Chapter 26
My heart felt like it was going to beat right out of my chest.
“How did you find out?” I asked in a low voice.
Rhys folded his arms across his chest. “That’s not an answer.”
“Just tell me,” I said, forcing myself to hold his gaze. “Was it something I said?”
“No.” He shook his head slightly. “I looked you up after we met. I found your file in Mabry’s office and realized pretty quickly that the driver’s license you used for your application was fake.”
A muscle in my jaw tightened.
“I guess nobody looked too closely because the owner hired you as a favor to an old friend,” he continued. “You basically got waved through.”
“Right,” I muttered.
“It was also a little weird that you didn’t provide bank details for your pay,” he said. “Just a PayPal account. Not unheard of, but still strange enough to stand out.”
I looked away.
“So I started digging,” he went on. “I checked a bunch of public records and background databases, and I eventually realized there’s no such person as Alissa Madsen.
” A faint smirk tugged at his mouth. “Unless you’re secretly a forty-seven-year-old accountant from Ohio, but I’m pretty sure you’re not. ”
“Why did you look me up?” I asked, looking back at him.
“I was curious about you.”
“So your response to curiosity is stalking people through government databases?” I said, brows rising. “You couldn’t just look at my socials like a normal person?”
Rhys smirked again. “You’ve been lying about your identity since the second you got here, baby. Let’s not pretend you have the moral high ground.”
I surged to my feet before I even realized I was moving.
“I absolutely have the moral high ground here!” I snapped, throwing my hands up. “You’re a fucking serial killer, Rhys!”
“Spree killer, technically,” he said. Then his head tilted. “And you’re changing the subject again. Who are you?”
I stared at him for a second before the anger drained out of me as quickly as it had come, leaving behind nothing but exhaustion.
With a sigh, I sank back onto the edge of the bed. “My first name is really Alissa,” I said. “And my second name is really Madsen. It’s just… not my last name.”
“So you’ve been using your middle name as your last?”
“Yes. It’s my mother’s maiden name,” I said. “My parents gave it to me as a middle name because they wanted me to have both family names without hyphenating them.” I hesitated and swallowed hard before going on. “My actual last name is Skalbeck.”
For the first time since this conversation started, Rhys looked genuinely caught off guard.
“Skalbeck?” he said, eyes widening slightly. “As in Adrian Skalbeck? The airport bombing?”
I nodded stiffly. “He’s my uncle,” I said. “It happened before I was even born. But when a member of your family kills almost four hundred people and becomes one of the worst domestic terrorists in American history… that kind of thing follows you around.”
Something shifted subtly in Rhys’s expression. “I can imagine.”
“My parents didn’t want to change our surname, and that made life pretty hard sometimes,” I said, staring down at my hands. “People would hear it and immediately assume we supported Adrian, even though we didn’t. So we got harassed a lot when I was growing up.”
I rubbed my palms against my leggings, head shaking slightly.
“Eventually we moved to this tiny town in Montana where most people actually left us alone and treated us normally,” I continued. “But every now and then random people would still track us down. Send letters. Leave threats. That kind of thing.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah. And even when people weren’t being hostile, they’d still react when they heard my last name. Every single time. They’d get this weird look on their face. Or they’d immediately start asking questions about my uncle like I was some kind of morbid trivia exhibit.”
Rhys stayed silent, just watching me.
“It got really exhausting,” I added softly. “And I knew it was going to follow me around forever.”
“So you started using Alissa Madsen instead.”
I nodded. “I’ve wanted to be a journalist since I was a kid, but I knew the Skalbeck name would probably overshadow everything I ever did.
People wouldn’t even care about my work.
They’d just see the byline and think ‘terrorist relative’.
So eventually I just stopped introducing myself as Skalbeck.
My socials all use Madsen, and I’ve been meaning to legally change my name.
I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
“So your official records still use your real name,” Rhys said. “Which means you’d have to use it for anything important. College applications. Jobs. Banking.”
“That’s right.”
He tilted his head slightly. “So why did you use a fake name and fake ID to apply here?”
I exhaled slowly. “That wasn’t really my idea. It was more of a precaution.”
“Not your idea, huh?” Rhys’s expression sharpened. “Let me guess. It has something to do with that investigative journalism professor you pretended not to know when we talked about him.”
“Professor Farrelly,” I said quietly. “Peter.”
“Sounds like you’re pretty close to him.”
“He’s basically my idol,” I said, twisting my hands together in my lap. “I took three of his classes during freshman year, and I did really well in them, so he offered me an internship the following year. We got close after that.”
“Are you sleeping with him?” The jealousy in Rhys’s voice was immediate and obvious.
“No, and I never would. He’s happily married.” I paused pointedly. “To a man, by the way.”
“Right.”
“He’s my mentor,” I added. “That’s it.”
His gaze stayed fixed on me for another second before he spoke again. “So why did he send you here?” he asked. “And why the fake identity?”
“Because he knew his old friend—the Blackpine owner—wouldn’t want a journalism student poking around,” I said. “Especially not one connected to investigative reporting.”
“Because of what happened last summer?”
“Yes.” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear before continuing. “So when Peter asked his friend to hire me, he downplayed how well he knew me. He pretended I was just some student he’d briefly met through another professor.”
Rhys listened quietly, arms folded across his chest.
