Chapter 18 #3
“Oh. Right.” She snapped her fingers. “Okay, so, Rhys has never been easy to read, so I can never really tell what’s going on with him.
But Knox… well…” She paused, raising a brow.
“You know how some people have a tell when they're lying? Like, they might always rub their chin, or something like that.”
I nodded. “He has one?”
“Not one for lying. Which is probably why he’s so good at acting. But he does have an honesty tell.”
I raised a brow. “An honesty tell?”
“Yeah. Something he always does when he’s telling the truth,” she said. “I’ve worked with him enough times over the years to recognize it by now.”
“What is it?”
She smiled thinly. “You know how a lot of the Legacies are super lazy? Always leaving the tough stuff for the rest of us to do?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Knox is no different, really. You’ll ask him if he did something he was supposed to do, and he’ll lie right to your face and tell you he did.
” She paused, rolling her eyes upward. “But on rare occasions, he actually has done whatever the thing is, and in that case, he’ll do the same thing every time.
He’ll say, ‘I did it, I swear,’ while he does this with one of his hands. ”
She stopped on the path, holding her left palm up with her fingers waggling slightly.
“It’s this,” she went on. “This weird little hand gesture. Maybe some subconscious part of him thinks it makes him look cute and appealing, or something like that. I don’t know. But like I said, if I see him doing it, I know he’s actually telling the truth.”
I nodded slowly. “He did that when we confronted him.”
“Exactly. So as much as I don’t usually trust those guys… I really think they were telling us the truth about this plan of theirs.”
We started back toward the main building, gravel crunching softly beneath our shoes. The last of the light was bleeding out of the sky now, the trees darkening into solid shapes instead of something you could see through.
“I still don’t like it,” I said after a moment. “Any of it.”
“Yeah, well…” Jasmine huffed. “I guess we’re not supposed to like it. It’s a pretty fucked-up plan. But it’s also the only one anyone’s come up with that might actually do something. And right now, we’re basically all just sitting around waiting to die.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
We walked the rest of the way in silence, watching and listening to everything around us, that constant tension settling back in until we finally re-entered the safe glow of the main building. The others were still in the dining hall when we stepped inside, their card game ongoing.
“Turns out we couldn’t shower after all,” Jasmine announced as we approached the table, dropping into her chair like nothing serious had happened. “The water was cold for some reason. We kept waiting, but… nothing.”
A couple of people groaned in sympathy, but no one questioned it.
“Yeah, sometimes the pipes just do that,” Jesse said, rolling his eyes upward. “Always fixes itself, though. Just wait an hour or so.”
I slid into my seat beside Jasmine, forcing my attention onto the cards and conversation. Anything that wasn’t the image of Rhys standing in that cabin.
But my focus kept slipping, dragged back to him no matter how hard I tried to anchor it somewhere else. Then the anger crept back in a slow burn, threading itself through the lingering relief.
That moment from the cabin kept replaying in my head; when I saw him standing there, whole and unharmed.
The realization that he wasn’t really gone had hit me hard enough to make my chest ache, and then, almost immediately, it had twisted into something that made me want to shove him back against the wall and pummel his chest with my fists for putting me through that.
I knew I was being stupid. Irrational. I’d even told him straight to his face that it was fine, and that I totally understood why he’d kept it from me. It wasn’t about me. Wasn’t personal.
But deep down… it still felt personal. And there just didn’t seem to be an easy fix for that.
Eventually, everyone started peeling off for the night in small groups, heading back to their cabins before it got any darker. No one wanted to be outside after full nightfall anymore, unless they absolutely had to be.
By the time I reached the cabin with the other girls, I felt wrung out.
Physically, mentally, emotionally.
All of it.
Inside, the familiar space didn’t offer much comfort, but it was a hell of a lot better than being outside. I changed quickly and climbed into bed, pulling the blanket up high. Wren, Tamsin, and Jasmine did the same.
The room went quiet then, but my mind didn’t.
Rhys’s voice. His face. The way he’d looked at me in that cabin…
I stared up at the ceiling, jaw tightening slightly. Then I turned onto my side, closing my eyes, but it didn’t help. My thoughts just kept on circling in the same frustrating loop.
Relief. Anger. Confusion. Hurt.
That last one weighed on me the most, no matter how many times I tried to reason it away.
Somewhere between all those conflicting feelings, exhaustion finally won. It always did in the end. The difference was that this time, when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t afraid of what I’d see. Because all I could see now was Rhys.
But… that was its own kind of problem, wasn’t it?