These Deadly Games(98)
“Will someone please tell me what the hell happened to my daughter?” Mom cried.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Donovan,” said Sanchez. “We’ll get her a psych eval, and I’ll explain everything at the station…”
I tuned them out, ignoring everyone except Zoey and Randall. “Please. You have to believe me. It was Dyl—Andrew. He wanted revenge for Brady’s death. He made me hurt the rest of you. He installed an app on my phone … He somehow created these videos and pictures of Caelyn. She was tied up and gagged. There was even a picture of him cutting her. Kiki saw one of them.” I gasped. “That’s right! Akira saw one of the pictures! Right before she fell. You can ask her—”
“Akira’s in surgery now,” said Sanchez.
“But … but when she wakes up, she’ll be able to tell you that.”
“If she wakes up,” said Randall. Any belief he’d had in my story had gone out the window when Caelyn appeared.
I gaped at him, helpless, until Sanchez helped me stand and unclipped a pair of handcuffs from his belt. Caelyn was crying now, and Mom screamed at him to let me go, that there must be some mistake.
“You have to believe me,” I said, frantic. Suddenly, I remembered something. “Dylan told you I was paranoid, right?” I asked Zoey. “That I was mentally unstable. He told you that, right?”
Both Zoey’s and Randall’s eyebrows shot up. He’d said the same thing to both of them, playing us all like pieces on a chessboard. “Well, he told me you told him I was paranoid. He flipped it around. He was trying to turn us against each other, to make us suspect each other. To make me suspect myself. He gaslit me, Zoey.”
The handcuffs were frigid on my skin, digging into one of the scrapes from Fishman’s yard, making me squirm in pain as Sanchez led me toward his cruiser. “I wouldn’t kill our friends!” I called back, more to Zoey than anyone else. “You have to believe me!”
But of course she didn’t believe me. I’d tied her up in her basement. And I’d done it on my own, without following any instructions.
She had no reason to believe me.
Let’s be honest—I had no reason to believe myself. I didn’t even know what was real anymore.
All I knew was that my life was over.
CHAPTER 41
The thing about being obsessed with playing games your whole life is you know when someone’s playing you.
It didn’t take long to figure out what happened. And when Zoey came to visit me at the juvie detention center, backpack in tow, I knew she knew I knew. I just had to get her to admit it.
I’d been stuck here for four days, held without bail since my charges were murder, attempted murder, arson, kidnapping, and filing a false police report—and the investigators had a mountain of evidence stacked against me.
We’re talking a mother lode of points here.
Ten points for triangulating the prank call’s location to the park, twenty for the nylon bag at the bottom of Hanover Lake, and five for Jeremy Fischer’s eyewitness account placing me at the scene. Ten points for my Instagram post of Hanover Castle and five for Mr. Ferguson placing me at Mount Morgan when Akira fell, plus bonus points for our li’l phone swap. Ten points for my fingerprints on the rake that broke the Nelsons’ basement window, leading to the furnace room with the busted gas pipe. Tying up Zoey after threatening her with a knife must’ve been a gazillion points right there. And more points were incoming, since Matty’s parents were having the brownies tested.
And let’s not forget how I confessed to all of it. I just couldn’t prove I’d done any of it under duress.
“How’s Kiki?” I asked as Zoey sat across from me, her pink jacket overly cheerful in this gray, dreary room. She shrugged it off, scanning the other small tables dotting the room, some occupied by other teens and their visitors, then searched my face. I knew how I looked—pale and haggard beyond my years, eyes bloodshot and puffy from endless sobbing fits over Matty, my curls more mussed than usual without my anti-frizz cream.
“She’s a trooper,” said Zoey. “She’s got this huge neck brace, and it’ll be a few weeks before she can attempt crutches. But she’s, like, more annoyed that Lucia keeps showing up with flowers and shit than anything.”
I chuckled softly. “She wants to make amends.”
Zoey rolled her eyes. “I know. Anyway … you should know, Akira’s memory from that morning is shot. So she doesn’t remember seeing anything on your phone, or whether her fall was an accident or not, or anything at all, really.”
“Yeah, Mom told me.”
She’d also told me about how she’d gotten an email from me while I was trapped in the back seat of Sanchez’s cruiser, exactly twenty-four hours after the games began. In this email, I confessed to everything, apologizing to Mom and admitting I’d wanted the MortalDusk tourney prize for myself. My email to Fishman proposing an alliance—supposedly a last-ditch effort before going for my friends’ jugulars—corroborated this. Mom had shown the email to Sanchez, thinking it was obviously fake and proof of my innocence—I hadn’t had my phone nor access to a laptop while handcuffed.
But she didn’t realize there were ways to schedule emails.
I actually laughed when Sanchez showed me and my lawyer how the email’s originating IP matched the emails everyone else received: Mr. Chen, Fishman, even the one Randall’s parents got from the no-show prospective client. I also recognized it as the IP I’d matched between Dylan and An0nym0us1. He’d been spoofing the same IP address the whole time, likely so the police could connect the dots—and I couldn’t prove I wasn’t the one using a VPN. More points for me, yay!