Chapter 1

Nix stood in the corner of his dorm room, tracking Lake’s movements as he packed his things for him. Clothing and textbooks were shoved into a duffle bag haphazardly, as though Lake could feel the same clawing tension in the air that Nix felt.

How had things gotten so messed up so quickly?

He’d come here in search of answers, wanting to find justice for his cousin after she’d sent him a cryptic letter just before taking her own life.

Only now, it was starting to seem like Nix had never really known her at all, and that the letter was more a setup than a plea for help. Earlier that day, he’d discovered Branwen had gone by a fake name at Foxglove Grove University. It explained why he hadn’t been able to find any traces of her since everyone on campus knew her by an alias, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t figure out why she’d go through all that trouble.

What had she been trying to hide?

And from who?

The man packing up Nix’s things, even though he’d made it clear he didn’t want to go anywhere with him? That would be a good guess. The Demons of Foxglove Grove weren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty or throwing their weight around. A person like Branwen wouldn’t have anything to fear so long as she kept her head down and stayed off their radar.

But a person like Iris…

Iris Cherith. Branwen’s fake identity. She’d kept her real last name, possibly because the school wouldn’t allow her to change it, but Nix couldn’t be certain. Yet. He’d have to find out. There were more threads now than at the start of it, but that wasn’t what frustrated him the most.

It was the fact he was here, being dragged around by Lake like he was one of the man’s possessions instead of an individual person. He could be out there, searching for answers now that he finally had a clue to follow, or even leaving since he’d learned she wasn’t who he’d thought her to be, but instead, he was trapped here.

Bleeding.

His hand shook as he lifted it, placing it tenderly against the torn spot on his neck, shock still coursing through his system over what had just happened.

How Lake had bitten him, and not just with any plain old bite either.

Nix should have anticipated some type of retaliation once the Imperial learned of his connection to Iris, but he’d foolishly divulged that information, and almost as soon as he had, Lake had shoved him up against a wall and punished him for that connection.

Not that the other guy considered it a punishment.

Asshole.

It needed to be bandaged as soon as possible, and a part of him wondered how much of Lake’s haste was due to wanting to get him medical attention and how much of it was out of worry Nix might try to run.

His gaze darted toward the closed door, but he didn’t so much as shift closer to it. Where would he even go? Back home?

It was tempting. So tempting. To give up on everything and flee. Why stay? For Branwen? The person he’d trusted the most? Where had that trust gotten him?

“She knew,” he whispered, not realizing he was speaking out loud until Lake paused and turned toward him with a blank expression on his cold face. “When she wrote me that letter, she knew what would happen once I read it.”

Maybe Nix hadn’t known her as well as he’d thought, but that wouldn’t be the case if their roles were reversed. He’d always been transparent with her. His one and only friend. The only family member he’d believed understood him and was on his side. She’d known his quiet act was just that, that he had a rebellious streak. That he was capable of picking up and starting over if it meant protecting someone he cared for.

She’d also known she was the only real person who made that list.

And what had she done?

He laughed stupidly and tapped his head against the wall, staring up at the ceiling as tears filled his eyes. “In the letter, she even put that she shouldn’t be writing to me.”

“She probably guessed you’d come to Foxglove in search of answers,” Lake agreed after a lengthy pause.

“Bet you’re pleased about that,” he practically snarled, quirking a brow when that had Lake frowning. “The fact that she wanted me to come means it’s possible for me to discover the person who hurt her. If we’re correct in our thinking, that also happens to be your hacker.”

“You’re my hacker,” Lake corrected.

Nix snorted but now wasn’t the time to argue with him about ownership. “There’s got to be something I’ve missed. A clue somewhere she expected me to easily find. If only I hadn’t wasted all this time with—”

“Don’t,” Lake warned.

“Or what? Going to bite me again?” Nix stared him down daringly.

“You’re sure she told you she was dating a King?” Lake changed the subject.

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t make sense. The hacker we’re after wouldn’t need to use her to climb the ranks if he already held that position himself.”

He shrugged. “Not my problem that the pieces don’t fit for you.”

“Nix.”

“Deal with your own issues,” he snapped. “I’ll deal with mine.” Nix pushed off the wall and crossed the room, snatching the duffle out of Lake’s grasp. “Starting with this. I don’t need you keeping tabs on me or your protection or whatever other bullshit excuse you’ll give for why I need to move in with you. My answer is no. I won’t do it.”

