Chapter 15
The dining hall felt too loud for how little anyone was actually saying.
People sat in clusters around the tables, nursing mugs of coffee or picking at toast, conversations starting and dying in the same breath. No one had slept much, and it showed. Dark circles, drawn faces, the kind of brittle energy that came from running on fumes and adrenaline.
I’d been sitting with Jasmine, Wren, Tamsin, Jesse, and Simon for almost half an hour when I felt the familiar pinprick sensation of eyes on me.
I glanced up. Rhys was watching me from across the room. When he saw me notice him, he tilted his head in a subtle nod toward the exit.
My stomach tightened, just slightly.
“Time for my lesson, I guess,” I said, pushing my chair back.
“You don’t have to go, you know,” Jasmine said, raising a brow.
“I think it’s probably a good idea. Just in case,” I said. “With the way everything’s gone so far… you never know what’ll happen next.”
Wren nodded gloomily. “I hate to say it, but I think you’re right,” she said, shooting a wary glance around the room. “If I wasn’t so tired, I’d come too.”
I met up with Rhys by the door, and we walked in silence at first. In the daylight, everything looked different. Smaller. Less threatening. The trees didn’t feel like they were closing in anymore, and the buildings didn’t seem so isolated.
We reached the ax storage shed a minute later. Rhys stepped forward and tugged the door open, the hinges giving a low creak as it swung inward.
“After you.”
I stepped inside. The space smelled faintly of wood and metal. Along the back wall, racks of axes were lined up in neat rows, varying in size and shape.
Rhys moved past me, reaching out to run his fingers along one of the handles as he scanned the selection.
“We’ve got a few different options,” he said. “The smaller ones are easier to control, especially if you’re just starting out, but they don’t hit as hard. The heavier ones…” He lifted one slightly, testing the weight in his hand. “Better impact. But harder to handle.”
I nodded and stepped a little closer, my gaze dropping to the floor as I moved.
That was when I saw that his shoes were streaked with dried blood.
My first thought barely registered. Of course his shoes were bloodstained. Mine were too after last night.
Then I stilled as another thought registered. The sneakers he had on right now weren’t the sneakers he was wearing last night. Those ones were black with a white slash pattern along the side, and these were khaki and white with stripes on the side.
Yet there was dried blood on them.
I kept my cool and took a deep breath, figuring there had to be a rational explanation.
“Hey,” I said, keeping my tone as even as I could. “What happened to your shoes?”
Rhys glanced down automatically. “Hm?”
“Looks like there’s blood on them.”
“Oh.” He shrugged slightly, like it was nothing. “One of the kids got a nosebleed on them during the break at paintball the other day. Remember?”
I blinked. “No.”
He shrugged, unconcerned. “You must’ve been somewhere else when it happened.”
“Right,” I murmured.
He motioned to his shoes. “I actually prefer my other sneakers for ax throwing, because they’ve got better grip, but they’re still wet from last night. From all the—” He abruptly stopped, lips thinning. “Well, I guess I don’t need to spell it out for you.”
My mind didn’t feel right. It was moving too fast and too slow at the same time, trying to slot his answer into place. Trying to decide if it fit or not.
A nosebleed at paintball.
I couldn’t remember anything like that happening. But maybe I’d missed it, like Rhys said. There had been a lot going on that day, after all. A lot of people moving around.
But then…
A flicker of memory. The fire last night. The way people had started drifting off as the hour drew later. The way Sloane and Reid had disappeared. The way Rhys had left right around the same time.
Hadn’t he?
I couldn’t quite pin it down, because now that I was actively trying to, everything suddenly felt blurred, like my brain had stopped recording things cleanly at some point.
Still, I was at least seventy-five percent sure I’d seen Rhys leave the fire not long after Sloane and Reid did, and he definitely wasn’t there when Jasmine and I left to shower.
Then again, most people had left the firepit by the time Jasmine and I finally left last night. It didn’t mean any of them had stalked two of their fellow counselors before brutally murdering them.
So… was I just being paranoid again? Or was I missing something right in front of me? Was I going to wind up like one of those idiots in horror movies who ignored every single warning sign and practically handed themselves to the killer on a silver platter?
“You good?” Rhys asked.
I looked up. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Looks like you’ve got something on your mind.” He was staring at me now, steady and unblinking, like he somehow knew exactly what was happening inside my head. “Are you still thinking about last night?”
