I let out a sigh of relief and lean my back against the wall, wishing for nothing more than Parrish’s warm arms around me, and a cozy bed we could both drift off in together.
“The headmistress grabbed me as soon as I walked in the door this morning,” he explains, which isn’t at all the promise that I was looking for. He shakes his hand out with a curse, tears his tie off, and wraps it around his bloodied knuckles. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t there.”
“What did the headmistress want?” I ask with a frown, watching as he stains the expensive silk tie with his own blood.
“She wanted to know what I thought about carrying on with plans for prom.”
“Prom?” I ask, realizing absently that they haven’t had one here since I came to Whitehall. Back home, junior prom usually happened late February while senior prom happened during March. Then again, they do things entirely different here at Whitehall. “What did you say?”
“I told her that I don’t give a shit about prom either way. Have it or don’t. It won’t bring Parrish back.” I cringe a little at the bitterness in his voice, but fully understand the source of it. I’m feeling a bit broken myself.
The eternal optimist is starting to buckle under the weight of the world.
“Why did she ask you about the prom?” I wonder aloud as Chas turns toward the urinal on the wall.
“I really have to pee, but I don’t want to leave you alone in the hall …” he starts, and I flush ten colors of crimson, turning around to look at the wall. I’m sure my boobs are flushed, too, but what can you do? The thought of Chasm taking his dick out with me in the room is … it’s weird.
I reach over and turn the sink on to give him some privacy, waiting for him to finish.
He rejoins me at the sink, washing his left hand while his right remains wrapped in the tie and stuffed in his pocket.
“Did you just pee one-handed?” I ask, and he laughs at me. The sound is pleasant, echoing off the walls of the bathroom. For the briefest of instances, I almost forget why we’re in here, hiding from the world at large.
“Like a boss,” Chas confirms, turning back around to rest his ass against the sink’s edge. “You do know that I’m the student body president, right?” he asks, glancing over at me. I raise both my brows at him, and he laughs at me again. “Does not compute, am I right?”
“It’s just … where do you find the time?” I wonder, and he shrugs his shoulders at me.
“I don’t sleep much. When I sit down to focus on something, I don’t let myself get distracted. What does it matter? Anyway, I’m sorry I wasn’t there. What did they do to you? Who was in on it?” He sounds almost disturbingly interested in the information.
“They tried to throw me over the edge of the third-floor courtyard wall,” I whisper, and Chasm goes completely still. “There was a redhead leading the pack. Veronica something? Chas, they said a bunch of stuff to me about my dad. That, and … I honestly couldn’t tell if they were trying to … kill me. I mean, that’s insane, right? It’s insane.”
Chasm says nothing, staring at the opposite wall of the bathroom as the bell rings to signal the end of break. Frankly, the idea of making it through the rest of the day makes me feel unstable on my feet. How many days of school do we have left? Eleven?
It feels like an eternity.
“What did they say to you?” he asks, looking over at me, seemingly unconcerned with getting to class on time. It bothers me that he doesn’t deny the idea that his classmates might’ve actually been trying to, you know, murder me.
“A bunch of stuff about Justin. They called him an embezzler, a thief, they …” I trail off because the words that Veronica threw my way hurt. They shouldn’t. I mean, she was clearly trying to get a rise out of me. But for whatever reason, I’m bothered by them. “She claimed he stole a bunch of money and research and was driven out of town. I never found anything when I looked him up online.”
“There won’t be anything online about it,” Chas offers up, turning to me with a sympathetic look in his eyes. “Any news of Justin Prior was scrubbed a long time ago.”
“You know about Justin?” I ask, feeling suspicion rise hot and unwelcome in my chest. “You didn’t act like you knew anything about him when I first mentioned his name.”
Chasm shakes his head at me.
