Page 76 of The Pawn

Our room is empty when I get back from the showers, my hair clean of Mariana's dark brown hair wax. There's a note on Holly's desk, and half her things are missing. Heart in my throat, I peer down at the note and feel my stomach sink.

Went to Cole's for a while. I'll talk to Mrs. Reynolds about a solution to our living situation.

She doesn't want to live with me anymore—of course. That should've occurred to me when I was worrying about her turning against me or telling law enforcement what I've done. Holly could get me kicked out of this place.

If she does, so be it. I've taken down two of the worst offenders among the Elites, and I'm about to make a post that will absolutely ruin the third and biggest member of their cabal. Lukas feels like an unworthy target now, after everything—somehow I no longer believe I'll get any dirt on him worth publishing.

It's not what I planned before I came here. But nothing has been as I imagined it when I was an angry-eyed girl brooding in Wayborne from my aunt's house. This place, and the people in it, have spun me around until I can barely tell up from down. If anything, it'll be a relief to wash my hands of them and return to the comparatively simple life at Wayborne Public High school.

Settling in at my desk, I open up the Legacies email inbox on Silas's laptop. It whirrs a little louder since I dropped it, the fans working overtime, but Lukas at least cleared enough space on the hard drive for me to finish the job I've started.

As I login to my account and open up the email I've received from the coroner's assistant in Albany, something occurs to me that I should've thought of sooner. Lukas had my computer on him, and though IthinkI've covered my tracks, there's a good chance he found something on it that I didn't know was there. Maybe there's proof I'm Legacies on here, and he figured it out.

If he did, that would make him the anonymous person who dropped off the envelope full of material on Cole's DUI. Given that he offered to help me out during the rock climbing trip, it actually makes sense. And it would make him even less of a worthy target than before—if he's gone to such lengths taking down a friend of his, he's not someone I should focus my revenge on.

In a way, it means this whole thing is coming full circle right here, tonight, with this single post.

I open up the post with the details of my subject, from his privileged childhood to his family's legacy as the founders of Masters & Sons. Then, in the middle of it all, I load up a pdf of the traffic accident before and after its tampering and post captions on every page with my observations.

Finally, in the last bombshell bit of the post, I add what I just received from the coroner's office: a picture of the young woman's body in the trunk of the car, and her autopsy results, which found that she was strangled to death by a strong, powerful person, likely a man, about six feet tall.

I end the post with yet another observation: Cole Masterson's profile on Instagram with a listing of his height. He's exactly six feet, zero inches tall.

It's a good post. Nothing says straight out that he murdered that girl—or that the Governor of New York State is the person who covered up the crime in order to keep his son's misdeeds out of the news. Everything in the post is factual, and it lets the public draw their own conclusions.

Hitting the "schedule" button, I set the post to go live during a peak traffic time tomorrow, while everyone is in class—including Cole. It'll be a while before he and his privileged family are able to respond to it, much less the governor. By the time they even see the post, I have no doubt that it'll be viral. I make sure to schedule social media posts with links to the pending blog post on every social media profile Legacies has, including the most jaw-dropping photo in the post, the one of the girl's body in the trunk.

The victim was only sixteen years old when she died.

Just like Silas.

Satisfied with what I've done, I sit back in the chair of my desk and let my eyes close. On the back of my eyelids, in the semi-darkness they provide, I see his face.

Silas. The way I imagine him, he seems satisfied. This new post, this takedown, has to do what none of the others have done: permanently end the Elites via their leader, preventing them from ever doing what they did to my brother again. It'll feed the fire inside me—I hope—and prevent it from burning me in its hunger for revenge.

My eyes are closed, so I hear the ping of a new email alert before I see it. Since it's probably just yet another tip about some prep school kid in Canada or Switzerland who I don't even care about, I take my time before I open my eyes and skim the subject line.

When I do, my heart jumps, and I click in an instant, reading through the email over and over again.

The sender is Mariana Marks.

And there's an attachment.

A video.Thevideo. The one that started it all. The one that will reveal the only truth that matters: who really assaulted Mariana that night, and why the finger was ever pointed at my innocent brother.

I open it with trepidation, knowing there's no going back from this.

Chapter 40

The first thing I see is my brother. I'd know him anywhere. Just seeing him on my screen, still alive, is enough to make me nearly crumble. So I have to pause the video and take a deep breath.

One thing Wally warned me before I started down this road was that I might not enjoy the answers I get on my way.

I thought that I was ready for this.

Staring at the still, I take it all in. The camera is clearly some kind of ceiling camera set up in Rosalind Hall; I'd recognize the architecture anywhere, and I'm no Lukas. That begs the question, though: if this video is from the school administration, why didn't they step in?

There's an open door to Silas's left. Peering at the number, which is hard to read since the plate is at an angle, I confirm that it's room number 212. That's the exact room Mariana and her friend shared during orientation week, when she says the assault happened.

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