“He told him an anthropology professor had mentioned I was looking for summer work,” I went on.
“He said he’d met me once or twice and thought I seemed responsible.
And that anthropology professor actually wrote me a recommendation letter for my résumé, because I’d taken a few of her classes before. ”
Rhys nodded slowly. “That way the owner wouldn’t catch even a whiff of undercover journalism.”
“Exactly. He thought I was just an anthropology student.”
“And the fake name was part of the scheme?”
“Yes.” I rubbed at my forehead. “Peter thought if the owner ever saw my real surname, it would instantly make me memorable. Maybe even suspicious. And if he got suspicious enough to start digging, he could easily make a few calls to NYU and figure out that I wasn’t just some random student.
He’d realize I was actually Peter’s intern. And his top student.”
“Okay.” Rhys frowned faintly. “So what exactly were you supposed to be investigating out here? Am I right in assuming it’s about the drowning?”
“Yes.” I let out a slow breath and looked down at my hands.
“Carly Martin’s family never believed it was just a tragic accident.
They thought the counselors responsible for her cabin had been negligent, and that the owner had somehow covered it up afterward to avoid the shitstorm that would’ve followed if the truth came out. ”
“Right.”
“They got a compensation payout after Carly died,” I said. “But accepting it meant signing paperwork agreeing not to talk publicly about the case.”
Rhys’s jaw tightened. “Yeah, I heard about that.”
“The funeral costs alone nearly destroyed them financially, so they signed,” I went on. “But they never stopped believing there’d been some kind of cover-up. And if they could prove negligence, the agreement would basically become worthless.”
“They just needed evidence, right?”
“And they needed to get it quietly,” I said, nodding. “Before the owner or anyone else connected to the camp had a chance to bury things even deeper. If they were right about there being some sort of cover-up, that is.”
His brows lifted. “So they approached Peter to look into it?”
“Not right away,” I said. “At first they tried private investigators, but none of them would touch it. Too many legal risks because of the agreement the Martins had signed. After that, they approached some journalists, but they weren’t interested.”
“Why?”
“They thought it was just grieving parents refusing to accept a horrible accident,” I said bitterly. “But then they finally approached Peter, and his interest was piqued the second he heard the details.”
“Why?”
“A few reasons.” I shifted slightly on the bed. “He’s always been drawn to stories involving conspiracies or institutional cover-ups. And there’s also the fact that he used to attend Blackpine as a kid, and his old bunkmate went on to buy the camp. I already told you about that, didn’t I?”
He nodded. “So it was personal to him.”
“Yes. Partly because of his history with the place, but also because he understood Carly,” I said. “You see, he grew up pretty poor. Made it into elite schools and colleges with scholarships.”
“So he saw himself in her?”
“Yeah.” My fingers twisted tighter together. “Not just in the scholarship-kid sense, either. He also understood what happens when kids like Carly die.”
Rhys’s gaze sharpened slightly, but he didn’t speak.
“The media pays more attention to rich victims,” I went on.
“The public does too. That’s just reality.
If Carly had been the daughter of some billionaire CEO instead of a scholarship student from a struggling family, there probably would’ve been wall-to-wall media coverage about her death for weeks.
But because she wasn’t, most people who knew about the case just accepted the official explanation and moved on.
It barely made a ripple outside the local area. ”
“That’s true.”
“Anyway… Peter asked if I’d be interested in helping with the investigation,” I said. “The idea was for me to work here over the summer and quietly dig around. Watch people. Listen. See if any of the counselors slipped up or revealed something they weren’t supposed to.”
“Off the books, I presume?”
“Very,” I said dryly. “The university has absolutely no idea I’m doing this. And ethically speaking, it’s pretty questionable.”
“No shit.” Rhys cocked his head, frowning. “So what did you find out?”
A low, humorless laugh escaped me. “Well, I wasn’t able to suss out many details, considering you shut the camp down after three days so you could start murdering people,” I said. “I mean… that was you, right? The environmental assessment report?”
He nodded. “Yeah, it was fake. I set it up.”
“Thought so.” I exhaled slowly. “Anyway, I overheard Delia and Sutton talking on the second day, and there was enough there to make me suspicious. Not enough to prove anything. Just enough to make me think the accidental drowning story didn’t fully add up.”
“And then?”
“Then last night happened,” I muttered, stomach tightening at the memory.
“I overheard Sutton and Grace talking, and they outright said that they killed Carly. Chris and Jensen obviously knew about it too. So then I realized it wasn’t just counselor negligence, like Peter and the Martins assumed.
It was murder, and all the Legacies were involved. Except you.”
“That’s why those four were chasing you last night, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. They realized I overheard them, and they wanted to kill me to keep it covered up.”
Rhys nodded slowly. “I figured that’s what happened,” he said, eyes flashing. “When I heard you screaming for help and saw them going after you.”
“Right.” I let out a heavy sigh. “Anyway… that’s it. I’ve told you everything I know.”
“So now it’s my turn, huh?”
“Yes.” I nodded slowly. “You said you’d give me some answers.”
Rhys’s brows lifted. “Luckily for you, I have all the answers you came here looking for. I know exactly who killed Carly, and I know exactly why they did it, too.” He paused, gaze holding mine. “And you'll never believe it in a million fucking years.”