After a while of circling the woods, I saw a light and followed it, knowing I wasn’t far from where we were staying.
I ran as fast as I could, still shaking, and dashed into the teachers’ quarter that was adjacent to the students’.
I banged on the doors, screaming for help, and the three teachers who had come with us came out. I explained everything that happened to them. From where I came out for air, got taken, saw blood and tissues and small bits of brain, Theon saving me, him falling off the cliff—they sighed when I mentioned Theon.
“I’m serious. Theon is dead! He fell while trying to save me. I’m not joking.”
“Look,” the only female teacher came forward, adjusting her robe. “Theon didn’t come along. We have sixty-seven students here and Theon is not one of them. Why don’t you change and go back to bed.”
I staggered back, dumbfounded. “I saw Theon. He was there. Look at my clothes. I was...I was in the woods. We were running.”
The male teacher sighed. “Fine. We’ll report this to the police tomorrow. You might have seen someone else, but given your clothes, we’ll contact—”
“No,” I argued. “It was Theon. It was his cologne, his voice, his face. I’m not confused. He was the one.” I was panting harshly, on the brink of passing out.
“Okay. We’ll talk about this tomorrow. Go back inside and lock your door. The police will be here tomorrow.”
Truth to their words, the police arrived the next day, just two hours before we were supposed to leave for South Highland. Gossip spread like wildfire through the students, each version of the story wilder than the last. Some said I was blinded by love, others claimed I’d been sleepwalking and rolled myself in the mud. Theon hadn't been seen anywhere, and since everyone knew how interested he was in me, it was all too easy for them to twist the narrative.
Two officers approached me, asking in low, sceptical voices to show them where everything had happened. It was hard to recall in the daylight—everything felt like a fever dream—but I told the teachers, who still believed me half-heartedly, that Theon had fallen not far from the path we took to the hills on the second day of our school trip.
The first stop was where I’d said I hit the kidnapper. I could still feel the impact of the iron rod in my hands, making me shiver. But when we got there, he wasn’t there. Nobody. No blood. No trace of anything. The police exchanged glances, their doubt apparent. It was as though, all of a sudden, I had lost my mind, as though none of it had happened.
Next, I took them to the steep hill where Theon had fallen. I could barely hold it together, my heart pounding in my chest, praying to see something—anything—that would prove I wasn’t crazy. But the hill looked undisturbed. There were no marks, no prints, nothing to suggest we had struggled here. The leavescovered the ground in such a thick blanket, it seemed like they hadn’t been touched in years. The officers began to look tired of me, and I could sense their growing disbelief.
Finally, we made it to the warehouse. The moment I stepped inside, my head took a dive. The warehouse wasn’t the same. The mess, the blood, the brain matter—it was all gone. The hammer, the wood, the sack, all the evidence that had been so real to me—gone. Instead, the room looked arranged, unnervingly clean. I ran to the spot where I had seen the blood and remains, frantically searching, but there was nothing. Not a single trace.
“Ainsley, we should probably start going,” one of the teachers said softly, as if trying not to agitate me further. I spun around uncontrollably, breathing heavily, my mind spiralling. The police looked like they had been tricked, as if they believed I was hallucinating.
My vision blurred, the room spinning as panic overwhelmed me. My legs buckled beneath me, and I fainted.
When I woke up, I was on the bus. My head was pressed against the window, and my friends sat beside me, their faces full of worry. I blinked, disoriented, before bursting into tears on their shoulders. Everything felt rushed, the world spinning too fast for me to understand. Though he was only a classmate, he was a classmate that I liked. Among the boys in my school, he was the one who cared about me, if the stares he gave me was anything to go by. And somehow, I’d began to feel something for him.
Did he die? Was it really a hallucination?
Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe none of it had really happened. I clung to that thought, hoping that it would ease the crushing guilt. But it never left me.
Theon never came back to school. Not during exams, not for graduation. The school tried to reach out, but they found out hehad submitted false information upon enrollment. They couldn’t track him down, and they ruled it out as him dropping out. He’d never been one to follow the rules anyway, always skipping classes, so the school didn’t consider it their responsibility to investigate further. And since he wasn’t on the list of students who went on the trip, they let the matter drop.
It was a nightmare I didn’t want to remember. So, I pushed it to the back of my mind, pretending everything was fine.
Over time, I started to forget about him. I convinced myself that what the teachers said was true—that it was all just a misunderstanding, a bad dream. The more I believed it, the less guilty I felt.
But deep down, a part of me always knew that something wasn’t right. Something about Theon’s disappearance, about that night, would never leave me completely.
21
THEON
I paused the video again, tapping my fingers on the desk, frustration building in my chest. I’d watched this damn clip—showing Ainsley’s porch on Wednesday night—over fifty times. Not that I kept count or anything.
The man wore a leather jacket, oversized, probably to hide his body shape. He kept his head down the entire time, clearly aware of the camera’s presence, as he slid the letter under Ainsley’s door. Everything about him screamed caution. On his way back, he bumped into a woman—careless, but still no glimpse of his face.
That woman…I’d tracked her down the next day, meeting her in that coffee shop after running her face through facial recognition. I thought she might help me identify him, maybe a detail or clue. But no, she had nothing—just empty chatter that I quickly got bored of. Instead of leaving after I’d told her I was done, she lingered, and I killed some time with Ainsley in the dressing room.
My fist clenched around the edge of the desk. This guy had managed to dodge every trick I had. No face. No recognisable features. Nothing to go on, and it was pissing me off.
I stared at the screen, rewinding the footage. The man moved like a ghost—silent, invisible. Should I bait him? Any threat to Ainsley was a threat to me, and I wasn’t about to sit back while some bastard circled her. But what could lure him out?