“You’re upset.”

“Of course I am!”

“What I mean is,” Lake took the bag back but dropped it on the ground at their feet, “you’re emotional right now. Once you calm down, you’ll see reason. Part of you wants to refuse to believe we’re after the same person because you’re angry with me, but the only way for you to really find out for sure is by continuing your investigation.”

Nix tightened his hands into fists at his side. “What investigation? I’ve done nothing this entire time but be your fucking toy!”

“I bit you,” Lake said darkly. “You know better than that.”

His shoulders caved somewhat, and even though he hated himself for the weakness, Nix found he no longer had the energy to keep up with his warring emotions. “You’re worried Yejun will find out and it’ll affect him negatively. Fine. I’ll go. If I transfer back to my old school—”

“I bit you,” he repeated.

“You didn’t mean it.”

Lake’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what you’re hoping, isn’t it. You’d rather I have acted foolishly and in anger than—”

He lifted a hand, stopping him. “We don’t know each other well enough for you to want anything more with me than what we already have.” And frankly, the idea that Lake could have been thinking this was more scared the shit out of Nix. “You won’t let me leave now? All right. Then I’ll stay until the contract is up, but come Demons Passing, I’m out of here, whether or not I’ve found the hacker.”

“You’ll just abandon your cousin like that? After everything you’ve already given up for her?”

“After finding out she played me just as easily as you have?” Nix growled. “Yeah. Yeah I will.”

A twist of guilt cinched around his heart but Nix played it off. This was all too much too soon and he needed time alone to think and sort through everything. He wanted to believe Branwen had her reasons, but there was no matching the version of her he’d carried all this time with the one he’d been presented with. Iris sounded nothing like the girl he’d grown up with.

“Branwen was always kind,” he said then. “She liked to daydream, sure, and sometimes she could be considered a bit na?ve, but when we were kids, she’d cry if she accidentally stepped on a bug at the park.”

“You aren’t kids anymore, Songbird,” Lake pointed out. “More often than not, people are more than they seem. You should know this better than most. If I went to any of your ex-peers, I bet not a single one of them would be able to guess how submissive you are for me in the bedroom. How cute you look when you strip, blushing. How mouthy you can still manage to be even with my fingers in your ass.”

Nix scowled, but Lake wasn’t finished.

“What about your parents, hm? If I called them right now and told them their son has been arrested for hacking into Essential? What do you think the first words out of their mouths would be?”

“That you were a liar,” he stated. “And you would be.”

“You might not have tried your luck with Essential, but that’s not the part that they’d find hard to believe. They don’t know what their perfect, straight-A student son gets up to. People see you as a loner because that’s what you’ve always wanted them to see. Your cousin had her own secrets, same as everyone else.”

“Are you forgetting you’re the one who was just yelling at me for caring about her?” He tugged on his collar. “That’s why you bit me even.”

“I’m protecting you,” he disagreed.

“From Yejun. Right.” Nix shook his head. “If you really wanted to protect me, you’d let me leave this place.”

“Is that what you really want?” Lake asked. “You find out Branwen tricked you and suddenly her death no longer matters to you?”

He glanced away, then, because he didn’t have anything better to do to distract himself, he crouched down and reached for his duffle. A flash of orange and neon yellow caught his eye and he paused with his hand on the bag.

They were tucked beneath Grady’s bed, which was why neither of them had seen them, but even from the shadows under there, the colors were bright enough for Nix to easily make them out. They were so bright, in fact, that he certainly would remember them if he’d spotted them in the room before.

It was unmistakable they were the same shoes he’d just seen on the security footage. The ones whoever had shoved him into the stall had been wearing.

Nix felt himself go cold.

“Is there no one I can trust?” Grady had been nice to him these past couple of weeks, had included him whenever he spent time with his friends on campus or at meals. Hell, just yesterday, they’d had lunch together in the small cafeteria and everything had seemed fine between them. He hadn’t even brought up the Demons again.

Apparently, he hadn’t been as forgiving with Nix for spending time with them as Nix had believed.

“Songbird?” Lake started to lower after him, and Nix practically jumped back up to prevent him from catching sight of the shoes as well.

Was Grady most likely behind the attacks? Yes. But that didn’t mean Nix was going to toss him to the Demons. He’d speak with him first, confirm things on his own. It wasn’t like he trusted Lake any more than he did his roommate. Not now. After everything.

