“You don’t think I’m worried about Parrish, too?” Chasm asks quietly, turning to look at Maxx and leaning his ass against the kitchen island. “I’m doing everything that I can.”
“How much can you really do sitting behind a computer or staring at your phone?” X challenges, giving me an assessing look. He wants to ask what I know, but he doesn’t want to do it when Chasm’s around. Great. I’ll need to add ‘avoid my sister’s boyfriend’ to my list of things to do.
“You always say things like that,” Chas retorts, getting irritated. “As if life isn’t real unless it’s lived outside, burning calories, dripping sweat. Don’t be stupid. I can do all sorts of things from my computer that are a hell of lot more useful than trudging around Medina looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Maxx stands up quickly, the chair scraping across the floor. For a second there, it seems like he might actually start a fight with his friend. Instead, he puts his palms flat on the table, lets his head hang low and lets out a long, tired exhale.
“Tell me then,” X continues, his voice low and dangerous. I wonder if Maxine’s ever seen this side of her boyfriend before? His anger is justifiable though, isn’t it? I know he’s just worried about Parrish, and I can’t blame him. He should be worried. If he knew what I knew, he’d understand exactly how dire the situation is. “What are you doing? Hacking into red light cams and looking for license plates? Searching the FBI’s database with your fingerprint samples?” He lifts his head up, green eyes blazing.
Chasm sneers back at him in response, and I stand up abruptly, doing my best to break the tension.
“We searched every account that Parrish has for clues.” That’s true, although it isn’t all that we did. But I won’t lie to Maxx. So partial truths and omissions it is. “His email, his PlayStation account, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Steam, Discord, even online banking. We’re searching for digital trails, Maxx.”
He just stares at me like he’s never seen me before or, more likely, as if he made a huge error in judgement, like I’m not the person he thought I was, the person he wanted me to be.
“Don’t ask for permission; own your space. Take it. If you make sure you’re comfortable with yourself, you’ll fit in wherever you are.”
I bet he’s regretting offering up such sage advice to me now; I know I look like a total asshole in all of this.
“You haven’t called your sister,” he says, his voice accusatory and laced with suspicion. X stands up straight, shirtless and beautiful, and then he turns away to head for the balcony doors. That’s when I notice his tattoos, these angelic white angel wings that go from his shoulder blades all the way down to the waistband of his pants and then beneath them.
I’d recognize that work anywhere: it’s Parrish’s.
I suck in a sharp breath, closing my eyes against a sudden wave of melancholy. I should’ve let him ink me when he was here, so I’d have a piece of him at all times. When I open my eyes, I see that Maxx has propped the doors open, letting the breeze tousle his chocolate hair as he stares back at me. He’s leaned up against the edge of the doorframe like he’s waiting for a response.
Oh, that’s right. Maxine.
“I’ve been busy.” What a feeble excuse. But it’s the truth. What else can I possibly say? Sorry, this creeper in a black stag mask who says he’s my father as well as the Seattle Slayer had me set my school on fire, so I haven’t had a chance to call. “Maxine will understand.”
X scoffs, shaking his head like he’s disgusted with me. He disappears onto the balcony and finally slams the doors behind him.
“Be careful with him,” Chas tells me, his gaze focused on the doors and not on me. “He isn’t as nice as he wants everyone to think.”
Chasm takes off like he’s about to leave but pauses beside me instead, reaching up a hand to play with my hair. I watch mesmerized as he twirls the lime green strands around his fingers.
“I’ve got to go start my hair and makeup.” He releases my hair and taps at one of his lip piercings for emphasis. “I’ll check in with you before I leave. Keep up the search and I’ll be in touch.”
With a small curse that reminds me of the way he said fuck it at the lake before he kissed me, Chasm leans in and presses a warm kiss to my forehead, taking off down the hallway before I even know how to feel about it.
