Chapter 30
MAX
If she wanted to break my heart, she’d already done it. She shot out of my reach so fast I couldn’t catch her. I knew myself well enough. If I didn’t give her space, I’d be in her face in three… two… one.
“Trouble! Wait!” I yelled, but she kept running. I wanted to chase after her and drag the truth out into the light between us. I wanted to tell her everything. I hated hiding this from her, hated the way the secrets sat between us like a loaded weapon.
West’s warning echoed in my mind like a curse: “You tell her, and you’re putting her in even more danger.”
Part of me wanted to hack in and see what I could find, to peel back the code and expose whoever was watching us, but I felt almost guilty now.
It was as if, because we were married, I shouldn’t do it.
I didn’t know where this sudden moral compass was coming from, but she made me want to be a better person. A better man. Less monster.
I also knew they were coming for me—the group of people who were hunting Mackenzie. I didn’t have many details, but I knew enough to realize that whatever game we were in had already started. We were already pieces on someone else’s board.
The characters changed often, and I was fucking terrified of that. You can’t protect someone if you don’t even know who the enemy is.
Yesterday, I heard her phone ping when she stepped into the shower. I told myself not to look, but temptation has never been something I’m good at resisting, especially when it comes to her safety. I picked up her phone from the nightstand and swiped my thumb up the screen to unlock it.
When I saw the text messages, everything around me came to a halt. The room seemed to narrow, the air getting thick and cold. I knew this was Jackson, even though it was an unknown number. This was the first time we had heard from him since her stabbing.
My paranoia escalated with every word I read.
UNKNOWN
They’re coming for him first, then you. Be ready.
The devil emoji stared back at me, stupid and cartoonish, but it made my stomach drop. I could almost feel him in the room, breathing down our necks, laughing.
I had stopped tracking her messages as soon as we got back to camp because I thought we were done with Jackson. He was gone, untraceable, and I thought our search was a bust. I was a fucking idiot to think he wasn’t still watching us.
I quickly took a screenshot of the messages, my thumbs shaking, and forwarded the images to my email.
Then I tried to trace the number, typed it into every search bar, and checked every handle I could think of.
The profiles were gone. When I tried to ping one account, a block notification popped up like a door slamming in my face.
Typical. Ghosts in the machine.
I wanted to tear the phone in half.
“Fuck!” I yelled.
I deleted the messages from her phone before she came out. While I was in settings, I set up a passcode for her.
She walked out of the bathroom, towel twisted in her hair, steam ghosting around her like a halo. She was smiling like we were about to go to dinner or out to a movie, like we lived in some normal world where people didn’t send death threats and stab girls in the dark.
Inside, I was exploding.
“Hey—whatcha doing?” Her voice was so sweet it was almost cruel. She had no idea what I was holding back.
I stared at her. I should’ve said something soft, something true, like you’re so beautiful, but the words burned in my throat. Instead, I swallowed them and said,
“I saw your phone wasn’t password-protected. I set it up for you. It’s our anniversary.”
“Thanks,” she said. She gave me the sweetest kiss, and I clung to her like a drowning man, like if I held her tight enough, nothing could pry her away from me. Not Jackson. Not this game. Not fate.
“I love you. You know that, right?” I looked right into her eyes. They were moss on clover tonight—green on green, deep and wild.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I love you, too.”
“You can tell me anything.” It came out more like a demand, more like a ‘please fucking tell me before I lose my mind’, but she just shook her head and stepped back.
“I know, and I do… tell you everything,” she said, smiling coquettishly.
I sat back. She had just lied to my face, and she had done it so well that it felt practiced. That didn’t sit well with me. My chest tightened.
She wasn’t the only one capable of lying.
I hadn’t spoken to Mackenzie for a few hours, ever since she ran off after our fight. I’d been texting her nonstop. She wasn’t in her usual spots. The cabin, the dining hall, and the lake were all empty. Everywhere that usually held some trace of her felt hollow.
I couldn’t find her, and it was making me panic.
Where are u?
Trouble, please text me back.
Mackenzie.
I’m not going to ask you again.
Text me back now. Please turn your location back on.
Please, please, please, stop ignoring me. I’m sry.
I love u. I love u so much.
Please. Please don’t do this to me.