Besides, Grady had shaken him up a little, but he’d never really hurt him. Even Lake and the others had pointed out the pranks seemed more like that than any real harm. Considering Nix had just learned firsthand that everyone who came into contact with the Demons ended up hurt, he couldn’t even blame Grady for his animosity.

He’d tried to warn Nix off nicely and he hadn’t listened. Now he was bleeding from the neck and trapped in more ways than one. Ways he still couldn’t fully comprehend. It was clear, however, that if Nix ran now, Grady would be discovered, and if Lake found out he was behind what had happened in the stalls…

It was impossible to tell if that comment he’d made about cutting off hands had been in the heat of the moment or from the heart.

Maybe he hadn’t learned his lesson—no, he definitely hadn’t, if Nix was really considering putting himself through more risk just to protect someone else. Someone else who had in their own way betrayed him too. He should know better after what he’d just discovered about Branwen. But…

Lake was right. He couldn’t give up. He needed to see this through, if only for his own peace of mind. If someone else got hurt because of him, if whoever had done this to Branwen and pushed her to lie got away with it because he’d given up, he’d regret it for the rest of his life.

Nix took a deliberate step back, squaring his shoulders when Lake’s brow furrowed. “You won’t let me go?”

“No,” he confirmed.

“And you want me to move into the Roost?”

Lake grew suspicious. “You know I do.”

“Then tell me everything,” Nix demanded. “Everything you know. Everything that happened between Bran—” He stopped himself and tried again. “—Iris and Yejun. How do you know she was working with the hacker? How did you find out?”

It seemed like Lake was going to refuse to answer, but he must have realized how serious Nix was and changed his mind. “West caught her drugging Yejun.”

“What?” He had to have misheard. “No, she wouldn’t…”

“We’re not sure how many times it’d already happened,” Lake continued. “She’d only been invited over to the Roost a couple of times, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t do it once or twice in his private studio. He claims he can’t remember if he ever passed out there with her or not. His work ethic means it’s not odd for him to burn himself out by staying up for three days straight. Crashing because his body is exhausted isn’t abnormal for him, so he wouldn’t have found it odd if he took a random nap.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She was trying to get into his multi-slate at first, but when she drugged him here, she was found in his room.”

“Doing?”

Lake shook his head. “Our guess is plans changed when she and her boss realized she wasn’t smart enough to hack into his device. She was going through his finished paintings, looking for something specific.”

“What?”

“Art by the Sang family is considered invaluable, did you know that? There’s a piece hanging in every building that has any importance or stature on this planet. Dozens of Yejun’s work are displayed in the Club House, and my uncle had asked him to paint something specific for his office there…Do you see where this is going, Songbird?”

Branwen didn’t have the skills to hack into Yejun’s multi-slate herself, but she couldn’t exactly steal it and give it to the person who could. There were security cameras all throughout the school buildings, ones Yejun would easily be able to access if he’d gotten suspicious. The hacker wouldn’t have been able to come to them either.

“You said you caught the hacker trying to break into the system inside Essential,” Nix recalled. “How’d they get close enough for that?”

“They didn’t. One of Yejun’s paintings did.”

“She did something to it.”

“The first time, we had no way of knowing. The security team was alerted early on there was a breach, and West took care of it personally. But he couldn’t figure out how they’d gotten in. The second we caught her in Yejun’s room trying to plant another device, on yet another painting that was set to enter the Club House, it was clear. We had irrefutable evidence, Nix. No matter what you want to believe, she wasn’t innocent and this wasn’t a misunderstanding.”

“Why weren’t charges brought against her?” Nix would have heard about that if there had been. She hadn’t just messed with the Demons. She’d messed with Essential. That was treason.

“You mean why wasn’t she ripped apart like the other people who wronged us?” Lake asked. “You have Yejun to thank for that. I don’t know what else she was feeding him, but your cousin really had him wrapped around her finger. He should have reported her to the Order. Instead, he covered it up and merely had her expelled. She was blocked on everything and warned if she ever returned to this side of the planet, we’d kill her and go after her family for good measure.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I didn’t know she was dead, Nix. That’s the truth.”

Oddly enough, he’d never even questioned that part. Not after the way Lake had reacted.