“I didn’t. I mean, I’d heard stories of your dad, but I didn’t know his name. Nor did I think it had any bearing at all on this.” He gestures randomly, seeming to indicate the situation with Parrish. “Look, we … we’ll talk later.” Chasm puts his hands on my shoulders, squeezing hard enough that we both wince from our injuries. “I’m going to walk you to and from every class from now on. Do not go anywhere without me. Not even to the bathroom.”
“I already told you—” I start, and he gives me such a sharp, punishing look that I stop talking.
“I don’t give a fuck about my reputation,” he says, and then he grabs my arm and yanks me into the hallway. Most of the students have disappeared into their classrooms already, but the few that are lingering cast strange looks our way.
Chasm takes me to my technical writing class, dropping me off at the doorway. The way he pauses there, his hands on either side of the doorjamb as his amber gaze tears across the classroom, worries me. He looks like he’s declaring war with a single look.
As promised, Chasm finds me after and guides me to computer science and then, later, keeps me by his side during lunch. Everyone is staring, but nobody dares bother us.
“They’re afraid of you,” I realize after a while, watching the crowd. I glance Chasm’s way, but he doesn’t bother to acknowledge my statement. Neither of us in the mood to eat, but we’re in the cafeteria anyway, sitting at a table in the corner by ourselves.
“Maybe,” he offers up, sighing and putting his elbows on the table. Chasm lets his head hang down for a minute before looking up at me. “Or if they aren’t, they should be.”
“Tell me what you know about my father,” I start, sitting up straight and wondering why I have to get this information out of a friend instead of my own bio mom. I mean, she told me about the typewriter, but nothing about … a startup or embezzlement or anything like that. “What’s the story there?”
Chasm’s gaze sweeps past me, searching the crowd for, I think, either Lumen or that Veronica girl.
“My father and your father were close friends,” he offers up finally, looking back at me. “Your dad gave my dad the money he needed to start his company.”
“Fort Humboldt Security,” I offer up, and Chasm’s brows go up.
“Uh, that’s part of it. How do you know about that?”
“Because Fort Humboldt Security installed both the security system as well as the cameras at the Vanguard house,” I offer up, palms flat on the table. I hate that I’m even making the accusation, but there it is.
“Yeah,” Chas offers up, looking down at the surface of the table. “I already thought about that actually.” He lifts his gaze again. “It wouldn’t be impossible, I guess, for my father’s company to have fucked around with it.” He sits up straight again, his mouth in a grim line. “I didn’t want to mention this, but maybe we should check the lake house? My dad has a ‘friend’ staying there, and he doesn’t want me over there. Doesn’t that seem like a weird coincidence?”
“It really does,” I reply, thinking of everything else we know. “It just feels sort of obvious. I’m wary of anything that seems too obvious. I did … well, that day I saw you with that drunk girl …”
Chasm gives me a sharp look, but he doesn’t stop me from talking.
“I felt like I recognized the woods near your house, like maybe that’s where I was when I woke up that night and started walking. Is there a skatepark nearby?”
“I guess there could be? I don’t know.” Chasm pulls out his phone and sets it on the table, opening up a map and then typing in the address of the house. He zooms out and looks around the edges of the property, his body going s
till as he spots a nearby park. Emerald City Skate is what it’s called. “Jesus.”
We exchange a look across the surface of the table.
“We have two field trips we need to take then,” I continue, cradling my left hand with the broken fingers in my lap. “Mr. Volli’s house, and the lake house.”
“We could maybe swing one on the way home today and one tomorrow, without Tess realizing it. That is, if you can get Maxx to grab Kimber for me.” He glances her way, toward the table where she’s sitting with her friends. She looks our way, but her expression doesn’t give anything away.
Does she know that I was jumped this morning or why? Does she care? What does she think of me sitting here with Chasm?
“It might have to be vice versa,” I amend, looking back at him. “You’ll have to take Kimber, and I’ll go with Maxx.”
Chasm frowns heavily at that, but he doesn’t argue. He knows as well as I do that this is a better solution to the problem. The very last thing I need is another enemy under my own roof. Keeping Kimber calm is paramount.
