Betty had spent most of the night poring over the cipher the Black Hood had sent her—and in the moments when she wasn't caught up in that puzzle, she was frustrated that Jughead hadn't been available to talk all day. It would have been so much better if she could have talked it through with him, so much easier to focus if she had his logical mind helping her find the patterns.

Not to mention that she was still a little freaked out by the letter. She had chosen to take it as a challenge, to accept that if the Black Hood was doing what he was doing because of her speech, to combat the evils living in Riverdale, she had a mandate to track him down herself … but it was unsettling to know she had set something like this in motion, and to think that he knew who she was and she didn't know who he was. He could be watching her; he could be passing her in the halls in school. He could be anywhere.

As soon as it was light enough, she showered and changed and took her envelope full of papers over to Jughead's, unable to sit still under the weight of her fear and excitement any longer.

It was clear she had woken him up—his hair was a mess, and his eyes were bleary. "Betty. What time is it?"

"7:15. I wanted to catch you before school." She kissed him, but he pulled away almost instantly.

"Sorry. I have morning breath. You want coffee or something?" he asked, shutting the door behind her.

"No. I'm actually on my way to the library. I asked Miss Prue to set aside all the books she has on cryptograms and ciphers. I thought it might help us crack the Black Hood's code. Which I'm hoping is something we can do together, Jug," she added.

He was getting milk from the fridge, pouring it out, barely paying attention to her at all. There was a long silence—or, at least, it felt long to Betty—after her request when he didn't move or respond to her at all. Finally, still not looking at her, he said, "Actually … funnily enough, Toni, of all people, and I—we, uh, we started working on that yesterday at The Red and Black."

Toni. Of course. She should have known. So while he was ducking her calls, he was working with Toni on the cipher. Betty's cipher. And now he couldn't even look at her while he told her.

"I can show you what we've got so far, if you want," he said, sitting down with his bowl of cereal, his back still to Betty.

Betty hovered for a moment between walking out in a huff, pretending she didn't see what was happening, and doing something about it. She loved Jughead. He brought something out in her she had always been afraid to show; he made her feel safe, and seen, and loved. She wasn't giving that up this easily. "Toni," she said evenly. She sat down at the table where he had to look at her. "Because, let me guess: She loves serial killers."

"She does have an affinity for the darker side of things, yeah." His laugh was nervous. He knew what was happening as well as Betty did.

"Hm." She could attack, or she could evade, and evading seemed like the better choice at the moment. "In that case, why don't we all work on it together? You, me, Toni … Kevin …"

"Kevin?"

"Yeah. It'll be like a little … code-breaking … party. So fun!" She smacked him lightly on the arm. "You can host." Keeping a carefully calibrated smile on her face, she waited for his response. Which was, naturally, agreement, because anything else would have been too obvious.

Betty left with promises to bring the library books over after school that day. As she closed the door behind her, she hugged to herself the knowledge of the letter, and that the cipher had been sent to her. She didn't entirely like keeping secrets from Jughead … but if he was drifting off toward some other girl, she was glad to have something that was just hers to hold on to. Even if that something was the twisted attention of a serial killer.

The 'code-breaking party' was exactly as tense as Jughead had expected it would be. Toni and Kevin didn't get each other at all, and Toni and Betty danced around each other as if they each saw the other as a scorpion ready to sting.

He wished it was just him and … Toni. Because she was easy, and she didn't expect anything of him. He didn't have to be anything for her other than himself.

And none of them were getting anywhere with the cipher at all.

Betty picked up a copy, frowning at it. "These symbols look so familiar to me. It's like I've seen them before, and it's driving me crazy that I can't figure out where."

"Maybe if you loosened your ponytail," Toni said. It sounded like she meant it to be under her breath, but they all heard her loud and clear, turning to stare at her. She stared back, all wide-eyed innocence, fooling no one. "What? That was a joke, guys."

"Betty's ponytail is iconic, and beyond reproach," Kevin said.

"Kev. It's fine," Betty told him, as Jughead smothered a smile. Then she reached up and took her hair down. "At this point, I'm willing to try anything."

Jughead sat up, turning the conversation back to the cipher to cover how much he wanted to run his hands through Betty's hair, which he had rarely seen down before. He went over some of the basics of cipher-breaking, looking for common letter associations. Toni agreed. But he felt moved to point out that they didn't know enough about the cipher to be assuming it was in English, or that it wasn't an anagram.

"Let's go back to the basics," he said. "What do we know about this guy? Who is he?"

"He's … a white male in his forties … like almost every serial killer, ever," Toni pointed out.

"No. I mean, like why—why is he killing people? Or, at least, why now?" Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kevin look down at Betty as if he expected her to have something to add.

Betty looked back at Kevin, but her face was unreadable to Jughead at the moment. "We know the Hood's obsessed with cleansing the town of sinners and hypocrites, right? And he seems to be attacking anyone with ties to the North Side—"

"Here we go with the fake news again," Toni broke in. "You Northsiders and your privilege. All you do is demonize the South Side, so of course you think the Black Hood's from there."

