Chapter 31 #3
“No. She was just shocked,” he replied. “Even more shocked to hear that I planned on putting her name on the List when October rolled around. But she wasn’t afraid. She was excited.”
“Because you told her what it was all about. She knew it meant you intended to marry her one day.”
“Exactly. And she wanted to marry me just as much as I wanted to marry her.” He paused to draw in a shaky breath, his chest rising and falling unevenly before continuing.
“I should’ve kept it to myself. Just put her name on the List, caught her quickly on the day, and explained it all once she was at the estate. ”
My heart began to thump hard. “Why? What happened?”
“Well, I know the hunt can be pretty scary, even if you know it’s your future husband chasing you.
So I suggested to Cal that we keep it low-key.
She would wait for me in her dorm when the List went up, and I’d go there and ‘capture’ her.
Safely and easily,” he said. His hands clenched into fists on his thighs. “But… she said no.”
“Why?”
“She said she wasn’t scared at all, and she thought it would be fun. She also said she didn’t want to take the tradition away from me, seeing as I’d probably been looking forward to it for a long time.”
“She wanted you to chase her.”
He nodded, the movement jerky. “Yeah. I ended up agreeing with her, because she was right—it would be a shame to miss out on the hunt that I’d looked forward to all those years.
But I was still a little worried about her safety, because a hunt always has risks, even if it’s just a game.
She could accidentally get hurt, for example. So… we ended up making a deal.”
“What was the deal?”
“She’d run and hide when the List went up.
But she wouldn’t hide very well. Just enough to make a game of it, because she wanted to be caught in the end,” Roman said.
He swallowed audibly, as if there were a lump in his throat, his Adam's apple bobbing. “If I still hadn’t found her by midnight, she was supposed to call and let me know where she was so I could go to her. I also gave her a Dionysus ring to show to any other hunters who came across her, to let them know I’d already ‘claimed’ her.
Just as a precaution, in case one of them decided to be an asshole and poach her for themselves. ”
“The minotaur maze ring?” I asked, brows rising.
He nodded. “Yeah. It’s an old Dionysus relic. My grandfather gave it to me when I was a kid.”
“She had it on her when she died, and I always wondered where it came from,” I murmured. “Now I know.”
He nodded again, slower this time, like the weight of the memory was physically pushing down on him. “All in all, I thought it was a pretty safe plan. Nothing could go wrong.”
“But things did go wrong,” I murmured.
He cleared his throat before he spoke again, the sound rough and painful.
“Her friends insisted on hiding her,” he said.
“Cal told me all about it before they made her get rid of her phone. She said she tried to tell them she wasn’t worried about the hunt, but they were very persistent, and she couldn’t really tell them the truth, could she? ”
“No, I guess not. Not without giving away the Club’s big secret.”
“Exactly,” he said. His knee started bouncing, a nervous tic he couldn't seem to control. “Anyway, because she didn’t have her phone on her, I tracked her friends’ phones to see where they ended up. Turned out they had her holed up at a motel in Crescent Bay.”
“So… you went there?”
“Not right away.” Roman winced, like the memory was physically painful.
His hand came up to press against his chest. “By that stage, it was only four o’clock.
I figured I should give Cal some more time to play the game, so to speak.
Let her think she’d actually had a real shot at evading me for more than a couple of hours. Let her have fun.”
“Right,” I said stiffly.
“That was the biggest mistake I ever made,” he muttered. His hands were trembling now. “I should’ve just gone there right away.”
“What did you do instead?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just waited. Eventually, around half past ten, I tracked a couple of her friends again, just to make sure they were still at the motel. But at that point, their phones actually showed them back at BHU, at a frat house. So I figured they’d all decided to go to a party.”
I nodded. “They did. A Halloween thing.”
“I drove down there and checked out the party. I spotted Jeremiah there in a zombie costume, so I knew her friends were definitely there. But… Cal wasn’t. I looked everywhere. Even made all the masked people unmask.”
“Yeah, she didn’t go to the party,” I said. “She told her friends she was tired and stayed behind at the motel.”
