Page 87 of Hide and Seek
Even if they don’t know who I am or what I did, it still doesn’t make sense that they’d risk themselves to help me. I’m nobody, and to them, I’m probably nothing more than an ant in this ant farm that we call a school. They have immense power and influence and can get away with literal murder if they can justify it to the right people.
Another loud noise, like the slap of something flat hitting the tiled floors, pulls me free from my thoughts, and I grab my sea sponge and bottle of body wash out of my shower kit so I can finish up.
I’m just going around in circles again. I have no idea why they did what they did, and I can speculate and guess all I want, but that’s all it will be, speculation and guessing.
I also can’t stop obsessing over all the little details I know about my stalker and how they loosely connect him to not just the Rebels, but the Hawthornes as well.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but there’s something about when he showed me the cabin out in the woods that sticks out to me now that I’ve had a chance to think about it. He said the cabin belonged to the Rebels and that I’d run right into their territory. I checked all the school maps and ecological surveys and everything I could find related to the woods, and there were no structures or mentions of cabins on any of them. How would he know about it if he wasn’t a member?
Then there’s how he asked about the backdoor code I used as my Hail Mary to try and tell whoever was looking into my hack jobs that I wasn’t the one they needed to worry about.
How would he possibly know about that if he wasn’t directly involved in the investigation? At the very least, he’d have to be connected to the frat on some level to have access to that kind of intel.
He also said that the job on Felix was how I got on his radar. How would that happen if he wasn’t looking into it? And he got really pissed when he heard about the blackmail files I found in the Kings’ system. Why would he care about those if they didn’t directly affect him?
I already assumed he was a student, and it makes sense that he’d be part of one of the frats if he makes a habit of stalking people to gather information about them. That’s not really the sort of thing someone does for shits and giggles. At least, I don’t think it is.
I might not know who my stalker is, but I know he’s calculated, clever, and hella strategic. And he’s really good atwhat he does. I can’t see him being a lone wolf and stalking people all willy-nilly. He doesn’t do anything without a reason, so unless he’s a freelancer who contracts himself out to the frats when they want info gathered and tabs kept on people, then he has to be a member.
But one thing I do know is there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell my stalker is Jax Hawthorne. Having similar body types and voices isn’t proof of anything, and neither is how a single look from him can turn my knees to jelly and my brain to mush.
I just superimposed my stalker on him because my dumbass brain is desperate to solve at least one of my problems, and it latched on to the idea that Jax and my stalker are the same person.
I don’t even know if Jax is into guys. Jace is, that’s a well-known fact around campus, but Jax is a mystery. From what I’ve been able to find, he’s never been linked to anyone on campus, never publicly dated anyone, and, like his brother, doesn’t really use social media or have much of an online footprint.
Turning off the water, I drop my sponge back in with my shower stuff. Time to drag myself back to my room and drive myself crazy obsessing over why a group of the most influential students on campus stepped in to stop me from being shot and trying to convince myself that my stalker is none other than Jax Hawthorne.
I’m just wrapping my towel around my waist when my eyes land on my phone, and a proverbial lightbulb goes off over my head.
Christ on a cracker, am I really that stupid?
There’s an easy way to check if there’s even a possibility that Jax is my stalker, and I shake my head at how dumb I am that I didn’t think of this sooner.
It takes about a minute to get into the school admin system on my phone, but once I’m in, I easily find the list of students who were on campus the week before the semester started.
There are only about fifty names, and I nearly drop my phone when I see Jax and Jace on the list.
That’s not hard proof, considering their cousin Xave is also on the list, but it’s a hell of a coincidence.
Ignoring their names, I look through the list again for anyone who stands out to me.
I still can’t believe I didn’t think to do this before, but in my defense, I’ve had a lot going on, and sometimes the most obvious answers are the last ones we think of.
No one on the list is familiar, and other than the twins and Xave, there was only one other Rebel on campus last week. His name isn’t familiar, and I look up his student ID.
I vaguely remember seeing him around, but it doesn’t look like he could be my guy. He has a similar build, but unless he’s lost some weight, he’s bigger than my stalker, and his ID lists a scar on his right hand as an identifying mark and no tattoos. My stalker doesn’t have a scar on either of his hands, and I’ve seen little flashes of ink under his sleeves, so it can’t be him.
I exit the school admin system and put my phone back on the bench so I can dry off and get dressed. That didn’t help nearly as much as I hoped, and now I’m left with even more questions than when I started.
Thankfully there are only a few guys around when I leave my shower cubby, and I slip out of the bathroom without having to talk to or even really look at any of them.
My head is still spinning when I slip into my room, and I glance at my chessboard before I can stop myself.
One of my knights is gone.
“What the fuck?” I rush over to my dresser to see how the hell he got my knight when I was a move away from putting him in check with it.
“Son of a bitch,” I mutter when I see what he did. I was so focused on trapping his king that I didn’t see his bishop had a straight shot to where I moved my knight.