"It's not demonizing, Toni, it's stating facts. There's way more drugs and gangs and—"

"The drugs, you mean, which are sold primarily to North Side crackheads? And what about the North Side neo-Nazis, the Red Circle? The Red Psychos, you mean. Hell, Betty, I'm surprised you haven't just come out and said it yet."

"Said what?"

"That you think the Black Hood's a Serpent. We all know how much you hate us." Her gaze flicked to Jughead, a reminder to him that he was one now, too, if only by default, and all of Betty's feelings about the Serpents applied to him.

"Okay, Toni—" he began, but Betty spoke over him.

"I don't hate the Serpents."

"Oh, yeah? Then why is it that your boyfriend here lies about the fact that he sits with us at lunch?"

Jughead sighed. He should have known this was how this little party was going to go. He felt Betty's eyes on him, waiting for an explanation, and he resented that he owed her one even while he knew he had helped create this situation by shutting her out.

"I'm gonna go," Kevin said quietly into the silence.

"Yeah. You know what, I'm going to get out of here, too." Toni began gathering her things. She had done what she meant to, after all.

The two of them were gone within seconds of announcing their departure, leaving Jughead and Betty alone.

Jughead slipped off the couch to sit next to her. "Listen, Betty, I sit with the Serpents purely for reasons of survival."

"It's okay, Jug. Let's just keep working on the cipher, okay? The clock's ticking."

"What clock? I mean, this could be his laundry list."

"Or his kill list." She opened a book near her, appearing completely focused on what she was doing. So Jughead did the same, even though he could feel all the things they hadn't said hovering between them.

The buzzing of Betty's phone woke them in the morning, with bright light streaming in through the curtains. Feeling her pull herself out of his arms only made Jughead more aware of how perfectly she had fit there. And how painful it was to have slept together on the couch.

"We fell asleep!" Betty exclaimed in disbelief. "How did we fall asleep?"

"We were exhausted. It's not easy being us."

She gathered her stuff and rushed out the door, muttering about how mad her mom was going to be and promising to call him later, and Jughead lay on the couch and tried not to think anymore, because his brain hurt.

After a while, he got up and started picking up the papers she had left, straightening them so he could return them later. A letter fell out into his hands, and he read it over, his anger rising with his fear. The Black Hood had written to Betty. He had told Betty he was killing people for her, because of her speech. He could be out there right now, watching her, wanting her to be the ultimate victim.

Jughead felt a chill of fear as strong as anything he had felt when his father was first taken to prison. He loved Betty, for all that he was confused about his own place in the world right now and how she fit into it, and the idea of her hurt, or worse—it was unthinkable.

He managed to get through the day, somehow, and hurried to her house as soon as he could that night with her books and the letter.

Holding it up in front of her, he explained how he had found it.

She snatched it out of his hand, saying his name as though he didn't have the right to be upset.

"I'm assuming that it came with the cipher. Betty, why haven't you told anybody?"

"I … I did, I—told Kevin."

"Well, why didn't you tell me?"

"Because you've been … at South Side High, running around with the Serpents."

"Betty, I've been gone for two days. And yeah, it sucks that we don't go to the same school anymore, but that's not the reason you're sitting on the fact that the Black Hood has sent you a letter!" He was guiltily aware of ducking her calls the day the cipher came out … but he was also suspicious that she might not have told him anyway. "So why is it?"

"Because of what it says, Jughead! Because of what he wrote. That I—inspired him. I inspired all of this … madness."

"Do you think people are going to blame you for this?"

She looked at him, her eyes wide, and he realized she did think exactly that—and that the person who blamed her the most was herself. "Not people. Just … one person."

Then it hit him. Whose father had been the first one attacked? Of course. "Archie. For what? For writing a speech that this lunatic has twisted around in order to mess with you? And mess with the town? Yeah, Archie's definitely shook, but he knows who the bad guys are, and you're not one of the bad guys." He sat down next to her, rubbing her back lightly. "You're Betty Cooper. You're like Nancy Drew meets Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."

Startled, she turned to stare at him, and then practically leaped up. "Oh, my god."

"What?"

She snatched the letter out of his hands. "In his letter, the Black Hood said that I'm the only one who can solve the cipher, like he created it specifically for me. Maybe using one of my touchstones. Jug, if I'm right, I think I know how to decode this. Let's go." She reached for her bag.

Jughead followed her to the library, looking in the stacks for a certain book, one that she said she used to check out obsessively. It was a Nancy Drew code book. She flipped hastily through the pages, finding the right code. At a table, she worked quickly, translating with confidence, and then sat back to read her handiwork. "I will strike next where it all began."

They looked at each other, both thinking frantically, but it was Jughead who put the pieces together first. "Your speech! Town Hall."

Hurrying there, they found half the town having an emergency meeting. They tried to convince everyone to leave, but the lights went out before anyone could get moving. The mayor asked everyone to stay seated, but Betty pulled the fire alarm, and people got obediently to their feet to file out, trained to respond to it. Then they had to explain to her parents and the sheriff and the mayor about the letter.

It was hours later before the mayor and the sheriff left, and longer than that before Betty's mother let up and agreed that they could all go to bed. As Betty sat in her bed, trying to read enough to calm herself so she could fall asleep, her phone rang. On the other end … was the Black Hood.