REALLY ✓

28: The Gray Area

"Sure, no problem,"

Once I got off the phone with Jenny, I quickly dialed Judah's number. I knew I told myself I wasn't gonna be involved with Judah anymore, but this I wasn't doing this for Judah, I was doing this for Jenny.

I had prepared a speech and I was gonna tell him off for making his poor mother worry once he picked up the phone. But the phone didn't even ring and it went straight to voicemail instead. It was weird. I remembered Judah giving me a call at 2.30 AM last night, why was his phone dead now all of a sudden?

I had this gut feeling that something wasn't right. I started to remember little details about his call from last night. Although he didn't say anything, I could hear some background noises. There was a muffled sound of electronic music of some sort—maybe he was in a club somewhere.

I think I know where he could be...

"Hey babe, you're up?" Blake's voice suddenly broke from my train of thought.

"Umm yeah," I looked up to him and flashed him a quick smile.

"Who was that?" he said groggily, referring to my last phonecall.

"Uh... my... mom," I lied.

"She's looking for you?"

"Yeah... I think I should head back. Can you drop me off in town? I need to... run an errand for her," I lied again. I didn't know why I just did that. Perhaps I just didn't feel like mentioning another guy's name to my new boyfriend.

"Okay. But, can I see you again tonight?"

"Yeah, sure,"

*

Blake dropped me off at town and he offered to help me with my errand, but I quickly turned him down. After he left, I used my trusty google maps to find the place that I heard Judah and Ava talked about before: Castro's.

Castro's was located deep inside these long alleyways near the town center. It was just a normal-looking bar in daytime, but at night it transformed into a club or something. At least that was what the review on google said.

As I made my way to the entrance of Castro's, I saw the 'closed' sign hanging on the window. I was about to give up and turn away, when I noticed something on the corner of my eye; Judah's motorcycle was parked on the side of the building.

He's here.

I walked around the back and tried to see if they have another entrance to the building. Sure enough, there was a back door and to my absolute favor, it was unlocked.

I pushed the heavy metal door back and immediately I was hit with a strong smell of alcohol, blood, and cigarettes. There were other weird smells too that I just didn't know what and the smell was so intense, I almost gagged.

Ignoring the fluorescent light above me that was flickering on and off, I slowly made my way through a long empty hallway. At the end of the hall stood this large room with something like a cage in the middle. It was strange, I had never seen anything like this before.

At the end of the room was this tall crimson door. It looked intimating as it had the restricted sign plastered there. And as I made my way closer to it, I could make out the sound of people talking. Taking a deep breath, I decided to creak the door open slightly.

"We can't just take him down. He's the most powerful man on this island," said a big guy with dreadlocks and tattoos all over his face.

"We can, because I happen to have a secret weapon for it," said a younger guy opposite to him. I remembered that he was the guy I saw riding with Judah a few months back. His name was... Max.