Chapter 30
I stared at Zach’s unconscious body sprawled across the floor, my heart hammering so hard it hurt. “If you expect me to kill him to gain your trust, there’s no fucking way—”
“I’m not asking you to kill Zach,” Rhys cut in.
My brows shot up. “So you’re letting him live?”
“Fuck no.” Rhys crouched beside him and began binding his ankles together with another length of rope. “I just need him alive for now.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain in a minute.” He rose to his feet again, hauling Zach upright beneath his arms like dead weight. “First I’m putting him in the bathroom. I don’t want him overhearing this conversation when he wakes up.”
He dragged Zach across the floor and disappeared into the bathroom with him. A second later, I heard another rope being tightened, followed by the soft click of the door shutting. Then Rhys returned and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“So what’s this grand plan of yours?” I asked warily.
“Well, obviously, I want to get away with all of this, and you want to go free,” he replied. “I think there’s a way for both of us to get exactly what we want.”
I folded my arms. “What is it?”
“All you have to do is help me paint Zach as the perfect fall guy. Even more than I already have.”
I frowned. “What do you mean, more than you already have?”
A faint smirk tugged at his mouth. “Zach was always going to be my fall guy, so I’ve been laying the groundwork for months,” he said. “I left all kinds of incriminating stuff in his apartment.”
“Like what?” I asked, brows knitting.
“Like trap schematics and explosive recipes. Hidden well enough that he’d never stumble across any of it himself, but not well enough to survive a proper police search.”
“Right.”
“Also, anything I needed to research online was done through his Wi-Fi, so it all traces back to his IP address,” he went on. “And everything I needed, like the weapons and materials, were bought with one of his credit cards. I made sure to avoid the store cameras, obviously.”
“He didn’t notice the transactions?”
Rhys shook his head. “He’s rich, remember? Guys like him don’t monitor every transaction on their accounts. Anything under a certain amount just blends into everything else.”
Realization slowly sank in. “So you kept every purchase small enough not to trigger attention.”
“Exactly. I also put the signal jamming software on his phone instead of my own. So when investigators eventually look into how the networks went down out here, that’ll lead straight back to him too.”
I blinked. “How the hell did you manage that?”
“The last time we went drinking together, he passed out at the bar.” Rhys leaned back slightly. “I unlocked his phone with Face ID, installed the app, then registered my own face as a secondary appearance so I could get back into it whenever I needed.”
My eyes widened. “You can actually do that?”
“Yeah, iPhones let you set up an alternate appearance.” His lips curved faintly. “And the signal jamming app looks like some boring calculator tool, so he never noticed or questioned it.”
“Right.”
“When I needed to jam all the networks that day, I told him I wasn’t getting any signal and needed to borrow his phone for a second. Two minutes later, there really was no signal anywhere.”
I cast my mind back to that day. It was only a week ago, but it felt like an eternity had passed.
“Anyway,” Rhys said, rubbing at his jaw. “My original plan doesn’t work anymore. Too many variables have changed.” His eyes flicked toward me meaningfully. “That’s where you come in.”
“Wait.” I lifted a hand. “Back up a second. What was the original plan?”
Rhys rubbed at his jaw for a few seconds, like he was mentally sorting through the version of events he’d almost used. Then he shifted a little closer to me on the bed.
“There was a story I planned to tell once all of this was over,” he said. “The idea was that the fake death scheme was actually Zach’s. He pitched it to me and Knox as a way to lure out the killer or catch him off guard. I’d play the dead guy while the two of them handled everything else.”
“Okay,” I said slowly.
“We went along with it, thinking it was a good idea, and it seemed fine for the first day. Then I woke up one morning handcuffed to that.” He gestured toward one of the thick wooden support beams that separated the sleeping area from the rest of the room.
“I was completely out of it. That was when I realized I’d been drugged. ”
A chill slid down my spine as I glanced toward the beam.
“Then Zach came in and told me Knox had outlived his usefulness, so he’d killed him,” Rhys continued.
His voice stayed calm, almost detached. “Apparently I was more useful alive for the time being. That was when I finally realized what he was doing. He was the killer, and he was setting me up to take the fall for everything. Eventually he’d kill me too and stage it as a suicide. ”
I nodded slowly. “Right.”
“He kept me sedated enough that fighting back or trying to escape wasn’t really an option.