I swallowed hard, head shaking. “No, just… Brad and Olivia. I’m hoping they’ll be here with the cops soon.”
“They should be,” he said, running a finger over a scuffed ax handle. “But hey, you never know when a lesson like this might come in handy, right?”
“Yeah, that’s true,” I murmured. I hesitated, then glanced at him again. “Do you think Piper will actually show up this morning? So we can get out of here early?”
Rhys snorted. “Fuck no. That girl’s never coming back.”
“What makes you so sure?” I asked, stomach suddenly lurching again.
“It’s like Jasmine said last night. She’s the flakiest person on the face of the planet, and she gets worse every year,” he replied. “I wasn’t even surprised when she dipped out of work on the first day and ghosted the whole camp.”
“Oh. Right.” My head tilted slightly. “So, um… how long have you known her for?”
“Practically my whole life.”
“Is it like that with all the Legacies?” I asked, suddenly curious about their history. “You’ve all known each other forever?”
“Pretty much, yeah. We grew up together. Our parents were all friends or business acquaintances, and we all went to the same schools. Vacationed in the same places.”
“So it’s like a big extended family.”
“Kind of,” he said, nodding. “We don’t hang out as much as we used to, because we all ended up going to different colleges after school.
But we’ve come here to work every summer for the last four years, and we keep in touch through the group chat.
So there’s always some kind of conversation happening. ”
“That’s pretty cool. It’s rare to see a big friendship group that stays so close for so long.”
His jaw ticked, ever so slightly. “Yeah,” he said after a beat. His thumb dragged absently along the ax handle, smearing over another faint scuff mark. “It’s… history, I guess.”
I frowned a little. “History?”
“Yeah. When you’ve known people that long, you don’t really question it. You just keep showing up because that’s what you’ve always done.”
I nodded slowly. “I guess it’s like my old high school classmates from back home,” I said. “Sometimes I feel like we’re only still in touch because it would be weird not to be.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly it. When you’re kids, it feels like you’ll be friends forever.
But eventually it’s not the same as it used to be,” he replied, eyes still on the ax instead of me.
“People change. Or they don’t.” A quiet exhale left him.
Then he raised a brow, lips quirking into a half-smile.
“A lot of the Legacies still act like they’re fifteen.
And I’m sure Jasmine’s never missed a chance to tell you how lazy some of them are. ”
I laughed softly. “To be fair, she’s not totally wrong.”
“That’s true. I have to kick Jensen’s ass to get him out of bed most mornings,” he said. He shrugged lightly. “I guess most of those guys were just raised differently.”
I blinked. “I thought you said you were basically raised together?”
“Grew up together. But we still had different parents, obviously,” he said, lifting a brow. “Different family dynamics. And I was always a bit of an outlier.”
“How so?” I asked, frowning slightly.
“My family is the only one in the group that’s considered ‘new money’. The others all come from generational wealth. Piles of money dating back literal centuries.” Rhys hesitated, rubbing his jaw. “People like that tend to be insulated from reality.”
“Or totally detached from it, in some cases,” I said, arching a brow.
He chuckled. “Yeah. Most of the other Legacies were taught that they can work if they want to, but only as much as they feel like. And that attitude bleeds over to their work here.”
“But you’re not like that.” I tilted my head slightly. “You actually work hard. Even Jasmine thinks so, and you know how she feels about Legacies.”
He laughed again. “Yeah, she never misses an opportunity to let us know.”
“So what made you so different, then?” I asked. “If you all grew up around the same people, same schools, same everything… why didn’t that rub off on you?”
Rhys stilled for a moment, like the question had landed somewhere a little deeper than he expected. Then his gaze dropped back to the ax in his hands. “My grandfather,” he said. “He’s the one who made our money.”
I leaned back against the workbench, listening. “What did he do?”
“Construction, originally,” he said. “Then property development. Small stuff at first. Then bigger. Then bigger again. Until he got into telecommunications at exactly the right moment, just before everything exploded. That eventually turned into Northgate.” His mouth curved faintly, but there wasn’t much humor in it.
“By the time I came along, the money was already there. But the mindset…” He shook his head slightly. “That never changed.”
“How so?”
“My grandfather didn’t believe in wasting anything. Time, money, opportunity. If you wanted something, you worked for it. Didn’t matter how much was sitting in the bank. You still had to show up. Still had to put in the hours.”