Chapter 25
“Alissa.”
Rhys was already up, fully dressed, and crouched at eye level beside the bed. At some point while I slept, he’d untied me. The gag was gone too. I hadn't felt any of it.
“Up,” he said quietly. “Eat first, then get changed.”
He moved to the small table near the window where he’d laid everything out. A sandwich, cut in half. A cinnamon rice pudding cup with a plastic spoon already tucked into the lid. A container of sliced fruit. A full bottle of water. My clothes, folded in a neat stack beside it all.
I sat up slowly, taking stock of my body. My knee throbbed where I’d hit something in the woods. My right thigh stung from the small cuts Rhys had made. My palms were scraped. Beyond that, I was intact.
“Can I use the bathroom?” I asked, voice rough with sleep.
Rhys nodded and stepped back to give me room.
The bathroom door didn't close all the way. He made that clear without saying anything; just held it at the frame as I reached for the handle, letting it rest an inch or two open.
I didn't argue. I also didn't bother to look at the bathroom window the way I might have twelve hours ago, because I wasn't willing to risk my friends’ lives for an escape attempt that would almost certainly fail.
I relieved myself, washed my face and hands, and came back out. My clothes were softer than I expected after a night of hand-washing, and getting back into something that was actually mine helped more than I wanted to admit.
I sat at the small table in the living area and pulled the food toward me.
I didn't bother being subtle about how hungry I was.
The sandwich went first, then the fruit, then the pudding cup scraped clean in about four spoonfuls.
I drank half the water in one go, set the bottle down, and finally looked up at Rhys.
He was leaning against the wall near the door with his arms crossed, watching me with an expression that gave nothing away.
“Why are we up before it's even light out?” I asked.
“Because of Jasmine.”
“What?” I whirled around to look at the door. “She’s here?”
“No. But if you were telling the truth last night, and she thinks there’s a chance I might be innocent, then she might bring me some more food this morning,” he said. “So I need to hide you for a while.”
I rolled my eyes. “Where? Under the bed?”
He smiled thinly and gestured for me to stand up. I followed him across the cabin to the narrow door beside the bathroom that I’d noticed on my first visit but never thought much about. A storage closet, most likely.
He opened it, and I looked inside.
The floor was completely lined with folded blankets, stacked two or three deep, and the walls were padded with more of them, pinned up with what looked like thumbtacks. A pillow had been wedged into each corner.
“You built a nest,” I said flatly.
“So you can’t make noise,” he said. “If I didn’t put all that stuff there, you’d be thumping around in there all morning.”
“I wouldn’t thump around,” I muttered.
“Yes, you would,” he said. “In you go. On your back. Head facing the door.”
Every single part of me wanted to say no. The word was right there, locked and loaded, and I could feel it pressing against the back of my teeth. I looked at the closet, then at Rhys, then at the closet again.
I thought about Jasmine. About the others still asleep in the hall, who had no idea what was out here in the dark with them, and who would have considerably less chance of surviving if I spent the next ten minutes making a scene about a padded cupboard.
I got in.
The space felt smaller than it had looked from the outside, the padded walls pressing in softly on both sides. Rhys crouched in the doorway. The cord was already in his hand.
“Hands first,” he said.
I held them up and looked at the opposite wall while he worked. Wrists first, then down to my ankles. When he was done, he tested each knot with a brief, firm tug. Then he reached into his back pocket.
“Wait,” I said before he could gag me again. “What if she doesn’t come? Are you just going to leave me in here all day?”
“If she’s not here by twelve, I’ll assume she’s not coming, and I’ll let you out again.”
I blinked. “Twelve? That’s seven hours away!”
“Don’t worry.” The corner of his mouth curved. “I have a podcast I can play for you by the door. So you won’t be bored in there.”
I opened my mouth to tell him exactly what I thought of that, and the gag went in. He tied it with the same quiet competence as the night before, smoothed a strand of hair back from my face in a gesture so casual it made me want to bite him, and sat back on his heels to look at me.
I glared at him with everything I had.
“I don’t think you’ll be here for long,” he said. “I think Jasmine will come soon.”
For her own sake, I hoped she didn’t, because I knew exactly what he intended to do with her.
The door clicked shut, and I lay in my padded cell, breathing very carefully through my nose. A few minutes passed. Then, through the wooden slats, a familiar jingle started playing. A true crime podcast intro.
A narrator's voice settled into that particular cadence they all had and began describing, in considerable detail, the methodology of a killer who’d massacred twenty people at a summer camp in the Pacific Northwest during the early nineties.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me…
I was halfway through the second episode, still rigid with fear and fury, when the podcast cut off mid-sentence.