The longer Mackenzie ignored me, the longer my thoughts simmered.
There was a two-week break before we headed to GCU for baseball and soccer training.
I still hadn’t told my parents that Mackenzie and I had gotten married.
They expected me to come home, but not with a wife.
Not with this kind of chaos stitched to my side.
The thought of her being alone without me made me want to gag.
The world felt full of sharp edges and shadows, and she was walking through it without armor.
I was a complete mess. I’d already lost my mind and kept imagining different scenarios of what might have happened to her.
Her body in the lake, blood on the dock, Jackson’s smile in the dark.
I checked my phone every five minutes for a text message from her and ended up draining my battery. I stopped by the cabin to grab my charger, and I also wanted to hack into her phone’s location settings from my computer. If she wouldn’t let me in, I’d force my way in another way.
As I blew through the cabin, I heard Megan say, “Did you see Jackson earlier?”
I stopped cold in my tracks.
“What?”
“Yeah.” She was sitting on her bunk, scrolling on her phone. The click of her turning off her screen startled me more than it should have in the quiet room. “He stormed by Heather and me earlier with all his stuff. He mumbled a bunch of weird shit.”
“Wait—he was here?” My voice was high-pitched, unlike anything I had ever heard from myself. I sounded like some other guy, like one who’d already watched everything he loved bleed out.
“Yeah, I was shocked to see him after everything that happened. I cannot believe he showed his face after stabbing Mackenzie. He should be in prison.”
“Where the hell did he go?” I asked, my voice dropping, sounding strangely deep now. The rage pulled it lower, made it rougher.
“I have no clue. He said Mackenzie was his, that they had a history, and then he just took off into the woods. It was really weird.”
The words “Mackenzie was his” scraped down my spine like claws.
It was hard not to react, but something in my expression must have given me away, because inside I was detonating. There was a hollow, echoing space in my chest where logic used to be.
Megan’s frown deepened. “Do you have any idea what he meant by that?”
I just shook my head. “Probably just more of his twisted bullshit. He hurt my wife, and I’m going to fucking kill him.”
She stared at me for a moment but didn’t press.
“He’s creepy,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, like even saying his name too loud might summon him. “I can’t believe they’ve been sleeping together.”
I spun around, surprised.
“Who?”
“Heather and Jackson. They’ve been hooking up all summer. It’s not serious—that’s just what Heather does. She loves psychotic guys,” she sighed. “Jackson’s into some weird shit, too.”
I nodded absentmindedly, wrapping the cord around my charger. My mind was racing. Did Jackson have something to do with the initiation I received? I had tried to trace the source of the text, but couldn’t get through. Was this part of my game? Part of hers?
“Hey, I think Heather and Jackson are up to something,” Megan warned. “I really think you and Mackenzie should leave.”
“What?” I asked, shoving the charger into my shorts pocket.
“Heather likes you,” Megan said, throwing her legs off the bed and sitting up on the edge.
“Okay?” I replied coldly. I was being a total dick now, but I didn’t understand what she was getting at.
“Heather always gets what she wants. She won’t stop ’til she does. You need to be careful.”
I leaned in close to Megan, my voice dropping a few octaves, the threat threading through it. “Tell Heather she can dream as much as she wants, but she doesn’t have a fucking chance. I’m a married man.”
I walked out, heading toward mine and Mackenzie’s room in the cabin, my nerve endings buzzing.
I couldn’t wait to get out of here and start over with Mackenzie.
We’d go somewhere no one knew us. Somewhere, the woods didn’t feel like they were listening.
California, maybe. This place felt too small, and everything felt wrong now.
I started shoving our clothes into my duffel bag, my hands shaking. Mackenzie was going to bitch about the way I was packing our shit, but I didn’t give a fuck. She could deal with it.
We were leaving tonight.
I shot West a quick text.
Something is wrong. Jackson was seen at camp today. I’m packing our shit. Send safe coordinates.
I waited a few minutes and got no reply.
That was not like West. The panic settled even deeper in my chest, thick and heavy, like someone was pressing a boot down on my ribs.
Later that afternoon, the screen door creaked before I saw her. The sound sliced through the cabin’s silence. The place seemed to inhale with me when she stepped in, as if even the walls were waiting to see what she’d do.