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“Come sit down with me, and I’ll see if I can figure out who’s stalking you.” He heads to the sofa, nodding at me to follow him.
I do, sitting down beside him. Then, with reluctance, I retrieve my phone from my pocket.
He extends his hand toward it, but I move it out of his reach. He cocks his head to the side, confused amusement written all over his expression.
“I’m going to need to see your phone, pretty Raven, or I can’t do much of anything.”
“I know.” I clutch my phone. I know I’m going to have to tell the guys a little about my past eventually—I know this. And with that note I have balled up in my backpack, I’m well aware that people in the school probably already know. Add that to these texts, and it’s inevitable. I don’t want to, though. At all. But I think I’d rather them hear it from me. So, sucking in a deep breath, I say, “I need to tell you something before I do.”
His puzzlement magnifies. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“It’s about me, and it’s bad,” I add, figuring I need to prepare him for this and prepare myself to get dumped by these guys who have been nicer to me than anyone else has for a long time—even cranky Zay. “And honestly, I don’t really want to tell you, but these texts are going to make you have questions about it. Plus, I’m pretty sure someone at school has already found out about it, so it’s only a matter of time before you guys do, too.” I stare down at my lap while continuing because I can’t look him in the eyes when I say this.
“When my parents were murdered, I was found with them … with blood all over my hands and not a drop of memory of what happened … I still don’t remember. I became a suspect and was put in a psych ward for a bit before the police stopped investigating me. Then I was released and handed over to my aunt and uncle. But, even though I was released, there’s no proof I didn’t do it. There’s just not enough proof that I did.”
I squeeze my eyes shut as red fills my vision. Then I summon a deep inhale and open my eyes again, willing them to stay dry. I tell myself to look at him, because the silence is getting awkward. But I’m a coward. I never thought this would be an issue with me—I’m usually tougher than this—but I guess nice guys are my kryptonite.
Hunter fixes his finger underneath my chin and angles my head up so our gazes unite. Weirdly, not an ounce of disgust is in those pretty blue eyes of him.
“I already knew that,” he tells me softly. “We already looked into your past, remember?”
My heart is thundering in my chest. “But you said you couldn’t find much about my past, that I was off the grid or whatever.”
“That’s more of a recent thing. But there is info about what happened with your parents.”
My lips form anO, my heart an erratic mess inside my chest as I wait for him to say what he thinks of this, for him to tell me that I’m a murderer like everyone else always does.
But all he says is, “No one’s gonna judge you. We all have our dark pasts. And you’re safe with us.” With that, he lowers his finger from my chin.
Way, way into the future, when I look back at this moment, I’ll realize that I may have fallen in love with Hunter Hathingford just a tiny bit just then. Although, at the time, I wasn’t aware of this, because I didn’t know what love was.
He offers me the kindest smile ever. “Can I see your phone now?”
I nod unsteady, my heart still acting like a total lunatic, but for different reasons than being worried. When I hand him my phone, my fingers tremble like little shitheads, and he totally notices but doesn’t remark, just giving my hand a gentle squeeze before taking the phone and plugging into the iPad.
I release a quiet exhale and pull myself together. “So, how do you even try to track down this person? Yesterday, you said the phone number was registered in a town in Wyoming, but how do you find out who it is?”
Amusement glitters in his eyes as he glances at me. “You wanna know how I hack shit?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
Smiling, he scoots back in the sofa then pats the spot beside him, indicating for me to scoot closer. I inch closer to him, but apparently not enough since he gently grabs me by the thigh and drags me over until my leg is pressed up against his. Then he taps open my phone and opens the text thread from the unknown sender.
A beat of silence ticks by, and then he grips the phone. “This is what they sent you last night?” he asks, looking at me.
I nod, even though I’m sure it was a rhetorical question. “I have no idea how they got that photo of that pendant either, or why they think it’s important, but I do know my uncle has it. He was actually trying to burn it before we moved, but I went out and picked it up. When he saw it on me, he freaked out and ripped it off me. Last night, while you were spying on him, he was actually sitting at the kitchen table, staring at it. But I have no clue why.”
He nods, seeming distracted by the photo. “We’ll look into that more,” he mumbles. Then he blinks and looks at me. “But first, I want to deal with this little threat they sent you last night, because like hell am I gonna let this person threaten you.”
“I’m not a fan of that either,” I agree. “But how can we do anything when we don’t even know who it is?”
“Oh, we’re gonna find out who it is and deal with them.” He lets out this eerie, almost manic laugh as he cracks his knuckles.
It might frighten me, but after spending months in the psych ward, only to be released into my uncle’s cruel hands, it takes a lot more to scare me.
Zay enters the room then with a plate of sandwiches in his hand. “What’s going on?”
Hunter taps a bunch of buttons on the iPad. “What’s going on is that a stalker is gonna get their ass beat.”
