Chapter 25 #2
Jasmine sighed heavily. “A few minutes later, Jensen and Chris went looking too,” she said. “And then…”
She trailed off again.
Rhys let the silence sit for a second. “What happened?” he finally asked.
“We don’t know for sure.” Jasmine’s voice dropped. “Nobody saw anything. But none of them came back.”
She broke apart again after that, crying openly now.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “Alissa’s dead because of me. They’re all dead!”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Yes it is! I should’ve stopped her,” Jasmine said. “I should’ve gone with her, or grabbed her, or—”
“Jasmine.” Rhys’s voice cut through hers. “Look at me.”
Her crying quieted slightly.
“Alissa isn’t dead.”
There was a beat of silence.
“What do you mean?” Jasmine finally asked, voice tinged with apprehension.
“Think about it. This is Alissa we’re talking about. She’s nice, but she’s also stubborn as hell. And smart. And scrappy enough to survive if she has to. Right?”
Jasmine sniffled but didn’t reply.
“There’s just no way the killer got her,” Rhys went on. “She’d outrun him. Or outsmart him. So I bet that’s what happened. She got away, and she found somewhere to hide out.”
“Where could she possibly hide?” Jasmine asked weakly.
“The caves near the river, maybe. Or one of the old ranger shelters.”
“But if she’s alive, why hasn’t she come back?” Jasmine’s voice hitched again. “It’s been so long.”
“It’s only just gotten light,” Rhys said. “If she spent the night hiding somewhere, she probably doesn’t want to move until she knows it’s safe.”
Silence stretched after that. Then Jasmine let out a long, shaky breath.
“I want to believe she survived,” she said. “I really do. But I just… I can’t.” Her voice cracked again. “This killer is everywhere, Rhys. Every time we think we might be getting somewhere, someone else dies. And nobody who crosses him survives.”
Rhys didn’t answer immediately. When he finally spoke, his voice had softened into something steady and reassuring. The kind of voice people instinctively clung to when they were on the verge of falling apart.
“We can’t give up on them yet,” he said. “Not Alissa. Not any of the others. Until we know for sure, we just have to keep hoping they’re alive.”
A humorless laugh escaped through Jasmine’s tears, the sound brittle and exhausted. “I wish I could be that optimistic.”
“You have to be,” Rhys said. “Because hope is really all we have right now, isn’t it?”
I’d never wanted to kill him more.
“Honestly… I don’t think there’s any hope left,” Jasmine replied. “I think we’re all going to die here.”
Rhys went quiet again. “I think you’ll make it out,” he said at last.
“I’d love it if that were true, but like I said…” Jasmine sniffed hard. “I’m not exactly holding onto hope anymore.” Another pause. “And your plan to lure the killer out clearly didn’t work either.”
“No shit,” Rhys muttered. “Now I’m fucked either way. Even if the rest of you survive, I’m going down.”
“What do you mean?”
He exhaled heavily. “I’ve had a lot of time to think while I’ve been cooped up in here, and I finally realized something last night.” A short pause followed. “I think the killer knows I’m alive. Honestly, I think he’s known the whole time. And I’m pretty sure he never intended to kill me.”
Jasmine was silent.
“I think I’m being framed,” Rhys went on flatly.
“What?”
“Think about it. Whoever he is, he’s eventually gonna need a fall guy, right? Somebody to pin everything on so he can disappear without anyone looking twice at him.”
“I… never really thought about that,” Jasmine admitted. “But yeah. I guess that makes sense.”
Rhys let out a humorless laugh. “Pretty sure that somebody’s me.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because I’m the most convenient suspect,” Rhys said. “My family owns Northgate, so if anyone here could figure out how to jam all the network signals around camp, it’d probably be me, right?”
“Yeah,” Jasmine murmured. “I guess.”
“Also, I’m a fourth-year engineering student, so if somebody starts asking who could rig up harpoon traps or explosives in the river…” He trailed off for a second before finishing quietly. “Again. Me.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“It’s not just that.” Rhys sighed, and I could picture him dragging a hand through his hair like he was genuinely stressed.
“The night Sloane and Reid died, I left the fire not long after they did. I just wanted to go to my cabin and chill out for a while, because I wasn’t in the mood to socialize.
But who the fuck’s going to believe that when I’m the only one here with no alibi for those couple of hours? ”
This time, Jasmine didn’t answer straight away, and I knew exactly why. Because she’d already heard this theory before. From me.
“That’s true too,” she finally said in a tentative tone.
“Obviously anyone with decent technical skills and access to Google could figure out how to jam signals or rig traps,” Rhys continued. “But nobody’s going to think about it like that. They’re just going to look at me and decide it fits. Aren’t they?”
