Chapter 5 Jace
JACE
My room is quiet as I open the door and slip inside. Jax is at Myles’s again, so I have complete privacy as I lock the door behind me and head over to my dresser.
I have no idea what just happened in Shane’s room, but I’m not mad about it.
I knew he’d be pissed that I caught him cheating, and I expected he might deal with his anger by trying to beat me into next week, but I didn’t have him rubbing off on me until we both came on my bingo card for the night.
I can’t stop my smile as I open my drawer and pull out a fresh pair of underwear, then fish a set of clean sweatpants out of another.
The fact that he’s the one who finished us off is way more satisfying than it probably should be.
So was how he sort of glitched out when the afterglow faded and he realized what he did.
Still grinning at the unexpected turn of events, I strip off my soiled bottoms and carry my new clothes into the bathroom so I can do a quick cleanup.
When I’m done, I toss my dirty clothes in my hamper and head over to my desk.
Instead of sitting at it, I pull my chair out of the way and kneel so I can reach my surge protector.
Sliding my finger over the back, I press the tiny divot that opens the hidden compartment built into the bottom of it.
The mechanism clicks, and I lift the bar and pop open the compartment so I can grab one of the flash drives I stashed in there.
When I have it, I close the compartment and flop down on my desk chair and scoot it back up to my desk.
I give my mouse a little wiggle to flash up my computer, then open my desk drawer and pull out one of my butterfly knives.
I put it away before I went to Shane’s room in case he decided to put hands on me again and somehow found it.
The last thing I need right now is for him to run around telling everyone I had a knife on me or that I pulled one on him.
The guys in my frat might be okay with my penchant for fighting, and most of them are aware that me, Jax, and our cousins seem to find ourselves in situations that force us to fight our way out of them more often than not, but very few people outside our family know exactly what the four of us can do, or how easy it is for us to do it.
Unlike most of the assholes who go to this school, we aren’t just empty-headed rich kids who ride the coattails of our family’s accomplishments.
Even most of the guys in the frat have no idea what kind of shit their parents actually get up to in their businesses, and would have no idea how to handle a problem if it bit them in the ass.
Our parents recognized that we’re different early on, especially Jax and me, and they made sure to give us all the training and tools we’d need not only to protect ourselves and each other but also to get shit done.
Because of this, we’ve had to be careful not to let anyone other than the house leaders and their inner circle see what we’re capable of, and it’s why we stick together.
It sucks donkey balls to have to tailor my entire existence around the sensibilities of the people around me, but at least it keeps the drama to a minimum.
Snapping the blade open with a flick of my wrist, I spin it around my fingers, the repetitive motion calming the last of my lingering adrenaline from the fight as I slide the flash drive into the port on my computer tower and type in the password to unlock it.
A little window appears on my screen with two dozen compressed files listed. I click on one of the ones in the middle, revealing another window of folders. On autopilot, I open one of the folders, then keep opening folders until I finally get to the one I want.
Burying the file in a web of decoy folders isn’t the most high-tech way to secure it, but it’s effective, especially when dealing with the dumbasses who live in my dorm.
Still spinning my knife, I open the file and navigate to the section I’m looking for.
Back when Myles was trying to figure out who was blackmailing him into helping some assholes kill Felix, he found a file in the Kings’ system that was full of incriminating evidence they’d collected on members of the other frats.
He destroyed the file at the source, then gave us a copy of it when he and Jax got together so we could deal with it.
I was supposed to delete any and all traces of it after handing it off to our house leadership, and as far as they’re concerned, I did just that.
The section of the file on the Rebels is way bigger than the other two frats on campus, and some of them go back almost a decade, meaning this fact-finding mission had been going on for years before it was discovered.
There wasn’t much in it about us outside of some snapshots of Killian and Xave drinking or indulging in some illicit drugs, a few pics of Xave in compromising positions with various women, and a gritty video of Jax and me walking away from an incident we had to deal with last year while we’re tucking guns out of sight.
That tells me that either we’re damn good at hiding shit from everyone, or the Kings were too busy focusing on other guys to care too much about trying to get info on us. Or they’re just idiots who suck at subterfuge.
There’s an entire section on Shane, and even though I’ve already looked through it, I open it again.
Like us, Shane is a founding legacy, and his family is nearly as influential within the frat alumni as ours is.
Unlike us, Shane either sucks at hiding his incriminating activities, or they went hard trying to find stuff on him because his file is bigger than almost anyone currently in the frat except our leaders.
After expanding the window so it takes up my whole screen, I scroll through the many pics and snapshots.
Most of them are Shane drinking or getting high, but there are a few of him getting cozy with some people he definitely shouldn’t be messing around with, including professors, members of the house staff, and some female students who seem to have forgotten their very public declarations of purity and chastity, considering what they’re doing with him in the pics.
The videos and audio files they have on him are just more of the same, but there’s one file that didn’t make sense when I first listened to it.
Slipping my headphones on, I play the audio file again and crank up the volume. The audio is full of background noise, and it was obviously recorded in secret. Shane is drunk off his ass, so his words are hard to make out, but they kept it for a reason, and I want to know what that is.
“I killed them,” he slurs.
“What do you mean?” a soft voice asks. The audio is so distorted that I can’t even be sure of the gender of the person he’s talking to, but I’m assuming it’s another student.
“I killed them,” he repeats, and the undertone of grief in his slurred words is impossible to miss.
“Who did you kill?”
“It’s my fault,” he mumbles, then lets out a pained moan. “I killed them.”
The recording cuts out, and I close the file.
None of the other audios of him have any mention of him killing anyone or lamenting about being a murderer, but he did. And unless they cut out the part where he was being coached or set up to say those things, he seems to believe it.
