by Stella Hart
If she knew about half of the shit I’d gotten up to lately, she wouldn’t say that.
I laughed softly. “Trust me, I’m definitely not that wise.”
I was just better at detaching from situations. Sascha had always been a very sensitive and emotional person, like our mother, so she found it harder to detach. She was also three years older than me. That meant she had more memories from Avalon than me, and it made things extra-hard for her.
Yawning, I dropped my gaze from the ocean to the street below, watching two wayward gulls peck at something on the sidewalk. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a black car parked across from our apartment. The tinted driver’s side window was partway down, and a man in sunglasses and a dark beanie was sitting inside, looking up at our balcony. He had a phone in one hand, and it looked like he might be filming us or taking photos.
Narrowing my eyes, I nudged Sascha. “Is that guy watching us?” I asked. “Don’t stare and make it too obvious, or he might stop before you see.”
She turned to look while pretending to rub the side of her head. “Yeah, it looks like he’s taking photos. What a dick.”
“Let’s confront him,” I said. “We need to take our bad moods out on something, so why not focus on a local creeper?”
She snickered. “Good idea.”
We marched out of the third-story apartment and went down to the ground floor. Then we headed outside and strode across the road, making a beeline for the black car.
“Hey, did you get some good photos of us?” I called toward it.
“Fucking perv!” Sascha added. “You know you can just look up girls on the internet, right?”
Before we could get close to the car, the window went up, and the man pulled away from the curb and sped down the street.
I burst out laughing as I watched the car turn the corner, and Sascha joined in. A few seconds later, she suddenly stopped. “Wait a minute,” she said, eyes widening. “Why would some random creep target our apartment?”
“Why not? There are creeps everywhere. Last week I caught some guy trying to take photos up a girl’s skirt at that café over on Seewald Avenue.”
“But… what if someone knows who we are? What if that guy was watching us because of that?” she said.
I chewed my bottom lip. She had a point. Someone could’ve figured out who we were if they dug deep enough.
Then again, why would anyone be digging into our backgrounds? We’d lived on the island for almost eight months now, and everything had been fine. No one seemed to suspect a thing.
“I’m sure it’s okay,” I said. “Honestly, we’re probably just paranoid because of our past.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. We probably overreact to stuff because of it. I mean, that guy might’ve been a lost tourist looking for directions on his phone, and then we came down and freaked the shit out of him by yelling at him.”
Sascha’s lips curved upward. “Oh my god. Imagine if that’s actually true. He’ll probably swim all the way back to the mainland in sheer terror.”
We started giggling all over again.
As we headed back to our apartment building, I quickly turned and looked over my shoulder to make sure no one else was watching us. The narrow street was quiet and empty, apart from the hungry gulls.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I was right earlier. No one knew our real identities on this island, except for our grandparents, and they’d made it very clear that they wouldn’t tell anyone as long as we didn’t open our mouths about them.
Our secret was safe.
2
Nate
Slamming my foot down on the accelerator, I tore away from the curb and raced down the street, wheels squealing as I made a sharp turn around the nearest corner.
Fuck. The girls almost caught me.
I was wearing dark sunglasses and a beanie, so they probably wouldn’t recognize me as the creeper outside their house if they saw me again, but still… it was stupid of me to park so close.
I hadn’t actually gone to the apartment with the intention of watching the girls. I’d been keeping an eye on Alexis Livingston for a while now, for various reasons, but today I decided to ramp things up, so I drove over to scope out the building and figure out a way inside that wouldn’t alert the security guy at the front desk.
I wanted to be able to sneak into Alexis’s bedroom later—after she’d moved into her dorm on the Blackthorne campus—so I could go through the stuff she left behind. I was also thinking about installing some sort of surveillance device so I could listen to conversations she had with her sister whenever she came back to visit. I had a plan for her dorm at Blackthorne, too.
When the girls caught me a minute ago, I wasn’t taking photos of them. I was taking photos of the building so I could remember exactly where all the security cameras were when it was dark later. I wasn’t expecting Sascha and Alexis to step out onto the balcony right at that moment.
My window was only down a few inches, but that eagle-eyed bitch Alexis happened to glance my way, and she immediately spotted me with my phone. Luckily, she thought I was just a random stranger who liked taking creepshots of girls.
As I turned onto Seewald Avenue, I breathed a sigh of relief. In spite of the near miss, today had gone quite well, because I’d managed to glean some interesting information.
While I was parked outside the apartment building earlier, I spotted some odd guests arriving—Edward and Deborah Paxton. I’d never met them, but I knew of them, and I’d seen them a few times at high-society events in Arcadia Bay. They weren’t in the same multi-billionaire league as others from the town, which kept them out of the most elite social circles, but they were still very wealthy and well-known. They owned two hospitals on the island, and they were often invited to speak at fundraising galas for disease foundations set up by my mother’s philanthropic society.
Overall, they were widely considered to be respectable people with pedigreed backgrounds.
