Page 60 of Hide And Seek
He motioned to his shoes. “I actually prefer my other sneakers for ax throwing, because they’ve got better grip, but they’re still wet from last night. From all the—” He abruptly stopped, lips thinning. “Well, I guess I don’t need to spell it out for you.”
My mind didn’t feel right. It was moving too fast and too slow at the same time, trying to slot his answer into place. Trying to decide if it fit or not.
A nosebleed at paintball.
I couldn’t remember anything like that happening. But maybe I’d missed it, like Rhys said. There had been a lot going on that day, after all. A lot of people moving around.
But then…
A flicker of memory. The fire last night. The way people had started drifting off as the hour drew later. The way Sloane and Reid had disappeared. The way Rhys had left right around the same time.
Hadn’t he?
I couldn’t quite pin it down, because now that I was actively trying to, everything suddenly felt blurred, like my brain had stopped recording things cleanly at some point. Still, I was at least seventy-five percent sure I’d seen Rhys leave the fire not long after Sloane and Reid did, and he definitely wasn’t there when Jasmine and I left to shower.
Then again, most people had left the firepit by the time Jasmine and I finally left last night. It didn’t mean any of them had stalked two of their fellow counselors before brutally murdering them.
So… was I just being paranoid again? Or was I missing something right in front of me? Was I going to wind up like one of those idiots in horror movies who ignored every single warning sign and practically handed themselves to the killer on a silver platter?
“You good?” Rhys asked.
I looked up. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Looks like you’ve got something on your mind.” He was staring at me now, steady and unblinking, like he somehow knew exactly what was happening inside my head. “Are you still thinking about last night?”
I swallowed hard, head shaking. “No, just… Brad and Olivia. I’m hoping they’ll be here with the cops soon.”
“They should be,” he said, running a finger over a scuffed ax handle. “But hey, you never know when a lesson like this might come in handy, right?”
“Yeah, that’s true,” I murmured. I hesitated, then glanced at him again. “Do you think Piper will actually show up this morning? So we can get out of here early?”
Rhys snorted. “Fuck no. That girl’s never coming back.”
“What makes you so sure?” I asked, stomach suddenly lurching again.
“It’s like Jasmine said last night. She’s the flakiest person on the face of the planet, and she gets worse every year,” he replied. “I wasn’t even surprised when she dipped out of work on the first day and ghosted the whole camp.”
“Oh. Right.” My head tilted slightly. “So, um… how long have you known her for?”
“Practically my whole life.”
“Is it like that with all the Legacies?” I asked, suddenly curious about their history. “You’ve all known each other forever?”
“Pretty much, yeah. We grew up together. Our parents were all friends or business acquaintances, and we all went to the same schools. Vacationed in the same places.”
“So it’s like a big extended family.”
“Kind of,” he said, nodding. “We don’t hang out as much as we used to, because we all ended up going to different colleges after school. But we’ve come here to work every summer for the last four years, and we keep in touch through the group chat. So there’s always some kind of conversation happening.”
“That’s pretty cool. It’s rare to see a big friendship group that stays so close for so long.”
His jaw ticked, ever so slightly. “Yeah,” he said after a beat. His thumb dragged absently along the ax handle, smearing over another faint scuff mark. “It’s… history, I guess.”
I frowned a little. “History?”
“Yeah. When you’ve known people that long, you don’t really question it. You just keep showing up because that’s what you’ve always done.”
I nodded slowly. “I guess it’s like my old high school classmates from back home,” I said. “Sometimes I feel like we’re only still in touch because it would be weird not to be.”
