Oh, did Alyssa Hayes create a Close Friends story about how she thought the queer-friendly Spring Fling dance wasn’t godly? Guess who’s writing a letter to the school board about her B&E and posting it on Confessions? Man, did Jacob Webber send in a post complaining about the entire GSA? Guess who’s exposing him as the head of his scummy nude-sharing group chat? Spoiler alert: It’s me. Because when everyone comes to you with their high school’s most notorious gossip, you can head off the rumors related to your brother before they even have a chance to spread. And because after that first time, I realized it was so easy: to put on a mask, to wear the face, to hold all the power. Because I liked it. Because I knew we weren’t going to stay long, anyway.

  “How about you, Santo?” Steff asks, turning to me. She tilts her head, and for a second, I’m worried she’s onto us—that she’s one of the rare people who can instantly tell me and my brother apart. But an easy smile settles onto her lips, and I know she suspects nothing. “Are you ready, too?”

  I smile. “You bet your ass I am,” I tell her. And then my brother and I follow her inside BREAKOUT’s double doors, because we’re prepared, and because tonight, it’s not just a game.

  Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 11:54 PM

  The handle of the meat locker rattles violently, and it’s only then that I realize just how fucked we are.

  It was Matt, and not Santo, who didn’t reply to my desperate brain-fog WhatsApp messages. It was Matt, and not Santo, who ignored my grief-ridden voicemails. It was Matt, and not Santo, who disappeared abroad and left me to mourn while I failed at picking up every jagged puzzle piece the Cesari twins left behind.

  It was Matt, and not Santo, who’s been inside BREAKOUT with me all night.

  Guinevere laughs. “As if,” she says. But Matt doesn’t smile, so her own smile wavers, and then a look of horror passes over her face. “Oh my God. You’re not kidding.”

  But Matt isn’t looking at her. He moves closer to the shattered window, a muscle in his jaw twitching, and I realize that I can’t pull away my gaze.

  “Look at you,” my best friend says softly. “Deer in headlights.” The shadow of a smile threatens the corners of his lips. “I guess I owe you an explanation, huh?”

  It was always him, I realize with stomach-sinking certainty. After the Wanderland game, after the fire, after the funeral. Matteo Luca Cesari is here, inside BREAKOUT, alive.

  Which means that Santo Xavier Cesari, his twin brother, has been dead for an entire year.

  I dig my nails into my palms as the UV-reactive walls of Arsonist’s Revenge swim around me. I fill my lungs in a half breath, guilt and terror coursing through every one of my cells. I can’t make a decision. I can’t choose. I’m stuck in the parking lot again, unsure if I want to step inside BREAKOUT or punch the gas; I’m frozen in the Mitchell-Moores’ driveway, unable to tell if I want to run after Guinevere or let her walk away from me forever.

  God, I can’t have an anxiety attack. Not here. Not now.

  “The Facebook posts from your nonna,” I breathe. “All your pictures. Your body language. You looked like your brother in every one. But you’re identical twins. You’ve been avoiding me because you’re grieving, and because you don’t like me anymore.” I blink, and tears splatter my T-shirt. “Not because you took your brother’s place. Not because you’ve been lying to everyone since last May.”

  Matt shrugs. “Wild when our friends aren’t who we think they are, huh? But hey, Steff, give yourself some credit. At least you solved a few clues, right?”

  Guinevere glances at me, panic playing out across her face, as more memories flood my brain: the weird moments between Malachi and Santo at Matt’s funeral, the Facebook posts I scrounged up while hate comments poured into my There’s No Escape email, the times he called me Steff instead of Zamekova tonight. Every nagging feeling I’ve repressed for the past year.

  This was all a game to him. Each premeditated death and clue and LCD screen video… they were all created so Matt could build up to this moment. Him standing in front of me. Me staring back at him. The ax in his hand, slowly twirling.

  Before I blink, the weapon flashes through the broken shower mirror. Guinevere’s eyes roll backward, lashes fluttering, as she slumps to the ground. Unconscious, hopefully.

  Hopefully unconscious, and not dead.

  “Hmm,” my best friend says. More one-way glass tinkles to the ground as he pulls the rubber ax-head back through the window he’s just created. “That was about sixteen minutes overdue.”

