Page 53 of Beneath the Surface

He had a point, so I stayed quiet until we neared the pile of rocks.

“Right there,” I told him, motioning to the shore.

Grayson jumped off as soon as I pulled up to the shore. He instantly turned on his phone’s flashlight and lit the area to ensure no one was around. Once I turned off the Jet Ski, I jumped off and did the same as him. Two flashlights were better than one.

“It’s just rocks,” Grayson mumbled.

“Rocks that someone fixed,” I added. “They’re creepy, aren’t they?”

Grayson ignored me and instead crouched down to get a better look.

“Look.” He pointed off to the side of the cairn, where more rocks formed a cross pattern.

“Shit,” I cursed.

“Let’s follow this path and see where it goes.”

He didn’t wait for me to answer and instead started walking away. I quickly followed after him. Like I said earlier, he was losing his shit.

“So, what did they send you?” I asked.

Grayson stopped mid-step and turned back to look at me.

“Look, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, but Micah and Ava, they have something going on. Don’t fuck with it. Micah deserves something good.”

His posture was stiff, and his jaw was tight as if it hurt him to say those words. I had seen the way he looked at Ava. He wanted her for himself…or had I gotten it wrong, and now he wanted Micah, too? Or maybe he didn’t want me to have either of them.

“So you got the video, not the picture,” I bit back.

“What picture?” he asked.

I ignored him and instead followed the path. There were two trees on either side of it, and the branches acted as a shield to prevent people from going deeper, but some of the branches were crooked as if they had been bent so people could go through them.

Grayson’s heat was suddenly behind me, and I found it comforting at this moment.

“On the count of three,” he whispered behind me, grabbing onto the opposite branch that I was.

Grayson and I weren’t so different, after all. He was used to taking control on the ice, and that attitude transferred over to his personal life. I was forced to take control of my life, but I had a wider margin for error. Controlled chaos was where I thrived, and Grayson would need to relish the feeling of losing himself if he wanted to keep his mind intact.

When he said three, we both pushed through and stopped when we found ourselves in a clearing. Up ahead was what looked like a mausoleum.

“This shit keeps getting better and better,” Gray spat, and I silently agreed.

31

GRAYSON

The crumbling stone building was dark and foreboding. A rusted iron gate barred the entryway, the metal warped and twisted, ivy twining through the bars. Behind the gate, all I could make out was a gaping black hole. Cruz gripped the bars, pulling at them. There was a metallic creak, but the gate remained closed.

“Come on. Let’s keep going,” I suggested, moving around the side of the mausoleum, following the faint trail that led into the trees behind the structure. We ducked under the overhanging branches—the trail clearly not made for people of our height.

“What the fuck was that?” Cruz muttered from behind me. I assumed he was referring to the building, but I had no answer. Chills were running down my spine, harder and harder to ignore the farther we went. The trees were becoming thicker, and as I sidestepped a tree root, Cruz knocked into me.

“Watch where you’re going,” I hissed, letting a branch I’d brushed past snap back toward him.

“Fuck you, Cross.” He shoved past me, stomping ahead of me—as much as he could through the thick undergrowth. The trail we were on now was barely wide enough for us to walk insingle file, but the earth was well trodden, suggesting it was in semi-regular use at the very least. I had no fucking clue what happened around this part of the lake. I’d always hung out at the main beach area, with the jetty and the facilities, where students always gathered. Other than that, the only other part of the lake I was semi-familiar with was the part where the lake houses were. The lake itself was huge, and it shouldn’t have been surprising that I wasn’t familiar with this part. But in my head, the rest of the lakeshore had been wild and uninhabited. Not this.

“Fuck,” I wheezed as all the breath was knocked from my lungs because fucking Martinez had come to a dead stop right in front of me. I shouldered past him, shooting him a glare, and then I realized why he’d suddenly stopped.

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