Chapter 1
JACE
“Is it just me, or could that meeting have been an email?” Jax, my twin brother, asks as he pushes open the door to our dorm room.
“Forget an email, that could have been a text.” Xave squeezes past Jax and hurries over to the couch in the seating area in the center of the room. “Claimed,” he announces as he flops down on it and kicks his leg up so it’s lying across the open cushions.
“Yeah, you can fuck off what that shit,” Killian says and stalks toward the couch.
“Not my fault you’re too slow to get the good seat.” Xave shoots him a cheeky smile. “Shoulda hustled your ass instead of getting distracted with sexting with the bf.”
“Oh yeah? Hustle this.” Killian grabs Xave’s ankle, but instead of yanking like Xave is obviously expecting, he wrenches Xave’s leg in a circle.
The move forces Xave to lean into the spin, and he tumbles off the couch and lands on the floor in a heap.
“Asshole,” Xave grumbles as Killian sits in his vacated spot.
“What’s that?” Killian cups his hand around his ear. “I can’t hear you from all the way down there.”
“Children,” Jax says to our cousins as he sits on the ridiculous settee across from the couch. “Do I need to separate you?”
“Separate this,” Xave flips both Killian and Jax off as he gets to his feet.
Jax rests his arm over the back of the settee and shoots Xave an unbothered half smile. Killian, on the other hand, takes advantage of Xave’s distraction and gives him a quick kick to the back of his knee.
Xave’s leg buckles, and he windmills his arms a few times to catch his balance so he doesn’t fall on his face.
“Gotta be careful with those knees, gramps,” Killian says casually as Xave shoots him a glare. “Old joints are a liability, you know.”
Xave is only a few years older than us, but hates being reminded that he’s the older one. So, like any good cousins, we fuck with him about his age every chance we get.
“Bite me,” Xave says, but there’s no real heat in his voice as he sits on the far cushion, leaving the middle one between them free.
This kind of horsing around is typical for them, and usually I’d be right there in the thick of things and instigating even more chaos, but I’m not in the mood tonight.
“I still don’t understand what the point of that meeting was,” Xave says, all traces of his early teasing gone.
“Why bother telling us that something is going on and that we need to be extra vigilant, but then not tell us what’s actually going on?
How are we supposed to watch out for something if we don’t even know what it is? ”
“Yeah, this whole thing is weird,” Jax agrees. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense for them to warn us that something’s going on but not give any details about what it is.”
“Maybe it’s a need-to-know thing.” I pick up a pen from my desk and spin it around my fingers absentmindedly.
“It could be,” Killian agrees. “But it’s still weird that they’d call a house meeting for it and make everyone attend if they can’t tell everyone what’s going on.
” He shoots Jax a quick look. “Do you think it has something to do with what happened to Felix and Myles making our security system his bitch?”
Jax flicks his gaze to me.
My brother and I are very plugged into the inner workings of the Rebels, the secret society that masquerades as a fraternity here on campus. All four of us are members, but I’m still privy to more information than the others, even Jax, just based on the nature of the work we do.
I’m a tech guy, where Jax is more of a hands-on and strategy person, and since his boyfriend is the one who made our system his bitch, as Killian pointed out, he doesn’t exactly have an unbiased view in this situation.
“It’s possible, but unlikely,” I tell them.
“Myles is a highly skilled hacker who hacked us under duress. Even Carter agrees that the only reason Myles could do what he did was because of how damn good he is. Not many people have that kind of ability, and now that we know the flaws in our system and Myles is helping us fortify it against future hacks, there’s literally no reason to tell the whole frat to watch out for cyberattacks.
Especially since most of the guys here still use ‘password’ or ‘12345678’ to log in to their school accounts. ”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too.” Killian leans back against the couch with a sigh. “So that means we’re dealing with a new security threat?”
“Maybe,” I say. “Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I doubt it’s a cyber threat. If it were, I’d either have been told about it, or I would have found it myself.”
“You think you’re better than Carter?” Xave shoots me a dubious look.
Carter is the head of the frat’s security systems. He knows more about our defenses than anyone, and he’s the only person on campus who knows about all the different layers of our security and how to control them.
He’s also the best hacker I’ve ever met, both online and IRL, and he has a side gig where alumni hire him to break into their security systems so he can find their weaknesses and give them ways to fix them.