  I step backward, my mind spinning, and force myself to pocket the cryptex as nausea coats my throat. “How did you do it?” I whisper. “How did you take Santo’s place?”

  He shrugs. “We switched,” he says simply. “For Wanderland, before we showed up. Santo knew we were going through a rough patch as a friend group, you know, after he found the post I wrote about you for Cedar Creek Confessions. And Tobias. And Charity. And Guinevere. And Malachi.” His jaw clenches as nausea swoops through my stomach. “But I guess you know how that feels, don’t you?”

  “We’re not the same, Matt. Just because the friend group ended up hating me doesn’t mean that I’m like you. You hurt people.”

  “So did you,” Matt counters. “The six of you killed me.” He pauses. “Well, no. You wanted to kill me.” This time, a menacing smile unfurls at the edges of his mouth. “I’m still here, though. And even if you had your suspicions about my identity, Steff”—he does another twirl with the ax—“you didn’t say anything.” His gaze flicks up, back to mine, and I shudder as he raises a mocking pierced eyebrow. “So what does that make you?”

  “Not a murderer,” I tell him softly, although I’m not sure if I believe it. “Not someone who killed my friends.”

  “YOU KILLED SANTO!” I step backward, startled, and Matt draws in a ragged breath. “You killed Santo,” he repeats, attempting to steady his trembling hands. His scarred fingers aren’t identical to his brother’s, but I guess it hardly matters when your prints were burned off in a fire. When your DNA is the same.

  Tears fill my eyes. “What happened to Santo was terrible. But it was an accident, Matt. I know the truth now—I’ve heard all our secrets. The six of us contributed to his death; we’re all responsible for what happened. But none of it was premeditated. We didn’t lie to the sheriff. We didn’t mean to kill anyone.”

  “You’re still holding the line?” Matt asks, and now I understand why I believed he was his brother: the pull of his mouth, the identical set of his yellow-blond brows, the sympathetic glint in his dark brown eyes. “No, Steff. Intent doesn’t cancel out impact. Your actions—premeditated or not—killed someone. You and everyone else—Charity, Malachi, Tobias, and Guinevere—needed to pay, so I invited you here to even the score.” Matt tilts his head. “Thankfully, Malachi was more than willing to help out his longtime crush. He thought Santo needed his help for one last prank—you know, giving you all one good scare the night before graduation—and was all too thrilled when I brought him some nachos as a thank-you gift.” He smiles. “You’d be surprised at how easy it is in this state to get your hands on enough tractor supply horse tranquilizers to knock someone out cold.” He sneers at the look of horror on my face. “No, he’s not dead yet—you probably panicked while you were up in the HVAC. But once this entire place blows, he will be.”

  “Blows?” I repeat. “What the fuck, Matt? Malachi made one mistake. One, in all the time he stuck out his neck for us.”

  “And you think it was okay for his family to get off scot-free in the aftermath?” Matt demands, his burn-scarred nostrils flaring. “For them to claim Santo’s death—my death—as inspiration for their latest attraction? For all of this”—he gestures around us with the ax—“for Arsonist’s Revenge?” He scoffs in disgust, the UV lights of the industrial meat locker flickering across his purple-lit face. “No. People need to be held responsible for their actions, Steff. We’ve always agreed on that, at least. And BREAKOUT… BREAKOUT is unsafe. It was unsafe when the franchises didn’t have fully functional sprinklers, when the Cedar Creek location got busted for wiring issues, when the lawsuit exposed the loopholes in the company’s waivers, and it’s unsafe now. I’m just proving that the James-Mays are cutting corners. Six deaths, exactly a year after the first one… They’ll have no choice this time, will they? They’ll have to shut it down.”

  Matt’s eyes lock on mine, waiting, like he’s only trying to get me to understand. But none of this is understandable. I finally have my answer, and after all this time, I don’t want it anymore.

  “And if I get revenge on the people who wanted to kill me—who killed my brother—in the process… Well, you know what they say about two birds, right?” Matt adds, lifting the ax.

  Make a decision, Steffi. Choose. RUN.

  I turn on my heel and scramble away from the door just as it bangs against the concrete wall. Glass and snow crunch behind me in tandem, but I don’t turn to look. At the end of the industrial meat locker, the LCD monitor switches to the blinking hot-pink smiley face before it boots up another video—more grainy black-and-white footage—but I don’t care. I need to escape. I have to get away from him.

