Page 169 of Hide And Seek

I snorted and rose onto my tiptoes to peck his cheek before heading upstairs to the bathroom.

By the time I finally finished showering, and my hair was mercifully free of sap and leaves, the entire lake house smelled incredible. Something rich and savory drifted through the air as I made my way back downstairs, enough to make my stomach growl.

“Okay,” I called out. “Whatever that is, it smells amazing.”

I stepped into the kitchen to find it empty apart from a saucepan simmering softly on the stovetop and a timer glowing on the oven. Forty-two minutes remaining.

“Rhys?” I called out, turning back around. “Where’d you go?”

A faint burst of voices and dramatic music drifted through from the sunken living room, so I followed the sound down the short set of steps and found him stretched across the sofa watching TV.

He glanced over as I walked in. “Too loud?”

I waved a hand dismissively. “No, it’s fine.” My attention shifted toward the news segment playing on the screen, and I dropped down beside him, curling one leg beneath me. “Have we missed anything major while we’ve been up here?”

“Actually, yeah.” Rhys hesitated slightly, forehead creasing. “You just missed a story about Blackpine. Somebody finally bought the land.”

My brows shot up. “Seriously? Who?”

“Some bigshot film producer. David Barber.”

I frowned slightly, trying to place the name. “Is he the guy who makes all those slasher movies?”

Rhys nodded. “Apparently he’s turning the old campground into some kind of horror-themed retreat for adults,” he said. “People will pay to stay there for a week and get ‘immersed in an authentic slasher experience.’ Basically a giant interactive horror movie.”

“So Jesse was right,” I said, nodding slowly. “He said this exact thing would happen.”

“Yeah.” Rhys leaned back against the sofa cushions. “I guess it’s not that surprising. People love places with real history attached to them. Especially fucked-up history.”

I pulled my phone from my pocket and found a flood of unread messages waiting in the group chat I shared with Jasmine, Jesse, Wren, and Tamsin. Most of them were variations of: ‘What the fuck’, ‘JESSE CALLED IT!’, or ‘Absolutely not’.

I laughed softly under my breath before setting the phone aside and shifting closer to Rhys’s side.

“I can’t believe people would actually pay to get chased through the woods by guys in masks,” I said, lips curving in a playful smile. “They could just get their boyfriend to do it for free.”

He laughed quietly and reached over to ruffle my still-damp hair. “That’s true.”

A red-and-white ‘BREAKING NEWS’ banner flashed across the screen, and both of us fell quiet as the volume of the broadcast filled the room.

“This just out of Seattle,” the reporter onscreen said, standing on courthouse steps while cameras crowded behind her. “Ethan Mattner has officially been released after servingjust eight months of the life sentence handed down following his conviction last year. The ruling comes after the Washington Court of Appeals determined that a key piece of evidence used during the trial was obtained through an unlawful warrant, forcing the judge to vacate the conviction despite stating there was still ‘substantial evidence of guilt.’ Prosecutors say they intend to retry the case, but Mattner has been released pending further proceedings.”

I sat up straight, eyes widening. “What the fuck? He’sout?”

Rhys straightened too. “He’s that rapist, right?”

“He attacked nine women,” I said, nodding. “I interviewed a few of them when they came to New York for that survivor advocacy summit in January. Voices Unbroken.”

The summit was part of the biggest sexual violence awareness campaign in the country. I’d spent three days interviewing survivors, activists, and legal experts for a long-form feature piece.

“One of the women was left permanently disabled by what he did to her,” I went on, stomach churning.

“Fucking piece of shit,” Rhys muttered.

“Another one of his victims died by suicide,” I said, voice softer now. “After those videos came out.”

“The ones his cellmate recorded?”

I nodded slowly, a cold feeling creeping down my spine as the memories resurfaced. Ethan Mattner’s cellmate had managed to get hold of a smuggled phone inside the prison, and he’d secretly filmed him laughing about the attacks, mocking the women’s appearances, their trauma, even the way some of them had begged for their lives during the vicious assaults. The clips had spread online within hours.