“Trust me. By the time you graduate, all of the shit from this month will be a distant memory,” Kiri added. “You’ll have everything you’ve ever wished for. Plus revenge against that asshole Hunter, if that’s what youwant.”
Camila’s smile faded. “Wait. Before we start coming up with any big retaliation plans, there’s something I should ask, just so I know we’ve covered all our bases,” she said, brows furrowing. “Are youabsolutelysure it was Hunter behind the video stuff today? Like one hundred percentsure?”
Ihesitated.
There were people back in my hometown who knew about the videos Peter Elton shot of his victims, but there was no way they could’ve gotten their hands on the tapes. None of them were wealthy, so they had no access to the things that uber-rich people could swoop in and grab whenever they wanted as long as they greased the right palms—things like sealed courtdocuments.
None of the people from my hometown had any motive to do such a terrible thing to me, either. I wasn’t popular back at Silvercreek High, but I wasn’t hated, either. There was simply no reason why someone from there would’ve followed me to RFA and played the video for everyone to see, especially with that text calling me a slut and claiming it was a sextape.
There was also Peter Elton himself. He had every reason to hate me—I put him in prison, after all—but he had no way of doing any of this stuff to me. He was rotting in a state penitentiary somewhere up north, and he didn’t have any close family or friends who would act on his behalf. I remembered that from the trial; how no one came to support him. So it couldn’t be him behind today’s attack on meeither.
Aside from him, my mom, and the Silvercreek people, only three people knew about thevideo.
Adam, Trina, andHunter.
Adam was a definite no-go. He had no reason to hurt me, and even if he did, he’d known about the video for a whole month now. That meant he’d had weeks to get his hands on it and hurt me with it if that was what he wanted. So why would he do itnow?
It made nosense.
Trina was much the same. I’d recently discovered that she wasn’t averse to keeping things from me, like the fact that she was best friends with Lindsay Connery when she was alive—something she seemed to have misled me about when we first met—but lying by omission didn’t necessarily make her some sort of psychopath who couldn’t be trusted under any circumstances. Also, like Adam, she simply had no reason to hurtme.
None atall.
That left only oneperson.
Hunter.
Not only did he find out about the tape very recently, giving him just enough time to get his hands on it and use it against me, there was a precedent to this kind of behavior from him. He’d hated and bullied me in the past, and now that I was thinking about it without a rose-tinted lens of attraction and passion, I realized it was incredibly stupid and naïve of me to think he’d changed his tune soeasily.
Of course he did this to me. Of fuckingcourse.
I swallowed hard and raised my chin, looking squarely at Camila and Kiri. “Yes,” I said. “It washim.”
2
Laney
Adam and Trinawere waiting for me outside the clubroom when I was done with the Medusagirls.
“Hey, how did it go?” Trina asked, gently rubbing the side of myarm.
I offered her a small smile. “It was okay. I’ll be initiated in a fewdays.”
“What does thatinvolve?”
I shrugged. “No idea. But I was told that I have to choose some sort of gift to receive at the end ofit.”
“Ooh, nice,” Adam said. I could tell he was struggling to keep his tone light after everything that had happened this morning. “What did youpick?”
“I couldn’t think of anything, so they said they’d surpriseme.”
“Cool!” Adam offered me his arm. “You ready togo?”
I looked down the hall, pulse racing. “Is itsafe?”
He nodded. “I haven’t seen Hunter or anyone else. I think Trina drove everyone off with her bansheeyelling.”
Trina grinned and elbowed him. “Hey, my banshee yelling was totallynecessary!”