Roman nodded, more agitated now. “I realized she must’ve stayed behind so she’d be alone when I showed up to capture her.
That way there wouldn’t be a big dramatic scene with her friends all freaking out over it,” he said.
“So I still wasn’t worried at that point.
I figured I’d drive up to the motel, find her room, and let her ‘escape’ so I could chase her around for a while.
Just for fun, you know? Then we’d be done before midnight, and we could head to the estate. ”
“But she wasn’t there.”
“No. The room was empty, and the door was open.” His voice had turned thicker, like he couldn’t stop the emotions from rising in his throat, and his breathing was becoming uneven.
“That’s when I started to worry. I checked her friends’ locations again, and all of them were at BHU.
So then I thought… maybe she was at the Halloween party after all.
Or maybe she was much better at hiding than I thought, and she’d left the motel door open as some sort of message to me.
Like: ‘Better luck next time! Happy hunting!’ to show that she’d outsmarted me. ”
“Right.”
“I was praying that’s all it was. So I went back to BHU and checked the party again,” he went on, his words coming faster now, more desperate.
“By that stage, it was almost midnight. I figured she’d call, like we planned, and laugh at me for not being able to find her.
For not being the amazing hunter I thought I was. But the clock hit twelve and…”
“She didn’t call.”
“No. She didn’t,” he said, his voice breaking on the last word. “But someone else did.”
“Who?”
“Julian. He said he had bad news. A girl had been found at the base of the clock tower on campus.” He stopped to draw in a shaky breath, blinking rapidly like he was trying to hold back tears.
His hands were gripping his knees so hard his knuckles had turned white.
“Before he even said her name… I just knew. I got a chill through my body, and I knew.”
“What did you do?” I asked in a low voice.
“I ran over to the tower, and I… I saw her lying there.” His voice cracked completely, and he pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “I saw her friends too, crying and holding each other. They eventually noticed me, and… the looks they gave me. It was pure hatred.”
“They thought you did it.”
“It wasn’t just them. The Club assumed it was me too, because I was the one who put her name on the List, and then she was killed during the hunt.
So I guess it just seemed obvious to them that I did it, even though it wasn’t true,” he said.
“They initiated the coverup right away, to make sure nothing ever made it to the news.”
‘They even paid off the dean to bury it as much as possible, right?”
“Yes. So the case didn’t go anywhere. The media never picked up the story, and the Club was safe from public scrutiny. But… Cal was gone. Gone forever, and I—”
His voice shattered completely then. He doubled over, elbows on his knees, face in his hands, and a sound tore from his throat that was barely human. A raw, guttural sob that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, somewhere he'd been keeping locked away.
“Roman…” I said softly, trying to bring him back, but he didn’t seem to hear me.
His whole body was shaking now, shoulders heaving, breath coming in ragged gasps between sobs that wracked him like physical blows. He tried to speak, tried to say something else, but all that came out were broken sounds and gasping breaths.
I sat frozen against the cold stone wall, watching him completely shatter in front of me.
This wasn't performance. This wasn't manipulation.
This was grief in its rawest, most unfiltered form; the kind that destroyed you from the inside out, that left you gutted and empty and barely able to breathe.
“I loved her,” he finally managed to choke out between sobs, his voice so thick with tears it was almost incomprehensible. “I loved her so fucking much, and I… I failed her. I should've been there. I should've protected her. It's my fault she's dead. My fault.”
He kept saying it, over and over. “My fault. My fault. My fault.”
Each repetition was punctuated by another wracking sob, his entire body convulsing with the force of his grief. That was when I knew. Not suspected. Not wondered. Knew.
Roman Valcourt hadn't killed my sister.
He'd loved her. Truly, devastatingly loved her in a way that had destroyed him when he lost her. The kind of love that still tore him apart a year later, that left him sobbing in front of another person because he couldn't hold it in anymore.
That meant everything I'd believed up until this moment was wrong. Which meant Cal's real killer was still out there… and I had no idea who they were.