With Chasm gone, the house feels lonelier than ever. I end up spending the first half of my day texting and calling people. Lumen is easy to talk to. Sally and Nevaeh, too. The rest of the people on my list are so emotionally draining that by the time I’m done, I’m going to need a nap.
Danyella spends nearly thirty minutes sobbing on video chat while I sit there and cry with her, apologizing over and over and over again.
“Don’t be sorry,” is what she says to me. “You didn’t do anything wrong. But when I catch the bastards who did this …” The sharp sound of her laugh will haunt me for years to come. Apparently, word has gotten around that the fire was, in fact, arson. I’m not sure if the authorities leaked something or if it’s just Whitehall gossip. Either way, it’s not a good sign for me or Chasm.
Reluctantly, she lets me go so that I can call my sister next.
“Oh my god, Dakota, are you okay?” Maxine breathes, leaning in toward her computer screen like she can hug me right through it. And oh, how I wish she could. “I’ve been calling and texting for days, but I wasn’t sure if that woman …”
“She’s on a warpath,” I agree, glancing away toward the wall of windows and the lake. “Was on a warpath, I should say. She’s too worried about Parrish right now to pay much attention to me.”
“What do you think happened to him?” Maxine asks as I look back at the screen, wishing I could tell my sister everything and knowing that I’d do anything to keep her from getting involved in this. Parrish’s pleas for me to walk away, to give up on him, they make a lot more sense when I think of them in the context of Maxine. He really cares about you, Dakota, I tell myself, but it’s not much of a revelation.
I knew.
I fucking knew that.
Tears prick my eyes, but I dash them away. Been doing that a lot lately, haven’t I?
“I don’t know,” I reply carefully, ensuring with every word that I’m not lying. I really don’t know what happened, why Parrish was chosen, how he was taken without anyone knowing. “But I miss him. Maxie, I … we …” Her face softens as understanding dawns. She had her first time at sixteen, too, so I know she gets it.
“Oh, baby sister,” she murmurs, reaching two fingers up to touch the screen. “I knew you liked him.”
“I think I’m in love with him?” I query back, shaking my head at the thought. “I know I haven’t known him for very long, and that I’m probably too young to think something like that, but …”
“Whoa, whoa,” Maxine soothes, stopping my self-deprecating rant in its tracks. “When love hits, it hits. Feelings are never wrong or right; they just are.” She pauses briefly, pushing her dark hair back from her face. “Maxx says you’re not participating in the search parties? I told him that didn’t sound like you, that if you weren’t helping you had a reason.” I nod, but I can’t tell her what that reason is. My silence is enough to communicate that. Maxine and I know each other too damn well; I can’t get anything past her. “Whatever that reason is, it’s valid. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Kota.”
“I know.” I sniffle slightly and rub at my nose. “I need to call Grandma and Grandpa and let them know what’s going on.” I pause briefly, wetting my dry lips. I’m so freaking tired right now, I can barely keep my eyes open. “What happened after Tess caught us? I mean … what did she do to you?”
Maxine looks supremely annoyed, the corner of her lip curling up in disgust.
“That doesn’t matter right now. How about we worry about that after Parrish comes back?”
I nod, glad to be able to set aside at least one problem in favor of a much, m
uch bigger one.
Justin Prior. The Seattle Slayer. What if it’s all true? What will Maxine think when she finds out that my blood is tainted with a killer’s? What will my grandparents think? Will that change our relationship?
I can’t allow myself to believe that.
“I’ll call them now,” I tell her, and she nods, giving the screen a kiss before we say our usual goodbyes. “Love you fierce.”
“Love you fierce, baby sister.”
As soon as she hangs up, I dial my grandparents, noticing that they answer the call without Saffron present. With all of this crap going on, I can’t help but wonder if she didn’t somehow know.
“Has she told you? If she hasn’t, she should—before he finds you.”
If Saffron didn’t know anything, then she must be prophetic because all the things she told me seem to be ringing true. But how? How the fuck would she know anything at all about my biological father?