In a 1 v 1, he’d kick my ass and hand it back to me on a silver platter, but I’ve been working with Carter to fix all the issues Myles found when he hacked our system, so I’ve had a chance to make sure I also understand the fixes and can still access all the same information I could before.
If there were something going on with our cybersecurity or a threat from another hacker, I’d have found evidence of it, even if Carter and the leaders of the frat decided not to tell me.
“No, but Carter isn’t trying to keep me out of the system, so I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on, and there’s no evidence of any sort of threat or attack that I can find.”
“Have they said anything to the senior members?” Jax asks Xave.
He shakes his head. “Not as far as I know. They might have told some of the guys at the main house and excluded me, but I doubt it.”
Jax nods slowly, his gaze fixed on the floor in that way he does when he’s analyzing information and connecting dots.
Unlike the three of us who live in Hamilton House, the dorm where most of the members of the Rebels live, Xave is one of the trusted few seniors who live in the main house with the leaders.
He also works closely with Nico, the head of our physical security, so the chances of him not being informed about threats or security breaches are slim.
“Especially after that shit went down just before Thanksgiving,” Xave adds.
“Yeah, that was weird,” Killian muses. “Did you ever figure out what that was about?” He flicks his gaze to me.
I shake my head and stop spinning the pen. “All I know is that it was an outside threat and had nothing to do with anything that’s happened on campus.”
“Yeah, I heard the same thing,” Xave says. “And I’m guessing there’s no info about it in our system?”
“Nope.” I toss the pen onto my desk and pick up a pack of gum. “They locked that info down tighter than a virgin’s ass.” Popping a piece out, I toss it in my mouth and drop the package onto my desk.
The incident in question happened just before Thanksgiving break, and the leaders of the frat put the main house under lockdown for almost two weeks while they sorted out whatever issue caused them to go into lockdown.
Unlike other times, I wasn’t asked to help Carter look into whatever was going on, and Jax, Killian, and Xave weren’t tasked with anything beyond helping with basic crowd control and enforcing the lockdown.
Even now that months have passed, no one has explained what actually went down or what the threat was.
“Do you think this is connected to that?” Xave asks Jax.
“It’s possible,” Jax says, his unseeing gaze still fixed firmly on the floor. “But I can’t be sure without more information.”
“What are your instincts telling you?” Killian presses.
Jax finally lifts his eyes, and the calculating look in them tells me he’s still deep in thought over this. “Considering all the secrecy around whatever happened then and whatever is going on now, I’m thinking it’s all connected.”
Killian glances at me.
“Samesies,” I confirm.
Killian starts to say something, but he’s cut off when the door to our room opens.
“Good meeting?” Felix asks as he and Myles come into our room.
“Let’s just say that’s two hours of our lives we won’t be getting back,” Killian says as Felix comes to sit next to him.
“That sucks.” Felix leans in for a kiss, which Killian happily gives him.
“Gag,” Xave says loudly when their kiss goes from a quick hello to one involving lots of tongue and Killian gripping Felix’s chin to hold him in place so he can ravage his mouth.
“I’m not sure which is worse: watching you two fight like feral cats for almost ten years, or having to watch you suck face and give each other mooneyes every time I’m in your orbit now that you don’t hate each other. ”
Finally breaking the kiss, both Killian and Felix flip Xave off.
“It’s hard to picture them fighting,” Myles says as he sits next to Jax, who promptly leans in and pecks a quick kiss against Myles’s lips. “I heard the rumors about how they couldn’t even be in the same room together, and now they’re so…adorable.”
Jax snickers. “They weren’t always like this. The fighting was real.”
“Was it fighting, or was it years-long foreplay?” I ask teasingly.
“Definitely years-long foreplay.” Jax loosely drapes his arm over Myles’s shoulder.
“Shut up,” Felix says, snuggling into Killian’s side. “What happened at the meeting?” He flicks his gaze to Myles. “Or can you not talk about it?”
“Should I go?” Myles looks around the room nervously.
“Nope.” Jax pulls Myles closer to him.
“But if you need to talk about house business…”
“Don’t worry about it, kid.” Using my feet, I swing my desk chair in a slow arc. “You’re good. The meeting was a whole lotta nothing.”
He shoots me a small smile but doesn’t look convinced.