Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
AUDREY
The vonBermere Estate
“Anyone find shit we can actually use?” Lex mused from the floor where he was star fished once again. The boy wouldn’t adhere to social norms if they slapped him in the face and asked him to sign his name. “Like secrets and shit.”
“Like…secrets…” Worth began, exasperated. “And shit. You mean, like, the whole reason we’re here?”
It never ceased to amaze me how different the two Kenton brothers were. They could be like a forced proximity yin and yang. One was the quiet to the other’s chaos. The chaos was usually arriving in the form of Lexington, the one who was born just a few minutes late.
“Yeah brother, like secret shit. Anyone have any-fucking-thing?”
“Weeell…” An oddly exuberant Ellery dramatically stood, eons different than he appeared last week, as if the news of a certain little hacker’s engagement never reached his ears.
Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. Ellery was proving quite masterful at pretending that he could pull it off wonderfully.
He unzipped his jacket, which he had insisted on wearing even though it was a blistering eighty-three degrees outside—practically a sauna for the normally mild temperatures of the overcast, dreary Pacific Northwest.
“I learned that sometimes, pussies just want to be cuddled.” Smirking, he shed the jacket, unveiling something hidden in his hands. “And then petted just a bit.”
Silence descended instantly—something only Ellery had ever been able to perfect. Once again, none of us knew how to respond. Spotting the ball of fur nestled in his hold, I groaned. “You got a cat.”
At the same time, Lex yelled, “You have a pussy on tap now?”
A defeated sigh was heard from the corner where Lilah was huddled into her self-built hacker cave.
“The second trial’s tailored to me. It’s mine, it has to be.
” Her raspy voice was like a gunshot as we collectively turned towards her.
She began to rapidly type on her computer as she pulled up several screens.
At that moment, I realized what she was referring to.
“Your family deals,” I started. “The vonBermeres always hold the final card whenever their name is called. You knew what this trial would require before we even received the cards…”
“No secrets are ever kept from me.” She finished her typing right as lines of code populated across the shared screen.
“The second trial is meant to collect ammunition and leverage, in the form of something unknown so The Guilda has something, in the case of a defector, that can be held over your head.” Leverage and blackmail.
I mused, thinking back to what Aleks and Cameron both said.
“I may have information about what we should use moving forward.”
Recounting all the information Aleks discussed with Cameron and me about the first trial and the rumours that were circulating about a potential new Gamemaster and Guilda head that had been called forth.
I avoided directly admitting that I had sought out Aleksandr first, that he had been helping me since he found me after Trial One.
Shocked silence greeted me after I laid it all out, from the way our first trials lined up, to Lilah’s engagement announcement, and then finally to how Trial Two seemed to line up too coincidentally with the public announcement of the tying of the vonBermere and Ellsworth names.
“If Trial Two is focused on Lilah, then who did Trial One target?” Worth muttered, observing the room like a bomb was about to drop.
“It was me.”
Ellery was right. His trial was by far more personal, more intent on causing discord among us, a failed attempt from The Guilda to draw lines in the sand.
It had forced him to face his biggest fear, but also his worst nightmare: forcing him to admit to himself that he and Lilah had no future, in the most brutal of ways.
The way that the truth was forced upon him had me wondering, days later, how he had bounced back already, knowing if the roles had been reversed and that it had been me, I would not have rebounded so gracefully.
“That’s great and all, but how’re we going to complete Trial Two?
What secrets do we have that no one here doesn’t already know?
” Worth’s question ricocheted like bullets into the silence.
His words had merit. If Lilah was the target of the trial this time, then there was no doubt, the secret The Guilda demanded of her would require a higher sacrifice than the rest of us.
The thought was terrifying when she undoubtedly held thousands of secrets close.
No secrets are ever kept from me. Her earlier statement circled my mind, replaying the way she looked as she said it.
The way her fingers paused slightly across her keys as she entered the information and brought it up to the shared screen.
Her refusal to meet my eyes once she saw those pieces clicked into place in my mind.