“Is there a way for me to contact Saffron?” I ask after I’ve had a chance to talk for a while. The look on Carmen’s face tells me that wasn’t the best question I could ask right now. She seems wary, almost afraid.
“It’s probably best that you don’t see or talk to her for a while,” she hazards, giving my grandfather a look. “Tess wasn’t happy with us for contacting you, to say the least. And Saffron was having a really hard time with it. She’s … well, she’s staying in a facility for the time being.”
I cock a brow, but I don’t really know how to respond to that. Saffron has always been a little sad, a little flighty, a little weird, but I never thought of her as someone who’d need to be committed or anything.
I decide to let the subject go for now, allowing myself just a few minutes to enjoy talking to my grandparents with Tess out of the house. Once I’m done, I curl up on my bed with an alarm set on my phone. Just thirty minutes and I’ll get up, get online, and see what I can’t do to help locate Parrish.
Unfortunately for me, I don’t wake up until hours later, when it’s already dark out.
The first thing I do is snatch my phone and check for messages.
There’s one waiting for me.
I don’t want your studies to slack because of this; it’s nearly finals and you should be studying. I’m going to give you the rest of the week off, and we’ll start fresh on Monday. Rest well, princess.
I just stare at the words, my jaw clenched tight as I resist the urge to throw the phone against the wall. What the hell is this guy playing at? My studies? Give me the rest of the week off? What the actual fuck?
You’re kidding me, right? You want me to study when someone I care about is bleeding and hurting and suffering? What sort of monster are you?
The response comes almost instantly.
The fatherly kind.
And that’s it. Just that. I send several more texts that he ignores, and then I shove up to my feet, wrenching my bedroom door open. Parrish’s is closed, but I can hear someone moving around inside. Even though I know it can’t possibly be him, a surge of stupid hope takes over anyway, and I find myself yanking the door open and stumbling inside.
It’s Maxx.
He’s sitting on the edge of Parrish’s bed, looking worn out and hopeless. Pretty sure he didn’t mean for anyone to see him that way. As soon as I set foot in the room, he stands up.
“Kota.” I love that he uses my nickname, but I’m not particularly thrilled to see him. He’s too perceptive. He knows that I know something, and he isn’t going to let it go until he finds out what that something is. “Are you okay? I knocked on your door earlier, but you didn’t answer.”
“Must’ve fallen asleep,” I offer, which is not at all what I wanted to say. I was sleeping while he was out searching for Parrish. That doesn’t make me look very good and, for some strange reason, I want to look good to Maxx. He’s my sister’s boyfriend, after all, and she’s more into him than any boy she’s ever been with. What if they get married? How will I ever live this down?
“Mm.” X ruffles up his hair with a sigh, closing his eyes for a moment, like he’s doing his best to regain his composure. “I’m sorry about earlier; I shouldn’t have come at you like that.” Sounds like someone was talking to Maxine, I think, forcing my tired lips into a semblance of a smile.
“No problem.” I pause, eyes flicking to the side where Parrish’s sketchbook is sitting, one of the green and black roses featured prominently on the exposed page. “For what it’s worth, I do care about Parrish. I want to find him just as much as anyone else.”
Silence stretches sticky and uncomfortable between us.
When I look back at Maxx, I find him staring at me.
“You know something,” he repeats, that edge of danger in his voice again. “Something big. I just can’t figure out why you’re keeping it to yourself.”
A shameful flush crawls up my cheeks and boobs, and I turn away toward the hallway.
“I don’t know as much as you think I do, Maxx.” I start back toward my bedroom, but he ambushes me, sliding around in front of me and slamming his left palm into the wall beside my head. His gaze is intense as he leans down toward me, that cool, sporty smell of his overwhelming me. I wonder if, like Parrish, that’s just his natural scent that I’m picking up on. I hope not. I hope it’s just cologne. Yeah, it’s got to be cologne. “What are you doing?” I choke out, looking up into his green gaze and wishing a hole would appear in the floor to swallow me up.
