These Deadly Games(81)

“Nope.” Sanchez took the crowbar. “If it is Brady.”

“It is!” I said. It had to be. Dad put his arm around me.

Sanchez gently knocked on the door. “Brady? Try to lean away from the door, son.” A chill had settled over the group—one that had nothing to do with the cold breeze whipping through my curls. Why wasn’t Brady answering? Surely all the noise and commotion would have woken him.

Dad clutched me even tighter as Sanchez wedged the edge of the crowbar into the doorframe, putting all his weight into it. After a few moments of him grunting and straining, the door burst open, and Brady flopped out. Sanchez caught him before he hit the ground.

Wow, he must have been exhausted from being in there all night.

“Brady!” I cried, lunging toward him, wanting to be the first to talk to him, to keep him from telling the truth. That’s when I saw Brady’s face.

Dad yanked me back and buried my face in his chest.

But it was too late.

Brady’s skin was purple, and his eyes were open, wide and glassy, staring blankly at the sky. I’d never seen a dead body before—not in real life, anyway. But I knew. And the anguished howl that tore from his mother confirmed it.

He was dead.

I shrieked into Dad’s chest. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening. This was my fault. My fault, my fault, my fault. I was the one who’d dragged Brady away from his jigsaw puzzle. I was the one who’d wanted to play Manhunt. I’d given up looking for him. And I’d lied.

I peeked back at Brady’s family. His mother had collapsed into her husband’s arms, and Andrew knelt next to Brady, his face screwed up in denial. He reached out to touch Brady’s hair, but Sanchez blocked him with his arm. He flinched back, covering his mouth instead and shaking his head, lost, helpless, like there was no way this was happening. No way it was real. But it was. It was. For a moment, Andrew glanced up at me, and the tortured look on his face made a fresh wave of agony consume me.

“It was just an accident,” Dad said in a soothing voice. “A horrible accident.”

But he didn’t know. He didn’t know. And I could never tell.

Dad hadn’t carried me in years, but he picked me up then, carrying me away from the boy I’d killed.





CHAPTER 35


Sometimes when you bury a secret, it claws at your heart like bloodied fingernails scraping against a coffin lid as you suffocate under the weight of all that compacted dirt.

But now, after all this time, someone had dug up our secret—and they were trying to whack us with the shovel, one by one.

Who the hell could it be?

My first thought was Brady himself, like some bizarro soap opera twist. But that was impossible.

I’d seen his body.

I’d been to his funeral.

I’d watched his brother, Andrew, give a monotone eulogy, eyes like hollow pits of despair. I’d noticed his father glaring at mine, as though finding Brady in that locker was what killed him, à la Schr?dinger’s cat. I’d seen his mother lose it as his coffin lowered into the ground, her flaming hair masking the snot dribbling down her chin.

You can’t fake that shit.

Plus, there’d been an autopsy and everything. The temperature that night had dropped low enough for Brady to succumb to hypothermia, but he’d suffocated before he could freeze to death. When he shut himself in that storage unit, a piece of fabric from Matty’s sweatshirt had wedged into the lock, jamming it. In such a confined space—barely enough to move—it didn’t take long for him to run out of air and start inhaling his own carbon dioxide.

He might’ve screamed for help, but we’d been too far to hear. The Nelsons’ yard was out of bounds, and we hadn’t wanted to venture so deep into the dark woods. The Nelsons hadn’t heard him, either—Tom had hearing loss, and Cheryl had taken a sleeping pill. Both slept through the night, unaware.

Entrenched in our lie, we vowed to stay silent. Nothing we did would change Brady’s fate. Nothing we did could save him. No good would come from telling the truth.

I figured the guilt gnawing at our insides was punishment enough.

Apparently, someone disagreed.

But it was an accident. An accident. As I stared at the solved anagram, another pattern occurred to me. An allergic reaction. A car left idle in a garage. Falling from an infamous cliff. A prank call gone awry. Even a poorly timed locker inspection. All of them could seem like accidents.

Fucking hell.

Who else knew we’d played Manhunt that night? I’d never told a soul. Zoey clearly hadn’t, or else she wouldn’t have used it as blackmail fodder. I obviously couldn’t ask Matty or Akira if they’d blabbed, and I doubted Randall had. Honestly, I doubted anyone else in this sleepy town even cared enough to remember. Brady’s family had moved to California only a month or so after his death.

Out of sight, out of mind.

My mind snapped to Brady’s brother, Andrew, friendly yet reclusive. He’d snipped at me when I came to bring Brady back to Zoey’s. But he didn’t know all the rest of it. Besides, he’d been in California all these years. Whoever was doing this knew us. Matty didn’t exactly advertise his nut allergy to the world, and they’d known Akira’s family would be out of town, that Randall’s parents were website designers, and about our rivalry with Fishman. It had to be someone local. Right?