Chapter 19 Rayne #2
“I know that my best friend falls for men who aren’t good enough for him, and it kills me to see him self-sabotage.”
Weston takes a long drink of vodka as that secret is read out to the room.
And I have a sneaking suspicion that was his actual secret, and he wrote it about me.
When the box is passed to Jason, one of our senior members, I hear the first words of my own secret as he starts to read out loud.
My heart beat a little faster hearing my words in another person’s voice.
“I care about you more than I’ve cared about someone in years, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling.
It doesn’t make sense. I can’t make it go away, no matter how hard I try.
I don’t want to want this. I know it will get snuffed out like a flame, sooner rather than later.
But I think I’ll always care about you. You’re carved into me, now.
And I want to tell the one person I shouldn’t tell. ”
My heart’s beating hard in my chest by the time Jason finishes reading my words.
My skin feels hot.
I’d written the secret in a moment of desperation, after trying to figure out what to write for over an hour.
I’d gotten frustrated and just let honesty spill out of me after I’d gotten home from the fall fair, and I didn’t let myself read my own words after scrawling them out.
Hearing them in a room full of my society brothers now, though, feels like being completely exposed.
Like they can all see it on my face.
That they know it’s about me and Hunter, and thirty pairs of eyes are seeing right through me.
But I sit with my heart threatening to beat right out of my chest and the box gets passed right along. A couple more secrets are read out loud, and as I finally summon the courage to look around the room, nobody’s watching me.
I meet Hunter’s eyes last, though.
And he may as well be staring right into my soul.
I feel like I do when I’m underneath him, naked and vulnerable, as a heat creeps up to my cheeks.
Nobody else knew, but Hunter knew.
And I have no clue what he feels about that information.
I watch the box get passed again and try to avoid his gaze, and finally, I’m the last person who gets the box.
I reach in, feeling around. Since I’m the last, I know there should only be one paper left.
“Wait. There are three papers left in here,” I say.
“That shouldn’t be possible. Thirty guys, thirty papers,” Noah says. “And they’re all the specific red note paper that I passed out.”
“Not all of them,” I say as I pull out the last three.
One of them is red.
But the two others are cream white, and I realize that they were at the bottom the entire time because each one has a heavy gold wax seal on it, weighing the paper down and causing it to stay at the bottom of the box.
Everyone looks over at me as I take out three papers.
I read the red one first.
“Sometimes I wake up at night and I’ve had a wet dream, and I’m a mess.”
Fairly tame.
“What are the other papers?” Roman asks, narrowing his eyes.
I break open the wax seal on the first one.
My heart pounds as I see what’s written.
“Something isn’t right,” I say.
“What does the paper say, Royal?” Roman demands again.
“Both of the brothers, by the end of the week,” I read, my chest tightening. I reach for the other, breaking it open and reading. “Playtime is over, Knox.”
I look all around, fear ripping through me, cold as ice.
It’s like I expect another dart to suddenly shoot through the window.
Or a rain of bullets to fly in.
But nothing happens.
The room is silent, other than Roman walking over the hardwood floor to grab the papers from me.
“Who else has had access to this box?” Roman asks Noah.
“No one. It’s been in my room all week.”
“I’m calling my cousin. Tired of feeling like our home has a target on it,” Roman says, already pulling out his phone.
“Relax,” Hunter says. “The notes are clear. Weston and I are the targets now. Everyone else should be safe.”
No.
The room erupts into slight chaos, with guys pulling out their phones, checking all around the room, and a few people going out into the front yard and back yard to assess any threats.
There’s nothing we can find.
Just like the last dozen times we checked the inside and outside of the house and found nothing out of place.
I feel stupid as I head to the only two rooms in the house that have extra doors to the outside.
The side door that’s in a hall near the kitchen pantry is locked and deadbolted, as always. No one ever uses that door, and I often forget it exists.
The reading room also has a door that goes to the exterior, into the little garden between our house and the edge of the Luros Sorority yard.
That door is also rarely used, and it not only has a deadbolt, but a heavy chair that is placed in front of it at all times.
The chair is still in that spot.
There’s no evidence it’s been moved or touched at all, and even the small amount of dust on the floor shows that the feet haven’t been moved anytime recently.
I run my hands through my hair, leaning back on one of the tall bookshelves in the reading room.
I pace around for a moment, heading over toward the open arch.
This room has given me a little surge of guilt every time I’ve walked past it in recent weeks.
It’s where Hunter dropped to his knees and blew me, and where we very nearly got caught.
Right now, that world feels a million miles away.
I feel like I’m surrounded by danger, everywhere I look.
I just want to stop time.
To make everyone else in the world go away other than the one person I want to be around, right now.
I scrub my palms over my face, and a heavy feeling settles in my chest as I realize something very dark.
The one person I want to be around.
For my whole life, the person who came to mind has been Weston.
But right now, I only thought of Hunter.
I’m pacing around the reading room, listening to the sound of the other guys checking all around the house, when I hear footsteps coming from nearby.
I feel a hand on my shoulder.
Weston’s there.
And a new form of guilt pools inside me.
I’ve never seen more fear on his face, and yet I was in here, only thinking about his brother.
“Rayne,” Wes says to me. “I think we need to quit pretending that this is coming from somewhere outside of Onyx House. It’s so obvious that this… that all of this is coming from someone in here.”
I shake my head. “No. There’s no way. We know everyone here. We’ve talked to everyone about this. We know where every guy goes, what every guy does.”
“We can’t be everywhere all the time, though. That box was in Noah’s room all week. Who else could have access to that?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “We have parties all the time, and people come over almost every day.”
“And guess what? Noah is one of the only people who actually locks his door upstairs,” Weston says. “Nobody’s getting in there during a party.”
I feel sick as I lean against the wall. “Wes, you’re not saying…”
“I don’t think it’s Noah. No.”
“It couldn’t be. I know you’re my best friend, but Noah is practically like a brother to me at this point, too—”
“It’s not Noah,” a voice says from the other side of the room.
Hunter walks in with a serious look on his face.
He’s so handsome he practically takes my breath away, and I can’t do a damn thing about it.
“You say that like you’re just so sure of it,” Wes says.
“I am sure.”
“Hunter Knox, smarter than everyone and apparently as all-knowing as the gods above, too,” Weston says with a distinct bitter tone.
He’s thinking about the text he showed me earlier.
This anger isn’t just directed at Hunter, it’s directed at their father.
Hunter frowns. “I don’t have to be smart to know that Noah’s innocent. I know he’s innocent.”
“How?”
“Because I put those notes into the box.”