“I like you, Kota, I do,” he tells me, and my heart contracts strangely. It’s a physical reaction that I can’t control, even as I find myself disgusted by it. “But if I find out that you and Parrish are up to something, I won’t forgive either of you.”
“Up to something?” I repeat, feeling a bit of that disgust morph into anger. “You think I’m doing this on purpose?”
“You know something, but you won’t tell me what that something is. Surely you and Parrish knew that you could never actually have a relationship. Tess isn’t the sort of parent who’d allow her stepson to date her daughter; it would never happen.”
“You’re insinuating that we’d put Parrish’s entire family through something like this over a love affair?” I’m tempted to slap Maxx, but I squeeze my hands into fists instead. “You don’t know me and clearly, you don’t know Parrish very well either. He always puts people he cares about above himself. How insulting.”
Rather than back away, Maxx leans even closer into me, like he thinks by pressuring me like this, he can get me to talk. Our faces are disturbingly close at this point. If someone were to walk in on us, they might get the wrong idea.
And oh, how wrong they’d be.
I’m much closer to punching Maxx Wright than kissing him.
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll keep digging until I find out. I’ll watch your every step, Dakota.”
“You do that,” I snap back at him, turning my face so that our noses touch. That gives him pause and he seems to realize what he’s doing, pulling back slightly but keeping his palm pressed to the wall by my head. “Make me out to be the enemy. I’m used to it by now.”
I go to move past him, and he grabs my arm, his fingers burning where they touch my skin. Our eyes meet. It’s impossible to deny that we have a natural chemistry. There’s just something about him that calls to me and vice versa, but if this is his true personality coming out, then honestly, I’d rather Maxine broke up with him.
“I’m sorry, Dakota, I really am. But if I think it’ll help Parrish, I’ll do whatever it takes—even if it means hurting you.” He turns away from me and heads down the hall, leaving me to stare at his back, at those perfectly inked angel wings.
A lot of care went into that design. I know Parrish and Maxx are close, but I can’t let Maxx’s zeal interfere with what I have to do.
And I’ll do anything to save Parrish.
There is no bridge that I won’t cross, mark my words. Mark my fucking words.
“Maxx is such a dick,” Chasm mutters
on Monday, watching me gather my things for class. I haven’t seen him since Thursday, but we’ve been able to text on and off. Needless to say, we haven’t made much headway in locating Parrish. How are we supposed to do that with such little information?
What was it that Justin said? Find the right clues. Follow the right trail. But what clues? What fucking trail?
“Yeah, well,” I start, thinking about Maxx. Holy shit, I have to say, when that boy gets it in his mind to make someone else’s life hell, he’s damn good at it. I believe what Parrish said, about Maxx causing a guy to drop out of school when he attended Whitehall. Maxx warned me about the other students, but he’s just as bad as they are. For the last four days, he’s been watching me, as promised. Whispering reminders that he knows I know something, insinuating that he might tell Tess. It’s driving me nuts. “He’s worried about his friend, and he knows I’m hiding something. I can’t entirely blame him.”
I hook my book bag on my shoulder, checking my phone for the billionth time. Justin hasn’t messaged me since Thursday either, but he did say we’d ‘start fresh’ on Monday. So where is he? Where’s my text, my video call? I’m desperate to know how Parrish is doing.
Meanwhile, I have to head to Whitehall. I have to see the ruins of the prop room. I have to comfort Danyella when I’m the source of her pain. How messed up is that?
“He was out of line regardless,” Chasm growls, gritting his teeth in frustration. “I should rightfully kick his ass.”
“But you won’t, because you know he’s got a point. He suspects us for a reason.” I head into the hallway with Chasm following, already dreading the day before it even gets started. I can’t imagine things are going to improve from here on out. I’m averaging maybe three hours of sleep a day if I’m lucky. Last night, I couldn’t bear to close my eyes. All I could think about was Parrish and that knife pressed to his chest. He’ll have seven marks by now. Seven. I can’t even imagine what he’s going through.
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