Page 144 of Hide And Seek

For several seconds, the only sounds were footsteps crunching against loose gravel and the distant whistle of wind moving through the mountains. Then the video abruptly ended.

I sat there staring at the blank screen, my mind spinning so violently it felt impossible to hold onto a single coherent thought.

Carly.

The lake.

Sixteen drunk, privileged idiots standing on the shoreline while a terrified little girl was held underwater like a sacrificial offering.

My stomach lurched hard enough to hurt.

I’d spent days trying to piece together what happened to Carly, imagining negligence or maybe even a panicked accident gone horribly wrong. But this was something else entirely. Something so much uglier. Sicker. So monstrous that my brain almost rejected it outright.

“I kept my promise to Gen,” Rhys said quietly. “I made sure none of the others ever touched a single hair on her head.”

My brows furrowed. “What do you mea—” The words died in my throat, and I looked at the timestamp on the screen again. “Wait. This was the day she died, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“It wasn’t an accident.” I slowly shook my head. “She was your first victim.”

Rhys nodded. “There’s a cliffside stretch of road on the way back down the mountain. When we reached it, I ran her off it,” he said matter-of-factly. “It wasn’t difficult. She was always a terrible driver. Reckless. Easily distracted.”

A chill crawled down my spine.

“After she went over the edge, I pulled over long enough to toss her phone into the ravine too,” he continued. “That way nobody would ever know I had it, and everyone would assume it was a terrible accident.”

“No one suspected anything? Even though you were right there?”

“No.” Rhys shrugged lightly. “Like I said, everyone already knew she was a reckless driver. So it fit.”

I couldn’t speak anymore. Could only shake my head with disbelief.

“Her parents knew I was the last person to see her alive, and they talked to me about it, but there wasn’t any actual suspicion attached to it,” he added. A faint smile tugged at his mouth. “And why would there be? We were friends.”

I held the phone out toward him, suddenly unable to keep it in my hand. It felt wrong now, like it was contaminated due to the mere presence of the confession video on it. Like if I stopped touching it, the awful mental images would suddenly vanish from my head.

But they didn’t. They were already there, lodged sickeningly deep. A terrified twelve-year-old girl floundering in a lake in the dark while a group of drunk adults treated some twisted old book like a game, right up until it crossed a line none of them could ever uncross again.

My stomach rolled violently, and I dragged a hand over my face, breathing unevenly.

“I can’t believe they killed a little girl over some stupid fictional ritual,” I said in a broken whisper. “Not that there’s ever a good reason to murder someone. Especially a child. Butthat? It’s just… it’s so…”

“Evil,” Rhys said. “It’s fucking evil.”

Silence flooded the cabin again. Then another thought hit me so hard my head jerked up. “Why didn’t you just go to the police? Like you told Gen you would?” I asked. “She was willing to confess.”

“To save her own ass, yeah. But she didn’t actually feel remorseful. You saw that, right?”

“It looked like she felt awful about it,” I said in a hollow voice.

“Only because she knew how it would make her look to the rest of the world,” he replied. “But you heard what she said about herself and the other Legacies. All that really mattered to them was protecting their own lives and reputations.”

I swallowed thickly. That was true. But still…

“Turning them in was the right thing to do,” I said. “Not… notkillingthem.”

Rhys scoffed. “They would’ve denied or minimized everything the second the cops got involved, and they all had rich families and expensive lawyers.” He cocked his head. “How many of them do you think would’ve actually ended up getting punished in the end?”