Switching to one of my other screens, I open his student file and quickly skim through it to see if anything jumps out at me. I’ve already read all the files the school has on him multiple times, but nothing I’ve seen explains that audio clip.
When I’m done, I minimize the file window and open the web to start a deep dive.
I’ve already done a cursory search on him, the same as anyone who manages to catch my attention for more than a few minutes, but I never saw the point of really looking into him.
Guess there’s no time like the present.
After an hour of reading articles and another two of going through almost a decade of his social media, I have a much better picture of exactly who Shane was, and it’s a vastly different person from who he is now.
From what I can tell, it looks like he has a classic case of gifted kid burnout after years of excelling at pretty much everything he did.
Not only was he a star player for his boarding school’s baseball and hockey teams, he was also heavily involved in student council and was in half a dozen academic clubs every year.
His school records also show that he graduated in the top five percent of students with a 3.9 GPA and received dozens of awards for academic and athletic achievements over the years.
Even his social media used to be full of tagged pictures of him at various events and parties and other social things, and he always had a different girl on his arm when he was photographed with a date.
Silvercrest is different from most colleges because we don’t do any sort of collegiate competitions, but we have clubs and other organizations that people can join. But as far as his records show, the only thing Shane is affiliated with on campus is the frat.
He’s still popular and has a decent GPA, but doesn’t really do much outside of partying, hooking up, and hiding in his room when he isn’t partying or hooking up.
Leaning back in my chair, I swing it in a slow arc with my feet and switch my search parameters to look up his parents.
One thing I’ve learned after living in this world is that a lot of parents will have unsavory info about their kids scrubbed from the internet, but forget to do the same for anything about themselves that might give insight into their kids’ activities.
The first dozen pages of results are all connected to his father’s work and family empire, and there are tons of articles and snapshots of his parents and him at charity events and other places where rich people tend to get photographed, but the strange part is that all of the results are from the last six years.
There are lots of historical articles about his parents from before they got married, and just after, but there’s a gap of almost eighteen years between then and when they seem to reappear in the public eye.
I narrow my search parameters again, and an article with an Italian headline near the end of the hits catches my eye.
Curiously, I click on it. I can’t read or speak Italian, but I’m able to make out that it’s from a small town in the Italian countryside and was published seven years ago.
I run the article through a translator, and sit up straighter in my chair when the newly translated headline appears on my screen.
Five dead after fire
I quickly read the article, then read it again just to be sure I didn’t miss anything.
According to the article, Shane’s family was renting a villa in a nearby town that’s known for luxury tourism when a fire broke out. His parents were in Milan at the time, but Shane, his two siblings, a couple of security guards, and their housekeeper were home and sleeping when it happened.
There aren’t many details about the actual fire, but it does say that Shane was the only survivor and he was found unconscious on the front lawn while the bodies of his siblings, their housekeeper and the guards were recovered from the ruins of the villa.
“Well, fuck me sideways,” I mutter and save the article.
Now that I know what to look for, I change my search parameters again and look for articles that have been deleted through the Wayback Machine and other tricks I’ve learned for finding info that people have tried to erase.
Page after page of hits pop up on my screen, and I filter through them.
Most are about his parents’ work, philanthropy and social lives, but these articles mention that there are three kids in the family, and there are hundreds of photos of all five of them together at charity things and other social events that all fall within that eighteen-year window of missing information.
Leaning back in my chair, I resume spinning my butterfly knife around my fingers and go over everything I just learned.
Is that what Shane was rambling about? Did he accidentally set the fire that killed his siblings and their staff? The few articles I did find about it said that the fire was determined to be accidental, and I can’t find any follow up information that says otherwise.
Shane might be a dumbass with anger issues and no sense of humor, but he’s not a murderer. Even if he was responsible for the fire, there’s no way in hell he set it deliberately, especially as a kid.
It takes a very specific type of person to be able to take a life, and as the saying goes, it takes one to know one.
Do the Kings know about the fire? Did they keep the audio because they think it’s a real confession that he offed his siblings? There’s nothing else in his file that would indicate that they know about his past, but that doesn’t mean they’re unaware it happened.
But considering everything I know about the Kings and how they operate, it seems more likely they got the soundbite by accident and held on to it because it’s incriminating enough that you don’t really need context to know that whatever Shane is talking about is a big deal.
And even their dumb asses would see that his entire existence between birth and when he started boarding school at fifteen is missing from the internet.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I pull it out to check my notifications, my mind still on everything I just learned.
Xave: are you free?
Jace: why?
Xave: I may or may not have found myself in a bit of a situation
Jace: where are you?
Xave: in the woods near Belmont
Jace: and what’s the situation?
Xave: I kinda need some clothes
Jace: are you naked in the woods right now?
Xave: maybe
Jace: you’re a dumbass
Xave: tell me something I don’t know
Jace: there are over 4 quadrillion spiders on the planet, and statistically speaking, you’re never more than 3 feet from one at any given moment
Xave: …
Jace: the more you know
Xave: are you going to bring me clothes or not?
Jace: what’s in it for me?
Xave: being my favorite cousin?
Jace: what else?
Xave: you can use my car for a night
Jace: a month
Xave: a weekend
Jace: a weekend plus an extra day of my choice
Xave: fine
Jace: be there in a few
Xave: asshole
Jace: tell me something I don’t know
Not waiting to see if Xave has more to say, I slip my phone back into my pocket and close out my screens so I can get some clothes to take to him.
It’s not the first time one of us has had to rescue Xave like this, and knowing my cousin, it won’t be the last.