Camila beamed at me. “Great,” she said, squeezing my arm. “I’m so glad you finally decided to join us, even though it happened under such horrible circumstances.”
“Me too,” Layla said, eyes sparkling. “Once you’re past this, we’re going to have so much fun!”
I smiled tightly, even though I was in no mood for smiles. “I hope so,” I murmured.
“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 you want.”
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 you absolutely sure it was Hunter behind the video stuff today? Like one hundred percent sure?”
I hesitated.
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 court documents.
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 sex tape.
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 me either.
Aside from him, my mom, and the Silvercreek people, only three people knew about the video.
Adam, Trina, and Hunter.
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 it now?
It made no sense.
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 hurt me.
None at all.
That left only one person.
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 so easily.
Of course he did this to me. Of fucking course.
I swallowed hard and raised my chin, looking squarely at Camila and Kiri. “Yes,” I said. “It was him.”
2
Laney
Adam and Trina were waiting for me outside the clubroom when I was done with the Medusa girls.
“Hey, how did it go?” Trina asked, gently rubbing the side of my arm.
I offered her a small smile. “It was okay. I’ll be initiated in a few days.”
“What does that involve?”
I shrugged. “No idea. But I was told that I have to choose some sort of gift to receive at the end of it.”
“Ooh, nice,” Adam said. I could tell he was struggling to keep his tone light after everything that had happened this morning. “What did you pick?”
“I couldn’t think of anything, so they said they’d surprise me.”
“Cool!” Adam offered me his arm. “You ready to go?”
I looked down the hall, pulse racing. “Is it safe?”
He nodded. “I haven’t seen Hunter or anyone else. I think Trina drove everyone off with her banshee yelling.”
Trina grinned and elbowed him. “Hey, my banshee yelling was totally necessary!”
I took a deep breath and grabbed Adam’s arm. “Okay. Let’s go to my dorm. I want to curl up in a ball on my bed and pretend today never happened.”
We headed across Royal Hall, making sure we took the narrower side halls so that we could avoid all of the areas where students usually congregated between classes—the locker banks, the cafeteria, the halls leading to the quad.
We managed to avoid everyone until we stepped into a hall near the science labs on our way to one of the side entrances.
“Ms. Collins! Stop!”
I turned to see Headmaster Sanders hurrying toward us from the other end of the hall. “Oh, shit,” I muttered, shoulders slumping.
“Guess it was only a matter of time before he hunted us down,” Adam said, rolling his eyes upward.
Sanders finally reached us, chest heaving from the exertion of chasing us down. “Ms. Collins, I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” he said, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “We need to have a discussion about—”
I held up a palm, not even caring if I seemed rude. “Sir, please,” I said, my voice close to cracking. “I really can’t do this right now. Can we talk another time?”
I expected Sanders to huff angrily, but instead he nodded. “Of course. I just wanted to let you know that you aren’t in any trouble for that… that incident in the auditorium. I’m aware of the true nature of that deplorable video, and I will be doing everything I can to find the student—or students—responsible for displaying it.” He stopped and cleared his throat. “I also wanted to extend my deepest apologies to you, Laney. I’m genuinely ashamed that something like this has happened on my campus.”
“Oh,” I said meekly. After my past experiences with Sanders, I was expecting him to find some way to blame me for the whole thing.
“How do you know what the video really is?” Trina asked, eyes narrowing.
Sanders neatly folded his handkerchief and slipped it back in his pocket as he replied. “A student came and informed me about it after the incident,” he said crisply. “Like I said, I’m disgusted that someone could do something so terrible to a fellow RFA student, and my staff and I will get to the bottom of it.”
“A student?” Trina cocked her head to the side.
Sanders shot her a quizzical look. “Hm?”
“You just said that a student told you that the video showed an assault. Which student in particular?” she asked.
“It was Hunter Connery,” Sanders said. “He was very concerned about you, Laney.”
Trina let out a derisive snort. “Well, if you care so much about getting to the bottom of the incident, you need to call Hunter right back into your office. He’s the one who did it.”