Page 137 of Hide And Seek

He paused, mouth flattening slightly.

“That’s when I saw another group chat I wasn’t part of,” he said. “Blackpine 2.0.”

I raised a brow. “So youwerebeing iced out.”

“That’s what it looked like,” he said. “Except none of them actually seemed to have a problem with me. Nobody was acting hostile. And it hadn’t escaped my attention that this weird shit only started after that night.”

“The night Carly died.”

Rhys nodded. “Yeah. So I knew their weird behavior had something to do withthat. Not me.”

“And you’re not exactly the type to let something go once it gets under your skin,” I muttered, eyes rolling upward. “Ask me how I know.”

A faint smirk tugged at his mouth. “I needed access to one of their phones for longer than thirty seconds,” he said. “So I went with the easiest option and asked Sutton out to dinner.”

“Why her?” I asked, brows dipping in a slight frown.

“Because she’s wanted me for as long as I can remember,” he said bluntly. “I knew she’d jump at the chance.”

“So you never actually dated her before?” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

“No,” he said. Then one brow lifted. “But why do you care?”

“I don’t,” I mumbled, waving a dismissive hand. “Go on.”

His smirk deepened slightly, like he knew perfectly well I was lying.

“I picked a restaurant where we were guaranteed to run into people we knew. That way she’d get distracted talking,” he said. “When some mutual friends stopped at the table, I excused myself to the bathroom and took her phone with me. Then I cloned it onto another device.”

I frowned. “Doesn’t that take a while?”

“About ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

“And she didn’t notice her phone was missing for any of that?”

“Oh, she noticed, and I figured she would. So when I got back, I handed it right to her and told her I’d accidentally grabbed it off the table thinking it was mine. She had no reason to suspect I was lying.”

I nodded slowly. “So after that, you had access to the new chat.”

“Yup. Every single message.”

“And that’s how you found out what they did to Carly?”

“No.” He shook his head. “They never outright said it, because they didn’t have to. Everybody in that chat was there that night, so they all knew what happened.”

“Oh. Right.”

His expression darkened, and he went on. “Still, it was obvious that the chat existed because of Carly. Her name came up constantly, and there were all these comments about ‘sticking to the pact’, ‘having each other’s backs’ and ‘staying strong’. Also, people would freak out every now and then and start spiraling about whether somebody knew something.” He paused briefly. “There was a bit of guilt in there too. Zach made more than a few comments about wanting to turn himself in, but the others always talked him down.”

I felt my stomach tighten. “So even if they never explicitly stated it, you knew they had something to do with what happened to Carly that night.”

“Yeah. After that, it was just a matter of figuring out the easiest one to crack,” he said, rubbing his jaw. “It was a tossup between Grace, Delia, and Genevieve, because the three of them were always pretty emotionally fragile. But I went with Gen in the end, because she always liked hiking.”

“What does hiking have to do with it?”

Rhys didn’t reply for a minute. He just pulled out his phone and started tapping on the screen. “My family has a vacation house up in the Hudson Highlands. Really close to Storm King Mountain,” he finally said. “I told Gen I was staying up there for a few days and suggested she drive up to meet me at one of the trails.”

“Um… okay?” I said, still not having any clue as to why he was talking about this.