Page 30 of The Deceptions

We may have our own organization and frat house near campus, but we're always looking for new people to pledge to our cause. We’ve been secretly growing right under Franco’s fat nose for years now. It’s about time we come out to the world as serious contenders.

Now the kings of campus will know we mean business.

There's a new leader in town and has been for years. He's ready to play ball and fight against the heirs of Greenwood. Oh, and their scumbag father.

Wilder makes his exit. No doubt, sauntering into his room to stare at the walls, rethinking all his life choices. And Meredith, of course.

As for me, I sit back in my bed, pulling out my phone and one lone photograph I've kept since I was fifteen.

She sits there, not bothering to smile at the camera. Staring straight into the lens. Into my fucking soul. I sit beside her. Timid and shell-shocked, staring straight ahead like I hadn't witnessed multiple atrocities the night before I met her.

She was clueless. Yet, welcomed me without question.

“My Little Ghost,” I murmur, running a finger over her face. “You've returned from the dead.”

Well, not technically the dead because she was never there. She survived. I saw it with my own eyes. The world may think my little ghost is a decaying corpse resting under six feet of dirt with her name etched in marble, but I know the truth.

Me. Her. Him.

“And I'll stop at nothing to follow you to the ends of the earth.” I smile at my phone, noting the blinking red dot near the Grand Hotel.

“Gotcha.”

And then my smile slips when the dot blinks out, and she disappears from sight.

“Motherfucker,” I hiss, nearly throwing my phone into the wall. But I stop myself. It’s my only lifeline to Meredith. She could text or call at any moment, begging for help. So, I refrain. For now, at least.

“I found you once, Little Ghost,” I murmur to myself with a sigh, climbing off my bed and sitting on the ground.

“That's a tracker,”Carter grumbles through the video chat with a sneer.

No shit, Sherlock.

He's always so lovely to talk to. But as my correspondent and the only man on earth I trust with technology—trust should be used loosely—I had to call him at five in the morning to get his opinion.

“Tell me again how you found a tracker in your jeans?”

I run a hand down my face, sitting on the edge of my hotel bed. The tracker in question is fully submerged in a glass of water at my bedside. Hopefully broken.

The psycho from the bar.

He said he wanted to come home with me and stay. I guess he meant it.

“I plead the fifth.” No way in hell am I telling that asshole how I ended up fucking a stranger in the bathroom while he was on the hunt for his missing sister.

“You hooked up with some fucking rando at a club or bar, didn't you?” That little weasel. How in the hell does he know?

“That doesn't matter.”

“Obviously it fucking does, Olivia,” he snorts, rubbing his temple.

“Fine. I hooked up with some rando at the bar, and he put a tracker on me for some reason.” Because why wouldn’t he? That’s all I seem to attract these days. Psychos.

Ugh.

“Fucking shit,” he growls. “Just send it to me. I'll take a fucking look at it and see if I can find out who owns it.”

I've known Carter for almost two years now. Ever since my first case out in the field, where I went undercover as a girl named Espie and infiltrated East Point Prep. Talk about an experience for my very first step into what the underbelly of the evil world had to offer. And boy, was that place crawling with evil. Teachers taking advantage of their students. An evil cult taking students and using their deaths for money. The list goes on.