Brent nodded and pulled out his cell. He held it to his ear for a moment. Then he shook his head. “I don’t hear it ringing. You must’ve left it somewhere.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I muttered. I knew where it was now. I took it out of my pocket earlier and left it on the kitchen counter in Kinsey’s chalet before we went outside and got in the hot tub, because I didn’t want to risk it getting wet. I must’ve forgotten to grab it when I went back inside to get dressed.
Brent held his phone out. “Here. You can use mine to log in to your iCloud. Should be able to get an exact location then,” he said. He raised his brows. “Unless you dropped it in the lake.”
I already knew exactly where my phone was, but I couldn’t tell him that without admitting I was at Kinsey’s chalet earlier, so I took his phone with a grateful smile. I opened a browser, logged in to my account, and clicked ‘Find My Device’. As expected, the red GPS pin showed that my phone was slightly south of my current location.
Hold on.
Frowning, I zoomed in on the map. The pin wasn’t in the right place. If my phone was at Kinsey’s chalet, it should be directly south of where I was standing right now. It was southeast instead, near the resort’s staff housing.
I grunted and exited the map. It was probably just a mistake. GPS errors happened all the time.
I was about to log out and hand Brent’s phone back to him when a message came through to my cloud account. It was from Kinsey.I see you. Be there in a minute!
My forehead creased. What the hell was she talking about? I thought she’d be asleep in bed by now.
I clicked into our conversation, brows shooting up as I read through the most recent exchange. None of it made sense. I didn’t send any of this shit to her. Why the hell would I make her leave her chalet in the freezing cold and walk alone to the staff cottages? I was an asshole, but holy fuck, I wasn’tthatmuch of an asshole.
My mind flashed back to a moment from the hot tub. Kinsey thought she heard someone entering the chalet, and I dismissed her, thinking it was just the wind or scampering nocturnal animals.
Fuck.
She was right. Someone had sneaked into the chalet and taken my phone off the counter. Now they were using it to lure Kinsey out of bed. For what, I wasn’t sure, but I knew it had to be bad. No one with good intentions would ever pull shit like that.
I stood and sprinted away from the firepit without a word. “Hey!” Brent shouted behind me. “Where the fuck are you going? You still have my phone!”
His voice faded into the distance as I headed down the hill, taking a shortcut toward the staff cottages. The moon slipped behind a cloud, darkening the landscape, and the frigid wind picked up, howling and tossing all the tree branches around me. It was so loud I could barely hear myself think.
“Kinsey!” I shouted, finally spotting a small feminine shape in the snow up ahead. She wasn’t too far away—maybe twenty or thirty yards.
She broke into a run, heading away from me.
“What the fuck?” I muttered to myself. Could she not hear me over the wind?
Up ahead, a dark shape was moving to the right. Kinsey was running toward it. Jesus, it was a person. She thought it was me.
“Kinsey!” I shouted, pushing myself even harder. My lungs were burning, but I wasn’t far off closing the distance between us now. Another five or ten yards and she should be able to hear me perfectly. “Stop!”
She didn’t listen. Her feet kept flying over the frozen ground, heading directly toward the trees behind the cottages.
I was about to catch up with her when a crack echoed through the air, followed by a piercing scream. The ground was giving way beneath Kinsey’s feet.
I lunged forward and managed to grab the back of her coat, leaving her dangling over a long drop. “Jax!” she shrieked, flailing and grasping at thin air.
“I’ve got you!” I said. “Just grab my hand!”
She reached upward, blindly searching for my hand in the air. I took it and gripped it firmly, still holding onto her coat collar with my other hand. “I’ve got you,” I repeated. “You’re okay.”
I pulled her upward, jaw clenched and heart hammering. Once she was safely out of the ravine, she collapsed on the snowy ground, chest heaving with short, panicked breaths. “What…” She shook her head, voice coming out in a choked whisper. “What the fuck just happened?”
Frowning, I shone the light from Brent’s phone in front of us. “Holy shit,” I muttered.
“What is it?” Kinsey sat up on her elbows, staring at me.
“I can see how you missed the drop,” I said, shining the light directly in front of her. “Someone covered it.”
The ravine was only a couple of feet wide, and someone had covered most of it with sticks, dead leaves, and snow in order to make it look like a normal bit of ground. The only visible part was the spot where Kinsey had crashed through, exposing a pit with several large spikes pointing upward.