No secrets are ever kept from me.
“Lilah already has our secrets picked out.” I abruptly cut off the discussions going on around me as the answer appeared in startling clarity. “She’s already figured out how to play our hand just enough, but not so much as to tip the scales away from us. Right, Lilah?”
Nodding, Lilah continued to type away on her keyboard, quickly opening and closing hundreds of screens.
She toggled between documents, files, photos, and police reports, until finally ending on five separate items, pulled up by name.
Truths that our group had long since buried or denied in the light of day.
“Lilah, what is this?” Lex cautiously walked over, like he was afraid of attack. “This was supposed to be erased…no…no, we can’t.” He vehemently shook his head as a picture of Calliope Rose filled the screen. His face turned sickly when the newspaper clipping appeared underneath.
The investigation continues as police and the Coastal Guard search for seventeen-year-old Calliope Rose.
The young woman was allegedly last seen Sunday with Lexington and Wentworth Kenton, both only sixteen-years-old themselves.
Both Kenton heirs claim they dropped her off at her dorm at Sir Edmund Preparatory Academy, but witnesses report seeing neither Kenton brother walk her to her door.
The search is ongoing as the surrounding woods and cliffs are being combed…
“Lilah! What is this?” Lex demanded this time, his face turning a ghastly green, as Lilah sat on the verge of unravelling one of his darkest secrets. He paled further until he could have been mistaken for a ghost as more information continued to appear across the screens.
“Your secret, Lexington. This is your secret that we’ll submit.”
“We can’t…and you know why! This will destroy us!
” I had never seen Lex so intense as he began to tear at Lilah.
That's when it dawned on us, one by one, as we each realized it would only get worse. “Fuck you, Lilah. Fuck you and that goddamn high horse you try to pretend isn’t there while you shed light on the night that turned into my worst motherfucking nightmare.”
“Lex, take a minute to think about what denying this trial will do.” Lilah’s placating voice did nothing to diffuse the situation as he continued to fume. Come on Lex, don’t refuse…I hate this, knowing what The Ludi will make me choose in the end…
Unwilling to voice the truth of why I needed him to calm down, I waited, morbidly curious how Lilah would spin this…what she could possibly do to contain it before members of The Guilda learned that ugly truth. “All they’ll find is Calliope going missing and you leaving her room hours later.”
“But what if that won’t be all…” Lex trailed off, his temper cooling as he became lost in thought about the night he failed to save the one girl who had always seemed able to keep him on the edge of his feet. “What if that isn’t all they will find?”
“It will be. You need to trust me.” The statement was not a question, but rather a silent command from our group's little hacker who had stockpiled and hidden all these secrets much more cleverly than I ever assumed. “You all need to trust me.”
Lilah made eye contact with me as she finished her thought, like she was willing me to understand the lengths she had gone to in order to balance the necessity of finishing this trial, while also giving The Guilda a sense of leverage without providing the smoking gun that would allow them to truly be able to hurt any of us…
unless it was done willingly from within.
“Worth’s was more complicated. I could not pull the same secret twice, and I doubt The Gamemaster will accept a two-for-one completion again,” she muttered before quickly firing off a command to bring up the second file, filled with speculation of bribes Worth accepted while playing hockey at Prep.
“He had very little that was fitting. The worst was the money he accepted to sit on the bench in a game, or the time he broke into the arena to ruin the opposing team’s equipment during the playoffs freshman year.”
“Good boy Kenton strikes again,” Ellery snickered into his fist. “Hit me, Lilah, whatcha got for me?”
Connecting gazes with him from across the room, Lilah released a resigned sigh. “I dug up something about the reputation that precedes you…” she began, hesitant to share the secret she had on him, one that Ellery would no doubt blow up over.
“There were rumours that Amanda Cross had your secret love child last year. That she smuggled him out before the distinction could be fou—”
“That’s utter shit. You know that’s not true!” Ellery lashed out, looking ridiculous as he jumped up in anger with a tiny kitten curled into his neck.