The only time he uncuffed me was when he dragged me to the bathroom once a day, and even then I could barely stand upright,” he said.
“Then one night he came in to feed me and dose me again. Enough of the previous drugs had worn off that I had a little strength back, and I noticed he had a gun tucked into his pocket. So I waited until he got close enough, grabbed it, and shot him. Self-defense.”
I stared at him for a second. “Wouldn’t the hospital run a tox screen on you?” I asked skeptically. “To confirm whether you’d actually been drugged?”
Rhys flashed me a wolfish grin. Then he stood and crossed the room to one of the drawers near the table. After rummaging around for a moment, he returned holding a small syringe between his fingers.
“This is midazolam,” he replied. “Fast-acting benzodiazepine. Strong sedative. I was going to inject myself with it before the cops or paramedics arrived so it’d show up in my bloodstream.”
“So then the tox screen would support your story.”
“Exactly.”
I slowly shook my head. “How the hell did you even get something like that? Did you rob a hospital or something?”
“Dark web.” His mouth twitched, and he rolled the syringe lazily between his fingers. “Using accounts and shipping details connected to Zach, obviously.”
“Right,” I muttered.
Rhys tucked the syringe back into the drawer and shut it again. “Anyway, like I said, that plan doesn’t work anymore.”
“Because of me. And Jasmine.”
He nodded. “You two know too much,” he said, returning to his spot on the bed.
“You know the fake death scheme only involved me and Knox, and you also know I was never drugged or held captive by Zach. So there’s no way I could sell that story to the cops, because the two of you would tell them a completely different version of events. ”
“Yeah,” I said. “That definitely would’ve fallen apart.”
“So.” Rhys shifted even closer on the bed, his knee brushing mine. “For the sake of clarity, I’m going to explain the new version as if you’ve already agreed to help me.”
A flicker of unease passed through me. “Okay.”
“Knox and I staged the fake deaths together. You and Jasmine discovered what we were doing, but you agreed not to tell the others because you thought it might help flush out the real killer.”
I gave him a slow nod.
“Every night, I went into the woods alone to search for him,” Rhys continued.
“One night, I spotted someone in a mask chasing another person through the trees. I tried to follow, but I lost them in the dark. I kept searching anyway, and that’s when I started finding bodies.
” His eyes flicked briefly toward me. “Jensen. Chris. Grace. Sutton. Then eventually I found you, dangling upside down from a tree. You’d been caught in one of the killer’s traps. ”
“Sounds familiar,” I muttered.
“You were unconscious but still alive. So I cut you down and brought you back here to the cabin to recover.”
I raised a brow. “Why wouldn’t you take me back to the main group?”
“Because by then I suspected the killer was one of the counselors.” Rhys rubbed absently at his jaw.
“There was something familiar about the way he moved when I saw him running through the woods. I couldn’t place it exactly, but I knew it had to be someone from camp.
” His gaze settled back on me. “And if I’d taken you back to the group… ”
“I wouldn't have been safe,” I finished.
“Exactly.” He dipped his chin in a brief nod. “When you woke up, you told me you got close enough to the killer to judge his height, but not enough to identify him because of the mask. He was around five-ten, give or take an inch.”
“Which conveniently ruled you out.”
“Right. But it still left a decent number of possibilities.” A faint smirk touched his mouth. “Especially once we realized it could’ve been a woman too. April. Jasmine. Stevie. Marlowe. They’re all tall.”
“Right.”
“After that, you agreed to stay hidden here with me while we figured things out,” Rhys went on. “Then Jasmine showed up the next morning. I told you to hide under the bed so she wouldn’t see you, and when she talked to me, I pretended I had no idea what happened the night before. Just in case.”
I frowned. “To… protect me?”
“Yes. Because I didn’t trust her anymore,” he said.
“At that stage, I trusted nobody except you. And Jasmine could’ve just been pretending not to know what happened to you to throw me off.
Because… who knows? Maybe she was planning to kill me later, but she wanted to stay on my good side for the time being.
Maybe she wanted me alive long enough to pin everything on me. ”
I slowly nodded. “I guess that makes sense. In a paranoid slasher-movie kind of way.”
Rhys laughed softly and glanced toward the darkened window. “Later that night, I went back out into the woods to look for the killer again,” he said. “That’s when all the chaos started.”
“The fake recordings.”