“What social circle?” She laughs. “Isabella is my social circle. You’re my social circle. I’m still here. You’re still here. She’s still here. My circle hasn’t changed at all.”
“Yeah, that’s my point. We’re all on the inside with you. But you have no friends on the outside.”
“I have never had friends on the outside. That’s why I’m doing this. My parents—” She stops. I don’t know what she thinks her parents were up to, but I have a good idea. I’m not gonna tell her because it’s pretty fucking sad. But I have a moment of hope that she’s figured it out too. “My parents were murdered, Cooper. And these people know why. I’m not leaving here until I know why too.”
“I don’t think that’s it, Cadee.”
“What are you talking about? Of course, that’s it.”
“You want to know why they were killed only because you’re hoping that knowledge will tell you why they were here in the first place. And I’m trying to explain to you that you should just let me handle it.”
She’s pursing her newly plumped-up lips. I cannot fucking believe that Leela talked her into getting lip injections. It blows my mind that Cadee said yes to that. I get the presents. I get the jewelry, the clothes, the chocolates, the flowers. Fine. She wants to keep that shit—whatever.
But lip injections? How does she not see that crosses a whole new line?
She gets up from the hammock and her bowl of ice crashes to the wood floor.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to bed, Cooper.”
I reach out and grab her wrist before she can leave. “Why?”
She yanks her arm from my grip and shakes her head. “I don’t need a prince, Cooper. I’m doing just fine on my own.”
My mouth drops open. And she takes advantage of my stunned silence and goes inside. Pulling the heavy door closed behind her.
I get up and look over the side of the railing.
Ax is still down there. Still pacing the length of the top terrace. He pauses to look up at me, then shrugs his shoulders and goes back to his thinking.
I don’t dare say anything else. I might’ve said too much, actually.
We have known that they’ve been watching us since the second week we were here at the inn. Ivan found more than four dozen bugs and sixteen hidden cameras. They are everywhere. In the bedrooms. In the bathrooms. In the kitchen. Even right here on this porch.
The only place they’re not is down by the water where Ax is right now.
That day Ivan found them Elexa announced that she and Ivan were taking a trip up to the cabins at Poplar Lake and over the course of two days, the rest of us made our way up there too. Even Dante and Mona showed up.
“Divide and conquer,” Dante had said. “That’s what they’re trying to do. So let’s make it easy for them. As far as they’re concerned, from this moment on, we’re not friends, we have no plan, we have no goal.” Dante pointed his finger at them. All of them. Hell, even me. “You will not talk about this. You will not utter one more word about any of it. You do not ask questions, you do not offer information, you do not do anything but the job you were assigned.”
Their jobs were easy. They were nothing, actually. Go along. Be normal and don’t freak out.
That was everyone’s job but mine. I’m the only one who has to do something in this plan.
Dante was privy to some serious inside information because his Aunt Laurie was my father’s assistant for a lot of years. She’s gone now and someone else has taken her place, but she got a lot of secrets out of that office before she quit.
The storage unit where I found all those boxes last summer was just the beginning. She also found my Capstone project.
Not the fancy blue and gold folder my father handed to me that day in his office. An outline, mostly. Detailing a discovery mission at the tomb.
“They are looking for something,” Dante said. “And they are looking hard. We need to find it first.”
We all have suspicions about what that ‘something’ might be. I mean—you have a tomb in the woods, you have young people called ‘pledges’ or sometimes ‘initiates’. This leads you straight to ‘cult’. And from there… well, anything goes.
There was a reason Cadee bought this inn. I mean, there were lots of reasons, actually. It was affordable, close to campus, had the right number of bedrooms, a lake view… but it also used to belong to Fang and Feather.
Long time ago. Like over a hundred years ago. Then they got the tomb and all the secrets were moved out there.
But it might still be holding some secrets they’d forgotten about.
“That sounds dangerous,” Lars had said when Dante informed us that we had to pretend to go along and we couldn’t talk to each other about it. “We’re gonna lose trust in this plan—and each other—really quick if we do this.”
“Good,” Victor said. “Good. Because if we do, then they’ll really believe it.”
“You don’t understand,” Ax said. “We’ll stop believing it too. This is all psychology. It’s all about mind control. Trust me, I know how they work. I know all the tricks. And they are gonna bring them out in force if they get one inkling that we’re all working together. Shit, they already know. How many conversations did we have in that inn before Ivan found the cameras and mics? They know.”
“Then we just have to be smarter than them,” Valentina had said.
“Smarter than them?” Ax had laughed. “They have two hundred years of secrets, Valentina. Not only do they know how to play this game, they invented it.”
Dante turned to Ax. “So what’s your idea, smart guy? Hmm? Beat the fuck out of them? Think that’s gonna work?”
“No,” Ax said. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Dante. I’m just telling you”—and then it was Ax’s turn to point his finger at everyone—“if we start lying to each other we’ll lose track of the truth pretty fucking quick. So all of this has to be done on faith. We cannot stop trusting each other. No matter what anyone says, or does, or appears to be—we cannot stop trusting them.”
“That’s just as dangerous,” Sophie said. “Because that means we can’t question anyone’s loyalty if they do something suspicious.”
Dante was quiet for a while after that and we all waited for him to form some kind of conclusion. I wish I could say I was the brains of this operation, but I’m not.
I’m pretty much following orders.
And now I’m tired of it.
Finally, Dante said, “OK. I understand that it’s a risk, but it’s the only chance we have to buy the time we need to find what they’re really hiding. So we’re going with divide and conquer. But with the express understanding that no one’s loyalty can be questioned.”
There was some grumbling, but everyone agreed.
Or—and this is what’s troubling everyone right now—we all just agreed because we knew it was falling apart.
We all just agreed so we could drop the subject and concentrate on something else.
We all just agreed so we could get back to our normally scheduled lives.