Sammy chokes out a laugh. “So, she wanted to blackmail Starling into divorcing Sebastian so she could marry him?”
“That’s what it looks like to me,” Clay confirms.
“So, she’s the actual real-life psycho.” Evan laughs, fighting to talk through his amusement.
“Are you sure about this?” Sammy asks, eyeing me warily.
“Definitely. This needs to happen before Tom tells the cops who she is and we lose our opportunity to end this for good,” I tell her.
“And you can definitely cover our tracks?” Sammy asks Clay.
“I definitely can. But the cops won’t care to look, we’re going to serve psycho Courtney up on a platter for them. All they’ll see is a deranged girl, escalating from obsession to violence,” he assures her.
Staring down at my cell, I read, then reread the text I typed out a few minutes ago before I hit send.
Starling : Hey, I need to talk to you about something, somewhere private. I’ve managed to slip away from my security. Can you meet me in the parking lot at Kingsacre? I’ll find your car and wait there for you. There’s an entrance ramp behind the admin buildings. I’m on my way, I can be there in thirty minutes. Please, Court, I need you. Starling xx
The message shows as read almost immediately, and I hold my breath waiting for her to reply.
“What happens if she refuses to meet me?” I ask, suddenly panicked.
“She’ll meet you, we know she will,” Hunter assures me, reaching out to squeeze my arm.
It’s only been two days since Courtney was at our house and the cops took Tom into custody. He’s still being held, pending a hearing, but more than likely a judge will grant him bail, so we needed to get this done before he and Courtney have a chance to regroup.
Bunny and January are in Florida with Hunter’s mom and Bunny’s Nana and the rest of us are sitting in a restaurant just around the corner from Kingsacre. The moment that she agrees to meet me, we’ll all head to campus. The guys have graduated, but with me and Sammy still enrolled, it’s not super strange that they’d come with us to campus.
Once we’re at school, we’ll all head to the coffee house we accidentally on purpose bumped into Courtney at a few days ago. Using his laptop and the hacked access to the campus security cameras Clay has had since I started my freshman year,he’ll make sure that the cameras see both me and Courtney walking into the parking structure. While we’re waiting for Courtney to arrive, Evan will tie me up, gag me, then drug me and put me in the trunk of Court’s Mercedes.
If everything goes to plan, Court will wait for me, possibly with some malicious intent of her own. But while she’s waiting, she’ll receive a message from who she’ll believe is Tom, asking her to meet him at a remote warehouse, where we’ve set up my pseudo cell and murder room, complete with latex gloves, plastic sheeting, bleach, rope, knives, and a gun.
By the time Courtney gets to the warehouse, Sebastian will have made a frantic phone call to Chief Turner, telling him that I’d had a text from an old friend, and had gone to meet them while the others had coffee. When I didn’t come back, he became worried given the threats they found on Tom’s cell and decided to call the cops. He’ll explain to the chief of police about the kidnapping attempts on his family in the past and how we all have trackers. Then he’ll explain that instead of being on campus, my tracker is moving, and he’ll beg him for help.
If we were normal people and not insanely wealthy, I’m confident they’d ignore him and tell him to call back if I haven’t shown up in a few days. But we’re not normal, and we’re banking on the fact that the very large donations Sebastian’s family have been making for years to the police department will curry us some favor, and that Sebastian and the cops will find Courtney, the cell, the murder room, and then me bound, drugged, and terrified in the trunk of her car.
If everything goes to plan, once I’ve been rescued, they’ll discover her obsession with Sebastian, and Courtney will end up incarcerated or institutionalized by the end of the day.
While my mind is working through the plan, my cell beeps. It’s a text from Courtney.
Courtney : Okay, I’ll see you there in thirty minutes x
Holding out my cell for the others to see, I suck in a sharp breath. “We should go.”
Silently, Sebastian leaves a pile of cash on the table to cover our bill, and we head out of the restaurant, filing into the large SUV my security team usually uses. Instead of letting the valet park the SUV in the parking structure, we ask them to leave it in one of the handful of above-ground spaces near the valet station. The large tip Evan hands the valet has them easily agreeing, and we make our way across campus as a group.
The coffee shop is busy with people when we arrive, so we commandeer two tables outside, while Hunter and Evan go inside to order.
“Are you okay, Little Bird?” Sebastian whispers against my ear.
“I just want this to be over,” I admit.
“By tonight it will be, and once it is, I’m taking you away for a while.”
“Away?” I question.
“Yes, just the two of us, naked for as long as we want. Somewhere the real world can’t touch us.”
Inhaling slowly, I nod. “That sounds perfect.”