“Maybe it’d be better if I just went with Maxx myself, after we dropped you off?”
I give him a look that he returns with an unrelenting stare of his own. That’s not happening, but we don’t have to argue about it just this second. I need to know about Justin.
“Tell me everything you know about my father,” I demand, and Chasm sighs.
“It’s not a lot. All I know is that he had some unicorn techie startup thing going on.”
“Unicorn?” I ask, and Chasm shrugs.
“Venture capitalist slang for ‘worth a billion dollars’. Your dad was creating a series of apps that he was going to sell to the military for a buttload of money. All I know is that some sort of scandal went down, and he was stripped of his title in the company, his assets were seized, and he was run out of town.”
My stomach drops and I feel a little dizzy.
Not only is my father the Seattle Slayer, but he’s a thief? A disgrace?
“A lot of people in this town hate him. But nobody’s seen or heard from him in like … fourteen years?” Chasm offers, tacking a question mark onto the end of that sentence.
Fourteen years.
Since I was stolen from a daycare center.
Fourteen years … fourteen days that the Slayer holds his victims. And Parrish is on day eleven.
We’re running out of time, and I don’t feel any closer to an answer today than I was nearly two weeks ago.
Where are you, Parrish? I wonder as the bell rings and Chasm rises to his feet. Where the hell are you?
“Let’s go through a drive-thru or something and get a coffee,” Chasm suggests as he meets Kimber in the hallway after class. “Dakota can catch a ride with Maxx, so we can have some peace.” He lets a warm, inviting smile slide across his lips, and I feel myself shifting uncomfortably.
“I’d like that Chas,” she offers up, returning his smile with one of her own. Hers is about as false as his, tinted with melancholy and pain, but neither of them acknowledges the other’s performance. Instead, Chasm walks me outside where X is already waiting outside of his orange Jeep Gladiator, arms crossed over his chest, his mouth turned down in a deep frown. Not unsurprising, considering the way the two of us spent our morning.
Anyway, I’m just glad that I managed to convince Chas to let me go with X to the house; I appreciate the boys’ help, but this whole situation very clearly rests on me and my ability to perform the Slayer’s wishes. Chas can’t save me from everything, and poking around a vacation home near a lake isn’t a big ask.
He grabs my arm just before I peel away from him and Kimber.
“Be careful, Little Sister. Don’t get yourself into trouble.” Chasm releases me, but I can’t respond with Kimber stepping closer to listen, so I just nod and move over to X instead.
He opens my door for me before climbing in, that stupid podcast playing as he turns the car on. I very quickly turn the volume down to zero.
“How was school today?” he asks, his voice tight and strained. We both know why, but there’s no point in talking about it. We did what we had to do; Parrish will be unchained from the bed and given a chance to shower. What next? What the actual fuck are we going to have to do to buy more time?
“I was jumped again this morning,” I offer up, and Maxx slams on the brakes at the gate so hard that I almost go flying, bracing myself against the dash with my right hand. I glance over to see him staring at me. “Keep driving, please.”
With an even sharper frown, he does, taking off out the gate and onto the road.
“What do you mean by ‘jumped’?” he clarifies. Dressed in a black wifebeater and jeans, Maxx looks … really, really fucking good. I make myself not notice any of it and turn back to look out the windshield. My mind drifts to my sister as it always seems to do in every single freaking down moment that I have. If I didn’t have so many balls up in the air right now, I’d be obsessing about it.
“A bunch of girls tried to throw me off the third floor of the parking garage,” I explain as calmly as I can, trying and failing to not be afraid of that statement. Would they have actually hurt me or was it all for show? I have no idea. It shouldn’t be a hard question to ask, should it?
“Are you fucking kidding me?” X growls out, his voice darkening in the way it did when he was worried about me trying to pull one over on the Vanguards. A protective streak. For me. I bite my lower lip and then find myself even more annoyed because I’m doing it.
