And it isn’t by moving my king.
It’s by attacking with my knight.
I look up at Chasm, always the knight to Parrish’s prince. Now, he’s the knight to my queen. Let the blame fall on me for this.
“What?” he asks, blinking at me and waiting for an explanation. “You’ve got that look on your face. What have you just figured out?”
I’ve been searching for you for a long time, my sweet princess.
In this box, you’ll find my heart. Wear it always, or you’ll break it.
I’m not sure either of us would survive that.
That’s the note that I found with this pin, inside my nightstand drawer. It’s a gift that Tess never mentioned to me. Of course, at the time, I didn’t think anything of it. How could I? I’d just met Tess. She’d given me the tennis bracelet, and I already found her behavior odd. Later, on my birthday, she shoved that pink envelope in my hand and took off, never to mention it again.
It didn’t seem entirely out of left field that she might leave a gift and a note like this.
The skeleton key.
How could I have forgotten the skeleton key?!
I look up at Chasm again.
“I need to stop by my locker,” I tell him, doing my best to keep my voice neutral. I cannot give away the fact that I know this. One, I’m not sure if that note constitutes an order. If it does, and I chuck the camera, Parrish could suffer. Two, it’s now a tool in my box. There are plenty of places in the world where the all-seeing eyes of technology can be hidden from for a brief moment.
Tess has taken away all of my electronics. At present time, all I have are the phones—the one she gave me, and the one from Maxine. If I’m careful about where I use and place those items, and I strategically move the bag with the heart pin where I need it, I can orchestrate things specifically for the Slayer to see.
“O…kay,” Chasm hazards, giving me a weird look. But he escorts me down the hall anyway, waiting patiently as I dump my bag as well as my phone inside my locker. I give him a look, reaching out with my right hand for his phone as well. With a slow reluctance, he extracts his own phone and gives it to me to lock inside.
“Parrish mentioned the hedge maze,” I start, and Chasm’s eyes go wide. See, he’s one step ahead of me on one subject while I’m a step ahead of him on another. My assumption is that, because the hedge maze near the school’s side entrance is a popular hookup spot, there must not be any cameras there.
“Uh, yeah,” he says, shaking his head. “I just need to grab something real quick.” He moves down a bit to his own locker—I’ve not seen the guy touch his locker once the entire time I’ve gone to school with him—and opens it, digging around for something and then stuffing it into his blazer pocket. “Come on.”
We head downstairs and out the side door where I’m most often picked up and dropped off.
Without hesitation, Chas jumps over the edge of the stone patio area and lands in the grass, reaching up to offer his hand. I take it and land with an ooph beside him, straightening out my skirt and hoping like hell we don’t have a lot of company down there.
He leads the way without a word passing between us, guiding me between two large statues near the front of the maze, and then winding his way into it. After a good dozen turns, I’m officially lost.
“I hope you know how to find your way out of here,” I say, letting my fingers brush against the leaves of the ‘walls’ to either side of me. “I’m assuming there aren’t cameras out here?” I ask as Chasm pauses in a dead end. The circular garden area is lined with white columns, a birdbath sitting pretty in the middle, surrounded by flowers in full bloom.
Chas turns to look at me.
“No cameras,” he agrees, studying me. The expression on his flickers briefly, like he’s torn by indecision.
“Perfect,” I say, exhaling and reaching up to push my hair back from my face. “I just realized that the heart pin on my bag is not only from the Slayer but also a camera—”
“What?!” Chasm chokes out, taking a step closer to me. My eyes snap up to his, finding him wide-eyed and panting. His shoulders heave with his heavy breaths, and his hands are clenched into tight fists. “That’s why … ah shit.”
“Why, what?” I ask, frowning as his amber eyes slide to one side.
Then I remember the actual content of the text.
The kiss … was not enough.
My breath catches and I take a step away from him, bumping my back into one of the white stone columns that surrounds the edge of the clearing. The sun is shining brightly, but the walls of the maze cast deep shadows over the pretty little garden area; I’m standing in one of those shadows now, looking at Chasm and trying not to feel all of the horrible things that I’m feeling.