“She said he was a King,” Nix stated, wanting to lay it all out there now that they seemed to be on the same page for once. Wanted to do it before things reverted back to the way they’d been, and Lake returned to throwing his weight around. “I know I’m not misremembering. She told me the guy she was seeing was a King. They’d met on the app.”

Lake considered it and then, “So, you don’t think that was a part of it at all?”

“No.” He crossed his arms. “Why were you all so certain it was?”

“She asked Yejun to give her Favors,” he said. “Enough for her to make it into the King tier. Why else would she have wanted that if not so she could help the hacker gain access to the program? She couldn’t hack it, sure, but once she had access to the King chat, she could easily hand her device over to the man who could.”

It just wasn’t sitting right with Nix. Something still wasn’t adding up about that explanation.

According to their logic, the hacker hadn’t wanted to expose themselves by joining the Enigma app and fucking around to become a King. But if Branwen was to be believed, that was how she and this person had met in the first place.

“Kings can interact with all of the lower tiers on the app,” Nix pointed out. “She didn’t need to be one herself in order to talk to this guy. You were listed under the King tier, yet you were off planet, so I’m guessing that meant you didn’t really frequent the app.”

“I did not,” Lake confirmed.

“What about West?”

“He just uses it now and again to hook up randomly. What are you getting at, Songbird?”

“You’re not all friends. Making the King tier doesn’t mean you all get together and hold secret meetings.”

“The Kings don’t really interact with each other at all,” he admitted. “Unless we proposition each other, which some people have done in the past.”

“Has any other King ever propositioned Yejun?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him that yourself.” Lake sighed. “I’m still not following. Where are you going with this?”

“This person approached my cousin after she’d already developed some sort of relationship with Yejun,” Nix hypothesized.

Lake frowned.

“Think about it. The hacker didn’t care about getting into the Enigma app, he cared about infiltrating Essential. If that was all he wanted, why would he need Branwen? The app and the club are two separate things, and you’ve got proof that he tried to hack into Essential, not Enigma.”

Because the only idiot here who’d tried that had been Nix, but neither of them bothered to mention it now.

“You weren’t around, which meant the only way in was through West or Yejun. My cousin made for an easy target once she’d drawn Yejun’s attention after meeting him in art class. The reason the hacker told her to ask for Favors? Favors bring you closer together.”

That’s what happened with him. Nix had developed a fucked up attachment to Maestro shortly after their very first encounter.

“I was easily enthralled by you because I didn’t know any better,” Nix added, a bit excited now that things seemed to be making sense finally. “But if Branwen was instructed to do this with Yejun, she would have been warned ahead of time. The two of them got close, didn’t they? That’s because she wanted him to trust her. She used the Favors to form a tighter bond with him and gain his trust so she could get close enough to plant the devices and—”

“The blood has soaked through your collar.”

“What?” Nix blinked and pursed his lips, momentarily unsure what Lake was talking about.

“We need to go get that tended to,” Lake said, reaching down to grab the bag. He was quick about it, so Nix only had a second to remember the hidden shoes and fear them being seen before he was straightening and setting that cold gaze on him once more. “Is there anything else you want to grab while we’re here?”

“Are you serious?” He couldn’t be. “We’re so close to figuring it all out. Isn’t that what you wanted? Why would you stop me now of all—”

Lake reached out and grabbed him around the collar, yanking him close, hard enough that he slammed into his chest. “Are you asking that because you really don’t understand, or are you doing what your cousin supposedly did with Yejun?”

“What?” Nix was confused all over again. What did he— “Hold on. You’re not saying you think I was using Favors to gain your trust, are you? That’s ridiculous!”

“How so?”

“You’re serious?” Nix tried to shove himself away but Lake’s arm wrapped tightly around his waist, keeping him close despite his protests. “Lake I didn’t trick you into anything. Let’s look at the evidence, shall we? You’re the one who had me sign that damn contract even though I didn’t want to. And you’re the one who did this to my neck—” He snapped his mouth shut, refusing to continue.

“You spoke a lot of words just now,” Lake pointed out, “but you’re still refusing to speak those ones?”

“Let go.”

“I bit you,” he said, “so we both know that’s not going to happen. Not now, and certainly not after Demons Passing.”

Nix froze. “Lake. Please, don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Just…Don’t.”

“It’s already done, is it not?” He poked at the injury on Nix’s neck, laughing darkly when that caused him to hiss in pain. “Feels pretty real to me. You’ve been claimed, Songbird.”