Page 50 of Kings & Chaos

“Fuck me,” Rock said over my shoulder. “Who the fuck is this guy?”

My eyes were scratched out in all the ones where my face was visible.

“Not one guy,” Neo said.

“He’s right,” Oscar said. “Look at the word choice on the letter:we’llstop them for you, notI’llstop them for you. And there’s no way one person could have been in all of these places. Think about it.”

For a long moment, no one said anything. I was trying to get my head around what Oscar was implying when Rock spoke.

“These locations, it would be hard for one person to get to them all.”

All at once, I understood. Syd’s was a biker bar. That meant whoever had taken the picture there was probably a member of one of the MCs, or a townie at the very least.

But bikers didn’t frequent Cassie’s, not that I’d seen anyway, which meant someone else had probably taken that picture.

Townie? Weekender?

The pictures on campus and at the quarry party screamed student, which didn’t exactly narrow the field.

“We always knew it was more than one person,” Neo said.

“We always knew it was at least two people,” I said. “This… this is crazy. How would someone get myhair?”

My skin crawled. It suddenly felt like a fucking army was out to get us.

Well, me mostly.

Neo shoved the pictures and they slid across the marble countertop. “These are just pictures.”

I gawked at him. “Justpictures?”

“A group of different people might have taken them, but that doesn’t mean they’re all in on… whatever this is. It could also mean the ringleader has enough money to hire a bunch of flunkies to go around taking creepy pictures,” Oscar clarified.

“Great,” I said. “So either my stalker is actually multiple people intent on shutting me up or it’s one person with enough resources to hire an entire town to spy on me. Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s definitely multiple people,” Neo said. “I’m just saying, these pictures don’t mean every person who took them is in on what happened to Emma and the other girls.”

Oscar took the chair next to mine, pivoted his body to face me, and took my hands in his. “You don’t have to stay.”

I pulled my hands away. “What are you talking about?”

“You could leave, go somewhere safe — we have a place actually, a place no one would find you — and let us find the asshole who took Emma and the other girls.”

I stared into his eyes. “No. I’m not letting these people intimidate me. That’s what they want. Emma was my sister, and I’m not leaving until I find out what happened to her and the other girls.”

Rock swore behind me. “I gotta be honest, I don’t love hearing you say that, kitten. Like a fucking echo.”

I looked up at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Emma said the same thing,” Oscar said. “The night she came here. The night she went missing.”

And look what happened to her.

The unspoken words hung in the air like smoke.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I get that this is… a mess. That you’re being threatened because of me. And if you want me to stay somewhere else, I understand. But I’m not leaving Blackwell Falls until I figure out what happened to Emma.”

Neo sighed. “Don’t be fucking stupid, Jezebel. You’re not staying anywhere else.”

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