“Lumen’s got them on the attack, apparently,” I explain. I didn’t see her or Danyella once today, but that’s the only explanation that I have. Why else would they come after me so suddenly and so aggressively? The whole school now knows that one, I set the fire. And two, that Parrish and I slept together the night before he went missing.
A rumor that only Danyella or Lumen could spread.
Gods help me if they learn about the car situation, too.
“This is getting dangerous, Kota,” X tells me, his expression grim as he stares out the window. Rain begins to fall, spattering gently against the windshield as Maxx flicks on the wipers. “Parrish is important, but so are you.”
“What does that even mean?” I ask him, glancing over to see him clenching his jaw.
“It means that you need to be more careful.” He gets that sort of, like, dad voice or whatever the hell it is on again.
“You’re nineteen, not ninety. You’re supposed to my ally, not my parent. Chill out.” I turn back to the windshield, but if Maxx is that worried, and Chasm is that worried, I should probably be worried, too, shouldn’t I?
He grits his teeth at me but decides to keep the rest of his thoughts to himself.
“Let’s do the lake house first,” I suggest, and he nods, heading in that direction.
More specifically, we drive to the skatepark I’ve pulled up on my phone’s GPS. I can see why Chasm wasn’t aware of it. It might be close to his property, but it’s in a completely different direction than anyone would normally drive if they were heading to Whitehall or Medina proper. It’s off the main road, buried in a small neighborhood at the edge of the woods.
As Maxx pulls up to the curb beside the park, I look out the window and catch sight of the house with the wind chimes.
“Holy shit,” I breathe, staring at the home across the way before turning back to the park. “I was here that night. I was …” The words die off as I stare at the scene out the window and wonder why I didn’t think to look this up before. If I had, and I’d known that my dream wasn’t really a dream at all, how different would things have been? Would Parrish be safe? Would he be here with us even now?
“Kota.” Maxx’s soft voice draws my attention back over to him. He’s watching me, his face drawn up with genuine concern. I try not to notice how muscular his arms are and fail miserably. The entire cab of that car is permeated with his scent, that fresh grass and drinks-by-the-pool smell that makes me fidgety. “Don’t b
lame yourself.”
“I’m not,” I protest, but then that weird urge to tell Maxx the truth grabs hold of me and refuses to let go. “But how can I not? I mean, I woke up in the woods and didn’t think twice about it. X, I was here. I was at this park. If I’d pulled up a map on my phone at any point and searched for a skatepark nearby, I might’ve been able to answer my own questions.”
“Why would that be your first conclusion? You said your pajamas were clean when you woke up,” he explains calmly, and that’s when it occurs to me how strange that scenario was in regards to my clothing.
So … someone stripped my pj’s down after and replaced them with an identical pair?
Or else they washed them, and then redressed me. Either scenario is, quite frankly, horrifying.
“Figuring this insanity out,” X continues, circling his finger around. “Isn’t something any normal person would ever be able to do.”
He’s right. I know that. But it doesn’t make it any easier to accept. Guilt sweeps over me as we make the drive to Chasm’s lake house. He’s given us the code to get in the front door, but we can only do that if the place is unoccupied.
When we first pull into the circular gravel driveway, it appears to be. There aren’t any other cars parked there, and all of the lights are off. Maxx pulls up to the house and then leans his forearms on the steering wheel, his mouth downturned in thought.
“Do we go in?” he asks, glancing over at me. “The chances of Parrish being in there are pretty slim. You’d think Chasm would know if his house had a wine cellar in it.”
“We have to go in,” I tell him, aching and wanting so badly for Parrish to be inside this building. It can’t be that easy, I know, but I also can’t stop myself from hoping so hard that my chest aches. “We’ll make it quick.”
I climb out and Maxx follows, catching up to me and grabbing me by the upper arm in a similar way to how he did in the parking garage this morning. I look down at his hand before lifting my gaze to his face. His expressions are always open and honest, even when they’re brutal.
Payback Princess (Lost Daughter of a Serial Killer Book 2) Page 13