Chapter 21
AVA
“Son of a bitch.”
It was not the reaction I had expected from Grayson after our kiss. Now that I noted the change in his tone, I could also feel his body was stiff in my arms. I opened my eyes, and I didn’t see a thing. I couldn’t see a thing; the whole facility was pitch black. Okay, son of a bitch is right.
A chill ran down my spine as my eyes struggled to see a fleck of light.
“The emergency lights,” I whispered as I held on tighter to Grayson.
This was done intentionally because, in the event of power loss or another calamity, the emergency lights were set to activate and illuminate the arena.
“Who the fuck is there?” Grayson shouted.
We needed to move, but both of us were on skates, and even though we knew this rink well, we didn’t know if it was safe to move around freely. Darkness and skate blades were not a good combination.
In the distance, we heard a door slam.
“Fuck, someone’s here,” Gray mumbled more to himself than me.
He put my body in front of his as one of his hands wrapped around my waist and slowly began to guide us toward the middle of the rink.
It was the equivalent of being stranded in the middle of a mass of water, but at least in this position we could hear if someone approached us, rather than going to one of the entrances and being struck because we were an easy target.
My heart was beating erratically already.
The only thing that made me feel a slight bit better was the fact that I felt protected and embraced in Grayson’s warmth.
Too bad that sense of security only lasted a second, because the whole rink was met with a shrill sound blaring through the sound system.
There was white noise, then a soft, feminine voice began to talk.
It was a voice I thought I was never going to hear again…
a voice that we shouldn’t be listening to.
“No,” Gray uttered.
“One…two…I’m going to get you…three…four…everyone will blame you.”
The walls I had built around myself came crumbling down at the sound of Livy’s voice. The facade I had tightly wrapped myself around, telling myself I was okay, was shattered.
“Gray…Ava.”
“Gray…Ava.”
“Gray…Ava, are you guys all right?”
I could make out Micah’s and Cruz’s voices, but they sounded distorted, almost as if I were underwater.
“It’s okay…we’re okay,” Grayson whispered in my ear.
I didn’t realize my eyes had closed again until I blinked and the whole place was lit up again.
The recording had stopped, and two figures were running toward us.
I scooted back, and that was when I noticed that Grayson and I were on the floor.
How did we get on the floor? I hadn’t even felt us moving.
I knew Grayson had to maneuver me. He knew as well as I did that losing control on skates was catastrophic.
Neither one of us could afford an injury.
“Are you guys okay?”
“What the fuck was that?”
Both Micah and Cruz spoke at the same time.
“T-t-that was Livy,” I whispered while I looked blankly at them.
“It can’t be,” Grayson said as the voice of reason, but his tone sounded doubtful.
“With today’s technology, anyone could have distorted the tone to make it sound like her. They want to fuck with us,” Cruz finished.
“What happened?” I asked as I cleared my throat. All of a sudden, it was too dry and I felt as if I were trying to swallow sand.
“Micah and I were just getting here, then we heard a weird noise, so we rushed in. Everything was dark, but as soon as we fully opened the doors, the recording stopped, but we heard it playing on a loop. The lights came back up all at once, so it was jarring to see if anyone else was lurking around… Our main concern was you guys,” Cruz added as he gave Gray a tense look.
As for Grayson, his jaw clenched, but he refused to meet his gaze. Instead, he got busy with getting us off the floor.
Micah shifted on his feet as he looked beyond the bleachers.
“Should we go check out the sound room?”
We all looked at one another and nodded.
It wasn’t safe for us to split up…not now, at least. Hell, maybe not ever.
Who the hell was behind this? Sending us text messages was one thing, murder another one—it made them sick and vile.
But the kind of power it came with, disturbing a whole D1 of a school, that was something else.
That was power, and in this person’s hands, it made them even more lethal than we could imagine.
Little by little, we were all starting to see the strings this person had stuck to us, and now they had begun to play us like puppets.
Get it together, Ava.
I scolded myself for being so weak. The guys were holding on a lot better than I was, and for them, I could be strong—I would be stronger.
No one said anything as Grayson and I switched to our sneakers.
I put my blades in my duffel bag and brought it with me, not trusting anything happening to them if I were to leave them behind.
Grayson did the same, and neither Micah nor Cruz questioned it.
The list of safe places we had kept getting smaller. We were wounded animals being caged in.
The four of us made our way to the back hallways of the facility, up a flight of stairs that now felt eerily creepy. We all looked at one another when we noticed the media room door was ajar.
Cruz opened the door the whole way and was the first to walk inside, followed by Micah, then me, and Grayson at my rear.
“Over there.” Micah pointed to the far wall where a disc kept spinning, but no sound came out. A button was flashing green, and Micah turned it off. “It’s for the stadium speakers.”
He moved something on the disc, and right away that same white noise began to play. Grayson removed the disc immediately.
“They were anticipating us finding this. This shit kept playing with no more noise,” Gray spat.
“You shouldn’t have touched it with your bare hands,” Cruz mumbled.
“Fuck off, Martinez,” Grayson snarled at him.
I couldn’t help but glare at both of them. Here I thought we were all getting along, and they seemed to be back at square one.
“Stop it,” I hissed.
Grayson snorted. “I forget Martinez knows a lot of people and can get shit done, except he doesn’t even offer to tell us shit.”
I had no idea why they were arguing. Micah, who usually helped to mediate between us, was looking at something on the desk.
“You gotta be shitting me.” Micah’s tone had a hint of disbelief laced with anger.
In his hands were three Polaroid pictures. The first to see them was Cruz, since he was the closest to him. His cheeks got a hint of red, then his eyes landed on me, and finally on Grayson.
With shaking hands, he passed them to Grayson, who lowered them so I could see them.
“H-how?” My voice came out shaky.
One photo was of Grayson showering at the end of practice.
You couldn’t see much except his naked back, but it was him.
The rest of the showers were empty, and he was smack-dab in the middle.
The second Polaroid was of Cruz talking with Big Dog, but that wasn’t the bad part.
It was the envelope between them that said more than any words could.
It could be considered incriminating evidence.
The last photo was the worst of all, because it meant the stalker had access to everything about us.
At one point, they had tapped our belongings and violated the sanctity of our homes.
It was taken from a corner of Micah’s tree house, while he was deep inside of me.
“Why are they doing this?”