didn't want him to die on me. Not at least before he gave me what I wanted.

My next move was to slice the lemon into half and squeeze the hemisphere shape on his oozing new wound.

Troy screamed.

As the drops of lemon juice diluted with his blood, he thrashed in his chair to get free but Brandon was holding him from behind.

I don't know what this said about me, but I didn't feel bad for doing this to him.

Although I did wait for the pang of guilt or conscience to hit me, it didn't really affect me when those emotions never hit me.

We had tolerated so much worse. Anastasia had gone through so much worse.

I was going to avenge her. Avenge us all.

And if I came out as a monster, in the end, I didn't give a fuck.

The only person whose opinion on me would matter had given up on me.

Good Riddance! She couldn't be mine anyway.

It was truth. Didn't mean I had to like it.

Bitterness seeped through my blood turning into ruthlessness. We weren't given any mercy, I wouldn't be providing any either.

I'd do whatever it took to know how to destroy them.

Next came the salt, my pinched fingers sprinkling it over his cut.

More screams. More thrashing.

"Come on, man. I was just being literal. You know 'salt in the wounds'. I remembered everything and made her go away. She slapped me with the promise of never returning back. I felt the phrase, thought you should feel it too."

My voice sounded deadly calm. No emotion, no arrogance behind it. A monotone as if I was delivering some boring speech.

Troy looked at me with desperate pleading eyes.

My response was to slash another cut on his shoulder. Then another near his wrist, followed by numerous on his arms and knees.

He cried out each time. Begging me to stop. My hands didn't flinch once, no heaviness surrounded me.

Actually, it was kind of liberating.

You're turning into a sick fuck, Grey.

Didn't matter. Didn't care.

You're becoming just like them.

Nice! Then I'd give them a dose of their own medicine.

I continued pouring lemon juice and rubbing salt on his cuts, he yelled in agony but no one would help him.

Just like no one helped me.

The memories plundered into me, weaving their evil web around me. I let them.

There was no fight, no resistance from my side. Each memory, each torture I had borne evolved me into something more.

Something darker, more dangerous, more savage.

I left behind the sweet playboy C. I adopted this new version of Christian. Threatening, menacing, feral and unforgiving.

Thank fuck Anastasia wasn't here.

Troy was crying now. Sobbing like a cunt, to be exact. His miserable state held no compassion inside me.

"Troy, why are you suffering so much for them knowing what they will do once they catch you?" Brandon asked after two hours.

I only knew the time because Jose went to get food for us stating it had been that long and he was hungry.

He still had an appetite after witnessing the alternate cut plays and water boarding for two long hours straight.

Maybe he wasn't as sensitive as I thought him to be.

"I-I can't o-ou" Troy coughed out blood, his breath wheezing.

At some time in between rubbing the salts, I had started throwing fists and kicks at him as well.

Troy was taking the brunt of all my anger every time a memory from the Brooke bounced back at the front of my mind.

Unfortunate guy.

"Come on, man. We can protect you. We'll give you our word. This doesn't have to be this way." Brandon's voice turned suddenly sober.

Which was odd considering he had been the one to repeatedly drown him for hours.

But I knew what he was doing. He was trying to manipulate Troy.

A deep growl left my chest as my fists attacked Troy's head relentlessly. Insanity became me, all thoughts vanished and the only thing remained was the red haze clouding my vision.

A strong arm pushed me backward. "Hey, Christian. Stop it!" Brandon said.

"He is not the enemy here. Look at him. He is just like us. Their victim." He urged on.

I bared my teeth. "Doesn't matter. He deceived me. I took him as my friend, and this whole time he was with them."

"They were threatening his life. What else could he have done?" Band on argued in a soft voice. Like he was trying to tame the beast inside me.

I continued playing my part of being the confused bad guy. "He should've come to me. He didn't. Now I'm going to kill him."

I roared, jumping forward. My movements were precisely slow so that Brandon could catch me in time.