Rhys’s footsteps crossed the cabin, and the door opened with a soft creak.
“Jasmine, you—” He cut himself off sharply. “Wait. Where’s Alissa?”
Jasmine didn’t answer right away. I could hear her breathing, though. Uneven and slightly congested, like she’d either been crying already or was trying very hard not to.
“What happened?” Rhys asked. There was an edge of concern in his voice now. “Why are you out here alone?”
A small sound escaped Jasmine then. Half sob, half inhale.
“She’s gone, Rhys.” Her voice sounded wrecked, scraped raw from exhaustion and panic. “Alissa’s gone.”
Rhys didn’t reply for just long enough to make it seem like he was blindsided by the news.
“What do you mean gone?” he finally asked.
“I… I can’t…” Jasmine let out another wrenching sob. “It’s my fault.”
“Hey.” Rhys’s tone softened. “Come inside. Tell me what happened.”
“I really shouldn’t—”
“You shouldn’t be standing out there alone,” he interrupted gently. “It’s not safe.”
Don’t do it, Jasmine! I screamed inside my head. Don’t fall for it. He’ll kill you!
“Just come and sit down. Take a breath. I’ll get you some water,” Rhys went on.
I couldn’t hear whatever Jasmine mumbled in response, but I heard the door close, followed by footsteps and the creak of the sofa taking weight.
Shit.
I tipped my head back, straining to see something through the narrow wooden slats, but all I could make out were Rhys’s shoes crossing the cabin floor before disappearing from view again.
“Here,” he said softly, presumably handing Jasmine the water he’d promised her.
The sofa creaked a second later, and I knew he’d sat down beside her now. Close enough to play the concerned protector while he listened to her cry about murders he’d committed.
“Hey,” he murmured. “Look at me for a second. Breathe.”
Jasmine sucked in a shaky breath that hitched halfway through. “It’s all my fault,” she said, her voice hollow and fraying at the edges.
“Take another breath and drink some water,” Rhys said gently. “Then tell me everything. Start from the beginning.”
A horrible thought suddenly slammed into me. The water. What if he’d drugged it?
I jerked violently against the restraints, twisting inside the cramped space and slamming my shoulder against the wall in an attempt to make some kind of noise. But the blankets swallowed the impact completely, muffling me into uselessness.
Outside, Jasmine started talking.
“It happened after Logan got blown up. Grace had a—”
“Wait. Back up a sec. Did you just say Logan got blown up?”
“Oh. Right.” Jasmine sniffed hard. “You wouldn’t know about that.”
“What the fuck happened?”
“There was some kind of net stretched across the river downstream. It was rigged to a bomb. So when the raft got caught in it, Logan reached down to try and free it and…” Her voice wavered. “It exploded.”
“That’s what that booming sound was yesterday? Around seven?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.” Rhys exhaled. “I thought I was just losing my mind out here. Cabin fever or something.”
“No.” Jasmine’s voice cracked again. “Logan’s dead.”
The sofa creaked softly.
“We were all messed up afterwards,” she continued. “Everyone kept arguing, and then Grace just… snapped. She started screaming that we were all going to die, and then she ran outside. In the dark.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. You didn’t hear anything?”
There was a slight pause.
“I went scouting after it started getting dark,” Rhys said. “At one point I thought I heard a scream way off in the distance, but it stopped almost immediately. I figured it was probably an animal.”
“You must’ve been too far away.” Jasmine took another shaky breath. “Alissa… she wanted us to go after Grace. She thought we could get her back inside before anything happened. But it was so dark, and no one else wanted to go, and I—”
Her voice collapsed completely, and a sob tore out of her.
“Hey.” Rhys’s tone softened again. “Take your time.”
“I said no,” Jasmine choked out. “I thought if I refused, she’d stay inside too. I thought she’d realize how dangerous it was, but instead she just…” Another shaky exhale. “She ran out there alone.”
“Alissa went out alone?”
“Yes.” Jasmine sounded like she could barely breathe now. “I should’ve gone with her. But I was just so fucking scared.”
None of this is your fault, I wanted to scream. But the gag stayed lodged between my teeth, and all I could do was listen.
“And then… Sutton went after them,” Jasmine continued weakly.
“Seriously? Sutton?”
“Yeah.” A bitter little laugh slipped out between the sniffles. “Guess she turned out to be a better person than me.”
“That’s not true.”