When I saw them stepping into the same apartment building that Alexis and Sascha lived in, my antennae went up. It was a nice modern building in a fashionable part of Avalon City, but it didn’t seem like the sort of place a stiff Arcadia Bay couple in their seventies would want to rent or buy for any reason. It wasn’t the kind of place any of their upper-class friends would live in, either, so I immediately sensed that there was something strange about their presence.
I was right. A few minutes after the Paxtons went inside, I saw them through a third-floor window, heading into the Livingston apartment.
They weren’t there for long, and it was clear that their meeting with the girls didn’t go well. I briefly heard raised voices through a window that Alexis had opened moments before their arrival, presumably to let in the sea breeze, and while I couldn’t make out any words because of the distance, the tones were clearly bitter and heated.
After the Paxtons left the building, looking pissed as hell, I heard china smashing up in the apartment, followed by a furious screech. A moment later, the Livingston girls stepped out onto the balcony, red-faced and sullen.
Something had happened during that meeting, and no one was happy.
I managed to catch part of the conversation between the Paxtons as they stepped past my car to get to their own vehicle. They didn’t see me because I slid partway down in my seat when they crossed the street, and they seemed too angry to notice what was going on around them anyway.
“Stupid girls. They should’ve just taken the damn money,” Edward said to his wife as they passed.
My brows rose at that. Why would the Paxtons offer money to Alexis and Sascha?
“Well, like you said, they don’t need it,” Deborah replied with an irritated sniff. “They got that payout when their father died.”
Ah.
Somehow, they knew that the girls were really Alexandra and Sarah Covington. I thought I was the only one on the island who knew that shameful little secret.
“There
must be something else we can do to convince them to leave,” Edward said.
“If they’re anything like our daughter, they’ll be too stubborn to listen to anything we say,” Deborah said in an icy tone. “And they are like her, aren’t they? You saw the older one. Practically a carbon copy of Susan when she was young. And the other one has that same churlish attitude that Susan always had.”
The realization hit me like a fist in the chest. Holy fuck. Edward and Deborah Paxton were Alexis and Sascha’s maternal grandparents.
No wonder they didn’t want the girls on the island. Their longstanding reputation would be shattered if everyone found out their son-in-law was the Blackthorne Butcher. So that was why they went to the apartment today. They were offering money to the girls to convince them to leave.
I couldn’t blame them for that.
I narrowed my eyes, wondering if, when, and how I could use this new piece of information. It was salacious as fuck, for sure, and if I were one of those douchey gossip column writers, I’d be hitting publish on my latest article right about now. I wasn’t one of those assholes, though, and I didn’t want to hurt the Paxtons or Sascha.
I only wanted to hurt Alexis.
My phone rang, interrupting my thoughts. I reached over and pressed the answer button. There were a few seconds of static as the call connected via my car’s Bluetooth, and then my friend Jasper’s voice started playing through the speakers. “Hey, man. How are you doing?”
Jasper was an Oregon transplant who’d been in my fraternity at Blackthorne since we started college two years ago. He was a nice enough guy, if you chose to ignore his raging pill and coke problem.
“I’m good,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Wondering what the fuck you’ve been up to, mostly. I haven’t seen you since that party at your house. When was it? Five weeks ago? Six?”
“Something like that.”
“So what’s up with you? Where have you been?” he asked. “You missed Sam’s boat party. I was boring as shit, though, so skipping it was probably the right call.”
I dropped off the radar so I could spend the last five weeks stalking a girl I met at the same party where we last saw each other, was the unvarnished truth. Of course, I couldn’t actually say something like that to him, so I gave him some generic bullshit answer.
“Just the usual shit keeping me busy. I caught some sort of bug a few weeks ago, too. Laid me out for a while.”
“Probably the same flu my cousin got a few weeks ago,” Jasper replied. “It was fucked. He ended up in the hospital with pneumonia.”
“Shit.”
“He’s fine now. Anyway, main reason I called—are you coming back to the house today?”
“Yup. I still have to pack some stuff up at home, so I’ll be there around one. Maybe half past,” I said, glancing at the time on the center console.
“Cool. We’re having a bit of a thing later. Nothing major. Just a few people to celebrate our last day of freedom before all the bullshit starts up again.”
“Nice. I’ll catch you then, man.”
Half an hour later, I pulled into the hedge-lined driveway of my family’s estate in Arcadia Bay. I looked up at the stone monstrosity before me with tightened lips. I never really liked this house much, with its pretentious Gothic-inspired design, countless empty rooms, and echoing corridors. It was tolerable as a kid, because it was fun to have so much space to run around in, but when my father died ten years ago, it was like any happiness the place had ever seen was sucked right out.
Now it just seemed far too large and cold. Too much space for me and my mother. The only thing I really liked about it was Colette and her cooking.
Colette was our housekeeper, but she was more like a grandmother to me than anything else. She was always there for me when I was a kid, baking me treats, tending to grazes when I hurt myself playing outside, and helping me with my homework. She didn’t live with us in the mansion, but she was always close, because her place was on the grounds of the estate.
When I stepped inside, I followed the heavenly scent of vanilla and found her in the kitchen, pulling a large baking tray out of the oven.