"Don't! Stay down." He turned to Troy. "I'm sorry man. I don't know why I had been doing this. I just... I just... doesn't matter."

He shook his head, looking guilty. "Christian, go bring the first aid."

"What? Have you bloody lost your mind?"

He pointed at Troy's distorted body. "Look at him. What's the difference between us and them if do that?"

Narrowing my eyes, I let my fists unclench and my shoulders stoop down. Hoping that was enough to play the defeated part.

Brandon was better at this. Leaving him to deal with his mind games, I went in search of First Aid.

A few minutes later, when I returned back to the room, Troy looked at me differently.

His gave wasn't full of fear or hatred, he was... was that pity in his eyes?

Why the fuck would he pity me?

Whatever Brandon had conversed with him seemed to be working.

Though I didn't need his fucking misplaced pity, I continued to play the part.

Brandon turned away from Troy to take the meds from me. I jerked back. "No, let me do it."

A slight twitch at Brandon's mouth indicated that I had made the right move.

As much as it burned me to kneel down in front of the fucker and tend his injuries, I did it without looking at his face once.

Hopefully, me not making eye contact with him would be taken as remorse.

Trying my best to be as gentle as possible I cleaned and nursed him, all the while planning ways to dump his body into the drainage.

It happened much quicker than I thought. A sigh in defeat was all the morning he gave before he giving up.

"The Brooke Caves." He blurted out.

I looked up at him at last. "Huh?"

"It is not very far from BMHS. East to Glean Center. Climb the rocky mountains and you'll find a series of caves. They are called as the Brooke Caves."

"What is there inside those caves?" I asked in a very cautious tone.

"A bunch of stones. Not just any stone, they are Scarlet Emerald, Painite, Black Fire Opal, Hematite, Blood Moonstone and most important - Alexandrite. Each of them is cut into accurate petals, Alexandrite is the center of it."

His eyes met mine through a thin wet sheen forming in them with a tinge of pink in the white.

"The Lotus Trophy. All the gems have to be fit inside it correctly. Their combination is direct sunlight would refract the speed and time of the light. The manipulation will explode the dimension and everything inside it. Only a vacant space will be left behind."

My breath stopped.

The way he said each word with finality and so carefully, it was hard to believe he was bullshitting us.

"How do you know this?" I asked. Somehow I doubted the Brooke would tell its student this vital information. Even those who graduated.

"We were taught how do destroy dimensions if any other came into dominance. They have whole emergency army prepared for it just in case."

Huh.

That was I had to react with. Huh.

"The Caves are heavily guarded. Each stone is preserved with prestige. I have seen the shapes of them, told to guard them with our lives if they ever came out of the caves. Not hard to join the puzzle."

"What's the Lotus Trophy got to do with it? And if it's something so valuable, why keep it for the Pinnacle Race winners?"

"Those stones are perfectly shaped to be fit inside the Lotus Trophy. Anyone who touches it gets instantly teleported to BLU. So the winner, which has been none except for Christopher, would be held at BLU where he or she would definitely break down."

But since Anastasia broke the glass, there was no chance of grabbing the Lotus Trophy.

Their immediate arrival made sense now. Anastasia had endangered the base of their dimension. They must have felt threatened.

"Christian! Come here." Jose's urgent voice echoed in the room as he barged through the door.

I was at his side at once. "What is it?"

He stopped inside of the bedrooms. To be out of earshot from where Troy was held captive.

"I was at the cafe next street. All flights to Barbados had been canceled for yesterday and today due to some weather issues there."

"Shit. Where is Anastasia?" I should've gone with her for the takeoff.

But I just let her leave like that knowing I won't be able to see her flying away from me.

Now she must be searching for us in New Orleans while we were here. She didn't even know my address to drive here.

Stupid. Idiot. Grey, you suck.

I took out my phone, frantically checking for Amy missed calls or texts by the girls.

There was none.

"They haven't reached for me. What about you Jose?"