  Now, before he kills me.

  “BECAUSE YOU HAVE FAILED TO ESCAPE IN TIME,” Matt yells as the in-room speakers crackle to life, “YOU WILL BE ELIMINATED, AND YOUR SECRET WILL NOW BE REVEALED FOR YOU.”

  “So, Miss Zamekova, tell me: Did you have a strained relationship with Matteo Cesari prior to his death?”

  I slip past a line of metal shelving just as a vibrant memory rears its head: fidgeting in an uncomfortable chair, sweeping my eyes over one-way glass, landing right back on Sheriff Travis Stallard’s too-blue eyes. The version of myself on-screen, the one who’s still freshly seventeen, shakes her head from side to side.

  “No. Matt and I are best friends. He’s had… issues with the friend group in the past. But we didn’t hate him. Sure, he made all those heinous Instagram posts, but we eventually forgave him.” On-screen, past me’s throat bobs. “Because that’s what friends do.”

  “Are you familiar with perjury, Steff?” Matt calls. “Because creating a plan to kill me makes what you originally told Sheriff Stallard look very disingenuous. And I would hate to see you caught in a LIE!”

  I duck past the sixth burlap-sacked body. The flapping soles of my broken sneakers snag beneath me and I slip, crashing into metal. Iron fills my mouth. My shoulder smarts, but I manage to lurch upright just as Matt’s laugh sounds behind me. “Are you trying to outrun me? You’re sprinting toward a dead end, Steff. There’s nothing beyond this room.”

  I slide behind a stack of cylinders and press my back against the wall, searching the props for a makeshift weapon, feeling impossibly cornered. At best, Matt is seconds away from killing me for what I planned to do to him and accidentally did to his brother instead. And honestly? Maybe I deserve it.

  I can hear his shuffling footsteps. The dragging ax. I squeeze my eyes shut, suddenly hyperaware of my breath, my heartbeat, my blood as a rush of images flood my mind: the clothes that Illaria Cesari cleared out and donated. The paperwork, the cops, the burial. Guinevere’s warm lips against mine, an old Radiohead song playing softly from my Jeep’s speakers and mixing with her quiet sobs. The fucking GoFundMe. Congresswoman Adler’s tearful speeches. Principal Buchanan urging us to honor Matt’s memory when this whole time he’s been hiding out in Italy, painting his nails, and catching up on over forty seasons of Survivor. Ignoring my messages. Listening to his brother’s favorite Mongolian folk metal band. Forgetting to tone his yellow-blond head after he nuked it with bleach and 30 Volume Creme Developer, because he’s a straight white man who had no idea how toner worked until I explained it to him tonight.

  A silver-ringed hand parts the cylinders until I’m face-to-face with the signet ring Santo never took off when he was still alive: DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP. “Found you.”

  “Matt. Wait,” I gasp. He tilts his head, and I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know what to do. This is the same person who wiped sticky arcade countertops and sprayed cleaner into bowling shoes with me for hours on end during our joint shifts at Perfect Strike. The one who made sure my hair was camera ready or checked whether I had something in my teeth at the beginning of every day before I ever hit RECORD in the newsroom for Warrior Minutes. The one I asked to proofread my blog posts. The one who helped me negotiate my first TERPECA-room-sponsored deal. The one who listened to my dad’s old rock songs without complaint, who let me borrow his leather trench coat on the night Michal Zamek packed up and left me and my mom with a mountain of debt. Maybe that was why I started taking bribes in exchange for glowing reviews. With most of my blog money locked in the trust, selling out was probably the only method I had to escape our terrible financial situation. To help out Mom. To afford eggs.

  “Before you kill me, I need to know… why did you make that post about me? All I ever did was try to help you adjust to living here. I thought of you as my best friend. So why did you want to expose my blog on Cedar Creek Confessions? You thought Mal was bad for Santo. Tobias fucked you over on the chess team. Guinevere didn’t give you enough physical affection, and Charity never enjoyed your presence. But what did I do? Why did you sell me out?”

