ARIES OR GMIE?

"Go with your gut instinct," Khan said, placing his hands on his legs before stretching them out. "Aries or Gmie."

Every fiber in my body despised Gmie. She was controlling, erratic, intelligently devious, manipulative and just a straight up bitch, but something told me she wasn't Layla's killer. It just didn't sit well with me.

"Aries." The name left my lips carefully yet swiftly, almost like I wasn't sure. Was I sure? No, but it was the best lead we had at the moment. "What if we're wrong? What if all of this is wrong and it's neither of them?"

"All of this is just a theory," he said. "Nothing's absolute. We just need to test our theory."

"How do we test something like this?" I asked, scratching my pants. "Just pretend we know their secret?"

He nodded. "And analyze how they react to us knowing their secret." Taking my iPad off the floor, he moved his finger around on the glass surface before typing something and handing it to me. "I just texted Gmie, telling her you know her secret and you're going to tell everyone."

My body jolted back a few centimeters. "What!" If Gmie didn't already hate my guts and want to murder me, she'd definitely want to now. "Why did it have to be me?"

"She already hates you, so she'll probably be more inclined to say something truthful."

"Now you're just talking out your ass," I said, watching a white bubble with three gray dots form under Khan's sent message. She was replying.

It took a few moments before her reply showed up, and it just made me hate her a little bit more.

I don't care. Tell them. Then she replied again. I can't wait to kill you just like I killed them. Watch your back. Your team won't be with you all the time.

"See? Told you she'd be honest," Khan said, completely ignoring her threat. "I figured she'd either hide it or deny it or just outright say it. Gmie doesn't have much of a middle ground. She usually goes from one extreme to the next. And now we can cross her off. She really doesn't care if you tell, so if Layla knew, Gmie wouldn't have cared if she told people."

"Thanks to that, Gmie probably hates me more than before," I said, arching my eyebrows, "increasing the target on my back."

"I really don't think Gmie could hate you more than she already does," he said, motioning to my bruised neck. Point taken.

"Are we doing the same for Aries?"

"No. I want to catch him off guard and see his real reaction," Khan said, eyes becoming darker. "He's been practicing this 'I didn't kill my girlfriend' façade for about a year now. I don't want him to have time to put it on. I want to surprise him — to see the real truth. Plus, if we give him a heads up, he might try to kill one of us, and we still don't know how he killed Layla or his ex."

"If he did kill them, anyway." I lowered an eyelid, studying Khan. "You seem to be really invested in this whole Aries thing."

His eyes lightened a couple of notches, but his irises still swam in gloomy depths. "Cold cases and unsolved mysteries like his intrigue me." He licked his bottom lip. "My mind likes to explore and analyze things like that, and Aries' case always stayed with me because I know I'm missing something. I just don't know what. I know he did it, and it bothers me that I can't figure out how."

The whole scandal with Aries and his ex was a huge deal for a long time. I remembered it being all over the news. It even made worldwide headlines because Aries was so popular. There were even a few crime docs and ID specials on it.

"Are you sure you're not only zeroing in on Aries because you want the truth? To calm your racing mind?" I've been there before, wanting to know the impossible. Why my mother did what she did would forever haunt me. I'd never know why she did what she did, and that realization sometimes kept me up at night.

He paused for a while. "It's possible, but it's the best lead we got at the moment, and we only have eleven hours left."

"You're right," I said before letting out a long breath. "So, what are we going to do? Kidnap Aries?"

"Exactly."

"I was kidding."

"I'm not." He inched forward. "We need to get him alone and confront him and see what he does."

"Why do I feel like I'm the one who's going to have to confront him?"

"I can do it, but you'll have to handle Chi." His hand flickered across his iPad, bringing up footage of Chi and Aries working out in the gym.

Chi or Aries? Who could I take? "Chi's not going to go anywhere with me willingly." It would end up in a fight, and I still wasn't a hundred percent because of Demo's sneak attack.

"She'll come with me," Khan said, putting his iPad down. "When Gmie tried to get her to seduce me—"

"You knew Chi was trying to do that?"

Khan gave me an amusing glance, eyes lightening even more now. "No one shows up to someone's room at two a.m. in a see-through nightie and no panties with wine to just talk. I'm not stupid. I just entertained it to get information out of her."

"What did you find out?"

"A lot. Chi loves to talk, especially when she drinks," he said. "That's why I suspected Aries so much. She kept saying how she was so curious about his scandal. How it's weird that every time they bring it up to him, he gets defensive and antsy."

"Did she say anything about anyone else?"

"She talked about Gmie too. How she's so controlling and has a major hard-on for you."

"That's public knowledge."

He paused, tapping his finger against his cheek before snapping his fingers. "I learned something else too. I meant to tell you earlier but this whole Layla thing distracted me," he said, wiping some hair out of his eye. "Remember that night when you got chased by Demo, Gmie and some unknown person in a hoodie."

"Yeah, that was the night you saved me."

"We always said that the third person had to be Chi or Aries, right?"

"Yeah, they were in her clique at the time."

"It wasn't either of them."

His words pierced my chest like an ice pick. "What?"

"Chi said that Gmie ordered her and Aries to stay behind that night," he said, eyes looking into mine. "And Chi didn't even know about the third person until she saw you guys running through the halls together. She asked Gmie who it was when it was all over, but Gmie was really tight-lipped and just said it was a secret ally."

Secret ally? A sickening coldness crept into my fingertips as my heart thrashed in my chest, throat constricting for a few moments. "Who the fuck was it?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. It could be someone on our team, or maybe even Layla? Maybe Gmie manipulated her? Or Chi could've lied, but she seemed truthful to me."

A thought hit me like a sack of metal. Jookie told me earlier that I had an enemy who wasn't Gmie. What if he was talking about that secret ally?

I stared at Khan for a brief second. What if it was him? What if he wasn't telling me the truth? But he helped me that night. Was it possible for him to be chasing me one second and be back at his room to help me the next?

No. We've been alone multiple times now. If he wanted to kill me, he could've tried by now. So, who else? My team? Rucker, Sebastian, and Yaz all tumbled through my mind. Was it one of them?

"You alright?" Khan asked, tapping my hand.

"Um yeah, just thinking," I said, shaking my head. "I can't worry about that now. We need to get back to this Aries thing."

"I'll distract Chi," he said, pulling up his iPad again. "I'm only going to be a few feet away in case things go south and you need me. All you have to do is confront him and see what happens. It could be a shot in the dark, but we have to at least try. He could be Layla's killer. He had the motive and opportunity."

This Aries thing did have merit, so why not try it?

I stared down at the footage of Chi and Aries laughing in the gym, a sinking sensation entering my tummy. Soon that eager smile would be wiped from Aries' face, revealing... what? Anger? Sadness?

Whatever it was I needed to be prepared for it because one thing I learned from being in this game was that plans rarely ever went as planned.

He stood, extending his hand out to me. "Ready?"

I grabbed his outstretched hand, feeling his fingers wrap around mine. "As I'll ever be."

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