Page 153 of Hide And Seek

“I wouldn't have been safe,” I finished.

“Exactly.” He dipped his chin in a brief nod. “When you woke up, you told me you got close enough to the killer to judge his height, but not enough to identify him because of the mask. He was around five-ten, give or take an inch.”

“Which conveniently ruled you out.”

“Right. But it still left a decent number of possibilities.” A faint smirk touched his mouth. “Especially once we realized it could’ve been a woman too. April. Jasmine. Stevie. Marlowe. They’re all tall.”

“Right.”

“After that, you agreed to stay hidden here with me while we figured things out,” Rhys went on. “Then Jasmine showed up the next morning. I told you to hide under the bed so she wouldn’t see you, and when she talked to me, I pretended I had no idea what happened the night before. Just in case.”

I frowned. “To… protect me?”

“Yes. Because I didn’t trust her anymore,” he said. “At that stage, I trusted nobody except you. And Jasmine could’ve just been pretending not to know what happened to you to throw meoff. Because… who knows? Maybe she was planning to kill me later, but she wanted to stay on my good side for the time being. Maybe she wanted me alive long enough to pin everything on me.”

I slowly nodded. “I guess that makes sense. In a paranoid slasher-movie kind of way.”

Rhys laughed softly and glanced toward the darkened window. “Later that night, I went back out into the woods to look for the killer again,” he said. “That’s when all the chaos started.”

“The fake recordings.”

“Yeah. Everyone was running around trying to find out where the voices were coming from.” His expression darkened slightly. “Then I spotted the killer again. This time he was with Noura and Maren. I was too late to save them, but not too late to stop him. I attacked him, knocked him unconscious, ripped off the mask…”

“And you saw Zach.”

“Yup.” He rubbed his jaw. “I was going to drag him to the assembly hall and tell everyone that I finally got the killer—and that I was still alive—but then I realized there was a major problem.”

My brows rose. “What?”

“I had no idea when the cops would show up, because we still had no signal and couldn’t call anyone. And everyone was still terrified. So if I dumped Zach in front of the group and told them he was the killer, there was a good chance they would’ve beaten him to death on the spot.”

“Like a mob mentality sort of thing.”

“Yeah. And as much as I fucking hated the guy for what he'd done, I knew we'd never get answers from him if that happened. So I tied him up and brought him to the cabin.”

I nodded slowly. “Right.”

“When he woke up, I forced him to tell me how to restore the signal so we could finally call the police.” Rhys leaned back slightly. “He agreed. But in exchange, he asked for one thing.”

“What?”

“He wanted us to film his confession. Said he wanted the truth told in his own words, instead of being twisted around later by cops, reporters, or lawyers. We figured it couldn’t hurt, so we did it.”

I folded my arms tighter. “Then what?”

“When it was over, he asked to use the bathroom. I had to untie him for that, obviously, and that’s when I realized I’d missed something.” His mouth flattened slightly. “He had a pistol hidden in his waistband. And the second he saw an opportunity to get away with everything after all, he tried to shoot his way out. He missed, thankfully, and I managed to wrestle the gun away from him. Then I shot him. Self-defense.”

Silence settled over the cabin while I mentally picked apart the story.

“It sounds pretty solid on the surface,” I finally said. “But there’s one glaring hole.”

“What?”

I threw my hands up. “How exactly are you going to get Zach to confess on camera to all these murders he didn’t commit?” I asked. “He’s not an idiot. If he thinks you’re just going to kill him afterward, he’ll never cooperate.”

A slow smile spread across Rhys’s face. “We’ll have to use a bit of reverse psychology on him,” he said. “Make him think that keeping him alive benefits us much more than killing him does, because it helps us sell the story better.”

“And you really think he’ll buy that?”