  “You mean, other than for the usual moral reasons?” Matt’s eyes flicker toward Guinevere’s unconscious body, and I suddenly understand. He knew. This whole time, he knew that I liked her. That she didn’t like him. That he had to make me pay for it.

  “Oh,” I whisper, realizing tonight’s revenge game was personal on a lot of levels. Thinking about how Guinevere didn’t die before her secret video played. How Matt couldn’t kill her even now. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, my voice hoarse. “I never meant to—”

  “Yeah.” His hot breath ghosts my forehead, and every hair on the back of my neck stands on end. “Well, you di—”

  I flick out the blade of my Swiss Army knife and lunge forward, slashing at Matt as I break for the door. Startled, he swipes at me with the ax and succeeds in knocking the knife from my hand. It clatters to the floor, and I pause for a millisecond.

  Leave it. Go.

  I’m halfway to the shattered one-way-glass window when my arm wrenches backward and I cry out, slamming headfirst against the metal shelving. Stars explode at the edges of my vision as Matt grunts in my ear, but I elbow him and roll away. My head is killing me—I might be dealing with another TBI, I realize as I duck underneath the burlapped bodies, prepped for this cat-and-mouse game by my earlier confrontation with Guinevere, unable to believe I ever thought of her as my enemy—but I’m finally ready to leave all of this behind. I’m almost at the door when something warm and wet slides across my neck—Zwinggg!—and for the second time in the course of a year, my knees buckle out from under me.

  My vision goes white, and then there’s nothing but weightlessness and no breath. Absolutely no breath at all.

  365 Days After the Accident

  Growing up with an identical twin wasn’t easy. Momma swears she accidentally switched us around at least once, so who knows if either of us actually ended as the twin we began. She used to paint our infant nails different colors so she’d remember who was who.

  But becoming Santo Cesari was easy. Like slipping on a second skin.

  Immediately after the fire, my face—my brother’s face—was almost unrecognizable. So while stumbling out of BREAKOUT last May, choking on smoke and secrets and the crushing weight of Santo’s death, I knew I had a choice to make. And I chose to let the good people of Cedar Creek, Tennessee, believe what they wanted. I chose to let everyone think Matteo Luca Cesari—the reject, the weirdo, the charismatic yet antisocial loser—asphyxiated.

  But he didn’t.

  He lived.

  I lived, and I took on the life of my twin brother despite the fact that Wanderland killed him. My friends killed him. They wanted to kill me for revealing their secrets, and they killed my brother instead, and now we’re playing one last escape room exactly a year later, and I am finally enacting my revenge.

  So far, everything is going according to plan.

  Below me, Steff stirs. It’s clear that she’s blinking between consciousness and a distant dreamworld. She’s fighting me—fighting this—but she won’t be for long.

  Still, though, I want her to remember this. I want her last memory to be what it feels like to be betrayed.

  “When you first contacted me after the fire,” I tell her, dragging her out of the meat locker and into the gas-filled bathroom, my fingers twisted in her damp dyed hair, “you said you were checking in.” The LED lights flood us. “All those texts. All those voicemails. All those letters. You wanted to know if I had nightmares, like you did.”

  Steff whimpers. I don’t know if she can hear me.

  “But after Santo died, my life became one long waking nightmare. Because my best friend—my best friend—was gone.” I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Every day, I woke up and put on Santo’s clothes. Every night, I went to bed and listened to Momma sobbing for hours. I knew I needed to leave, so I went to Italy, but that didn’t fix anything, so I started leaving myself voicemails. Texts from my own phone, just to try and make the loss feel less real, until I stopped being able to tell where Santo ended and I began.” I pull out Charity’s watch from my pocket and check the time: 11:55 PM. “Then my burns healed. I started seeing his face again, and I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. But then I thought, why not go out with a bang?” A smile curves my lips. “And you know what? Right now, I’m feeling perfectly fine. Better than I’ve felt in a long time, actually.” I swallow. “I’ve waited too long for this, you know?”

  I readjust the sweat-slicked ax handle. No more games—it’s time to finish what I started and avenge my brother. Because when I invited Charity Noelle Adler, Tobias Quinton Matthews, Guinevere Jade Mitchell-Moore, and Stephanie Marie Zamekova here tonight under the supervision of Malachi Ashton James-May, I meant every word: There’s always a price to pay for your past mistakes.