“Yeah, you’d probably be a suspect,” Jasmine said.
Rhys sighed again. “I’ve been thinking about what happens if I reveal I’m alive, and I realized I’m basically fucked no matter what I do.
” He let out a short, brittle laugh. “The others might not believe me when I explain this fake death plan. Even with you backing me up, they could just decide I manipulated you, and that I’m actually the killer. ”
He paused for a second before adding, “Then all it takes is one paranoid idiot sticking a knife in my back while I’m not looking and convincing themselves it was self-defense.”
“That could definitely happen,” Jasmine muttered.
“And if it did?” Rhys said. “I’d bet a million dollars that the murders would suddenly stop.”
Jasmine immediately caught on. “Because then everyone would think it really was you,” she said. “The killings stopped the second you died, so that ‘proves’ you were the killer all along.”
“Exactly.” Rhys snapped his fingers. “Which means if I show myself to the group, there’s a high chance I die. But if I stay hidden, there’s two other possible outcomes, and they’re both equally shitty.”
“What are they?”
“The first is that the killer already knows where I am and eventually comes here to kill me,” he said. “If that happens, he’ll probably stage it as a suicide. Maybe even leave behind some fake confession note claiming I did everything.”
“And the second possibility?”
“If I manage to avoid him and survive long enough for the police to finally show up… I’ll get arrested because I’ve already been set up as the perfect fall guy.” Another bitter laugh escaped him. “So basically I’m triple fucked.”
“Yeah,” Jasmine said after a moment. “I see what you mean.”
Silence lingered briefly before she spoke again, slower this time.
“Rhys… I have to be honest with you about something.”
“What?”
“All that stuff you just said about looking suspicious…” She hesitated. “Alissa and I talked about that already. We actually had a theory that it might be you.”
Rhys groaned softly. “See? I fucking knew it,” he said. “I’m being set up. I look guilty as hell.”
“No one else has thought about it yet,” Jasmine said hurriedly. “They still don’t know you’re alive, remember?”
“Yeah, but it’ll come out eventually,” he muttered. A beat passed. “Wait… if you actually thought it might be me, why did you come here alone today? Why risk that?”
Jasmine fell silent for another moment. When she finally answered, her voice sounded smaller somehow. “I stopped thinking it was you when Alissa didn’t come back.”
“Why?”
“You’ve had a major thing for her since you met her. I could tell from the way you looked at her.”
Rhys groaned again. “That obvious, huh?”
“Yeah. I think everyone noticed, to be honest.” A quiet, tired snort slipped out of Jasmine before she continued.
“Anyway, maybe I’m just being na?ve, but if you really were the killer…
I don’t think you’d hurt her. Me? Maybe.
We haven’t exactly had the world’s healthiest relationship over the years.
” Her voice softened again. “But Alissa? No. I just can’t picture it. ”
For a second, neither of them spoke.
“For what it’s worth, I know we haven’t always gotten along,” Rhys said. “But I’m glad we’re friends now. Assuming we can call it that.”
Jasmine let out a weak laugh. “Yeah. All it took was a psycho killer terrorizing us to bring everyone together.”
Another brief silence settled over the cabin.
“So what do you think I should do?” Rhys finally asked. “Tell the others I’m alive and just hope they believe me? Or stay hidden?”
“Honestly, if it were me, I’d stay hidden,” she replied. “It’s like you said before. If you reveal yourself to the others, then you’ve potentially got the group and the killer after you. But if you stay ‘dead’, then you’ve only got the killer to worry about.”
Rhys exhaled slowly. “I can’t believe this is an actual conversation we’re having.”
“Trust me,” Jasmine muttered. “Neither can I.”
Inside the closet, rage twisted hotly through my chest.
This was the damage control Rhys had mentioned last night.
Not killing Jasmine. Manipulating her.
He was feeding her just enough truth to make the lie believable, carefully building this whole narrative where he was the obvious fall guy; the poor bastard being framed by the real killer who was lurking somewhere out there in the woods.
And the worst part was that it was smart.
Smart enough that Jasmine was already buying into it.
Because now, even if she thought about all the suspicions we’d had about him, she wouldn’t tell the others. Wouldn’t want to risk getting an innocent person killed if he really was being framed.
It was honestly kind of brilliant, in a deeply horrifying way, and I hated that part of me could still admire how smart and calculated Rhys was.
But beneath all that anger was something else too; something that slowly loosened the choking knot that had been sitting in my chest ever since Jasmine knocked on the cabin door.
She was safe. Just like I’d begged for.