He shook his head. "No, they didn't. I called Ana but her phone was switched off. So I called the airport. Christian, only three flights left for Barbados last evening. And there were no Anastasia Steele or Mia Adams booked for any of them."

I stilled. "What?"

"They never booked any flight to Barbados. Mia never bought tickets for it."

Bloody fucking hell!

Panic and fear gripped me from within.

The girls had been missing from last eight hours or so and none of us had any clue about it.

Anastasia's phone was switched off. She could be in danger and I was here beating Troy over sending her away.

No, no, no, no, no.

I can't fuck up this bad.

I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if something happened to her because of me.

Because I made her leave.

Fuuuuuucckkk!

An abrupt pain bloomed in my chest, focusing more on the left side.

It felt as if someone was trying to rip my ribs and shatter them from inside out.

Clearing my head, I tried to think of a wise step.

I decided to call Mia. She was with Anastasia. She would keep her safe.

The line rang and rang and with each brimming sound, my breath turned out ragged and shorter.

I almost went into a cardiac arrest when the line finally connected.

"Hey, hot-shot. Took you long enough."

"WHERE THE FUCK IS SHE?"

"Jeez. Calm your dick. She is using the washroom. Have to tell you her bladder is really annoying. She needs a washroom stop at least twice in every state."

"State? What do you mean? Where the hell are you?"

"St. Louis, Missouri." Her reply was cheerful and impacting straight upon my fury.

"What. Are. You. Doing. There?"

She made a voice which I guessed was a snicker. "You seriously thought I'll take your side? Ana needs this as much as you do. If you ain't supporting her, I will."

Oh my fucking God!

I was going to kill her. Possibly both of them.

With patience I didn't have in me, I gritted my teeth in an attempt to reason with the Blondie.

"Mia, you don't understand. This is much bigger than we thought. Anastasia can be in grave danger. You understand that? You know what that means?"

"I know Christian. Anastasia filled me in with what Troy has told you all. But this is her choice. You can't steal that away from her. And just for your knowledge, we both are big girls. We can handle it ourselves."

"And how are you exactly handling it?"

"By going to Elgin."

Ah. The mental hospital.

"How far are you?" I asked in a barely contained tone.

"Six hours tops. I can go slower if you want. I anyway wanted to do a little sightseeing of Columbia which is not exactly in the way."

Blondie was not as dumb. "Go as slow as you can. Text me the hospital's address. I'm meeting you guys right there."

"Bring an armor with you. It'll protect you from her wrath."

Oh, I will. But who would protect Anastasia from my wrath?

A loud clatter disrupted my murderous thoughts against Anastasia.

Disconnecting the line, Jose and I ran where Troy was held down.

Brandon was sitting on the ground. Both his hands cupping his bleeding knee cap as he looked at where Troy was sitting still.

To still.

His back was to us, but I knew there was something wrong with his slumped posture and his tied hands.

Brandon's eyes collided with mine, filled with sadness. "I'm sorry. I tried to stop him."

I didn't ask him what he was sorry for. What he had tried to stop.

My doubts were confirmed as I rounded Troy's chair.

One hand was free of ropes, limp across his thighs. The ropes around his torso were cut too.

The knife I had carelessly left on the table when Jose had come to me, must have been the one he used to free himself.

And attack Brandon who's knee was bleeding.

And then slash his own throat with that very knife.

Troy had killed himself.

Is there anyone who cares about Troy's death more than what's going to happen when Christian goes to Ana? I'm pretty sure not. You all are pretty horrific human beings who just want to see Ana being spanked rather than knowing why Troy committed suicide.

Well guess what? I'M JUST LIKE YOU ALL! Haha

So there's definitely going to be some spanking in the upcoming chapter. Probably, some hot steamy sex too? I'm not telling you that, you'll have to stay tuned ;)

I can see I have 94 reviews here, can we make it over 100? Review number 100 and 101 will get a surprize from me regarding The Brooke Trilogy!

Love ya all,

Kaishi Springs xoxo