“Hi, Col. What are you making?”
She glanced up at me, eyes wide with surprise. “You’re back earlier than I expected,” she said in her thick French accent. “I was hoping to have these done before you came in. It’s your favorite—choc chip.”
I stepped over to her with a grin. “You know I’m not ten years old anymore, right?”
She nodded. “Yes, but you always have some sort of party when you return to college, don’t you?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I thought you and your friends might like some treats for that.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that cookies weren’t the kind of treats my frat brothers would appreciate at a party. Not unless they were laced with something.
Then again, I could just lie and say they were laced, because the placebo effect was real. I once saw a guy acting stoned as hell after smoking a joint, but it turned out everyone was just fucking with him, and he’d only smoked a bit of dried parsley and oregano.
“Thanks,” I said, leaning down to give Colette a hug and a peck on the top of the head. “I’m sure the guys will love these.”
She smiled and playfully swatted me away. “Careful! The tray is still hot.”
I stepped back, jokingly raising my arms in surrender, and Colette’s forehead wrinkled. “What on earth are you wearing?” she asked, waving at my head. “All black clothes, and that awful hat? You look like a criminal.”
I took the beanie off and tossed it on the marble island counter along with my sunglasses. “You’re right, Col. I’m a criminal. I’ve been following a girl around for a few weeks now, figuring out every detail of her life, and I went to her house today to work out the best way to break in so I can look through her stuff. Maybe even plant some surveillance equipment,” I said smoothly. “This outfit was a sort of disguise in case anyone saw me hanging around.”
Colette stared at me for a moment, and then she burst out laughing. I laughed along with her, knowing she’d never believe what I just said.
“That was a good one,” she said, waving a spatula at me. “It’s not as good as some of the stories you used to tell me as a boy, though. I remember when you were seven, you told me and Emilie that it was ghosts throwing your toys and clothes all over your room in the middle of the night. You looked so earnest that we actually believed you for a while.”
I smiled half-heartedly at the bittersweet memory. Emilie was Colette’s daughter. She used to babysit for me when I was a kid, and she was just as nice and caring as her mother, but she was dead now. Just like my father.
This house really was filled with ghosts. Not the make-believe poltergeist kind, but the cold, lingering memories of the people who once happily walked these halls, only to die long before their time.
“I miss her too,” Colette said softly, reading my expression perfectly. She straightened her shoulders. “Anyway, you should go and finish packing. These cookies need to cool for a few minutes.”
“Mmm, what’s that wonderful smell?” My mom’s formidable voice cut through the air as she entered the kitchen and deposited her handbag and a stack of papers on the counter. “It made me hungry as soon as I stepped through the door.”
“I made some cookies for Nate and his college friends,” Colette replied.
“Oh, that’s right, you’re going back today. Are you ready?” Mom asked, looking at me with raised brows.
I nodded. “Pretty much, yeah. I just need to grab a few things from upstairs, and then I’ll head out.”
“Just when I was starting to get used to having you around again,” she said with a sigh.
“I think you should stay here with us,” Colette interjected. “Blackthorne is so close, and it’s only compulsory for first-year students to live on campus, isn’t it?”
“It’s easie
r for me to live there. I can just roll right out of bed and go to class. Plus there’s all the frat stuff. You have to live at the house to be a member.”
Colette turned back to the counter, mumbling something about ‘silly American traditions’ as she opened a cupboard to retrieve a large plastic container.
“Oh, speaking of your fraternity, you’ll need this,” Mom said, reaching into her pantsuit pocket. She pulled out a silver signet ring with a sculpted skull on its face. “I found it on the floor on my way in. You must’ve dropped it earlier.”
“Thanks.” I took the ring and slipped it on.
Colette turned around again, and her nose wrinkled as she looked at my hand. “I know your group is called the Skulls, but that ring always makes me shiver. It’s so ugly.”
Mom let out a light laugh. “It’s a bit creepy, isn’t it?” she said. “But the Skulls is the oldest and best fraternity at Blackthorne, Colette. None of that hazing nonsense goes on there, either, like it does with some of those awful mainland ones. It’s just well-bred young men supporting each other and making connections for their futures.”
I was tempted to laugh at her last two comments. The parents of Blackthorne students loved to convince themselves of bullshit like that so they could feel smug and superior, but the Skulls was basically the same as any other fraternity, with all the wild parties and crazy shit that went on.
The only real difference was that membership was restricted to guys from elite families with a certain net worth, just like the Roses, which was the top sorority on campus. If you didn’t have at least a quarter of a billion dollars in a trust fund and an old family name, you probably weren’t going to make it in to either group.
There were those on campus who resented the exclusive organizations, considering them to be relics of the past that reeked of elitism, snobbery, and unfairness, but it wasn’t as shitty as it sounded, and we weren’t complete assholes. There were a lot of other fraternities and sororities on campus for students who couldn’t get into the Skulls or Roses, and we got along with them and shared events and parties. There were also large residence halls for Blackthorne students who wanted to live by themselves, and they were usually welcome at our events too, unless it was something special.