13. Jax
JAX
“How’s your favorite show?” Jace asks from his desk. “Or are you rereading things you’ve already committed to memory because you’re totally not obsessed?”
“Shut up.”
“Someone’s touchy.” His tone is mild, but I can hear the edge under it.
“It’s nothing,” I tell him, not looking up from my tablet.
There’s some rustling, then the squeak of Jace’s chair as he stands. “I’m going over to the main house to see what Xave is up to,” he says when I look up. “Are you coming?”
I shake my head.
His expression stays neutral, but I can see the flare of frustration in his eyes. “Do we need to talk about this?”
“No.”
“Are you still lying to yourself about what’s going on?”
“No.”
“Good.” He rakes one hand through his hair and pushes it back from his forehead. “Did you do something stupid?” he asks in his usual blunt manner.
“Depends on your definition of stupid.”
He rolls his eyes. “Will whatever you did come back to bite us in the ass?”
I shrug.
He stares at me for a few beats, and it’s one of the few times in our lives that I can’t read him.
One of the reasons so many people underestimate us or think we’re nothing but empty-headed rich kids is that we’ve always been able to mimic other people’s expressions and reflect whatever we want back to them.
We can look happy or sad or confused or sorry on command, and we know how to tailor our reactions not just to a situation, but also to the person, so they think exactly what we want them to.
The only people we can’t do that to are each other and our cousins, to some extent. We could manipulate them the same way as other people if we wanted to, but there’s no point. They know how we are, and they accept us, so they’re the only ones who get the unfiltered version of us.
I don’t like that Jace is hiding from me, but I can’t fault him for it because I’ve been doing the same to him, and he knows it.
We stare at each other for a few beats, then Jace breaks eye contact and grabs a sweater off his bed. “I’ll be back later.”
“’Kay,” I say as he heads toward the door.
I look back down at my tablet as soon as it closes behind him.
I’ve spent the past few days working double time trying to figure out how Myles got mixed up in what happened to Felix and what, if anything, it has to do with what’s going on with him right now.
We have most of the information we need, but there’s just enough missing that I can’t piece things together without a larger margin of error than I’m comfortable with.
The facts are simple. Myles worked with Jacob Fisher, and Jacob tried to kill Felix.
But if you factor in the other stuff we know, it’s no longer a simple cause-and-effect situation.
Myles helped Jacob try to kill Felix, but he also helped Felix when Jacob tried again.
And there’s no paper trail between Jacob and Myles, or even the person who hired Jacob and Myles.
All the evidence we have stops at Jacob.
I also need to figure out what the Kings have on him, and if they’ll be able to exploit it again in the future. But I can’t do that without all the facts, and every search for new information has come up blank.
Even the police report that Jace found and was able to decrypt didn’t really tell us anything new.
All it said was that Myles was abducted on his way home from school and that there were no witnesses or footage of the abduction and they only know it happened because of Myles’s testimony, and the ransom note his family got.
There were a few details about the initial investigation in the file, but considering it was a high-profile kidnapping with a ransom demand, there was almost no mention of any actual legwork or evidence collection, just a lot of conjecture on the part of the officer who wrote the report.
And just like Xave said, Myles was found unharmed less than twenty-four hours later.
The report had some details that the article didn’t, like how Myles knocked on multiple doors in a residential neighborhood and had to ask several people to call the police and his parents before someone took him seriously and called it in.
But that’s where things get vague again. According to the report, Myles didn’t see the people who snatched him, and he was taken to a house and held there until he was able to escape and walk to the nearest neighborhood to ask for help.
That’s it. No details about the house, his captors, his imprisonment, nothing. And the file was closed without anyone looking deeper into who did it, like Myles escaping on his own somehow zeroed out the kidnapping and ransom demand.
And it doesn’t look like anyone other than Myles tampered with the file.
The actual reports didn’t have any evidence of being changed or altered, and nothing was redacted.
It’s possible that because Myles lived in a semi-rural area, the country bumpkin cops were just incompetent and botched the case because they had no idea how to handle an actual crime, but the complete lack of details for such a high-profile victim and the passive wording in the report makes me think there was more to it.
So even with the new info, I’m still left with more questions than answers. It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without a reference photo and missing a half dozen important pieces.
One thing I will give Myles is that he figured out my clues way faster than I thought he would. It’s been two days, and he found the cameras in the statue and the puzzle within about ten minutes of each other. And that means I’ve been looking at two blocked camera feeds for hours.
Not being able to see him is frustrating, but it’s telling that he only covered the cameras and didn’t get rid of them.
After he found them, I watched in real time as he packed up a gym bag and raced out of his room. Knowing he’d be gone for a while, I made a quick trip over to Boone House and moved another chess piece on his board.
I didn’t touch the cameras or anything else in his room, just the chess piece. I know he found it because I was watching through the window when he came back to his room after his workout, and his reaction was everything I hoped it would be.
He’d barely closed the door behind him when his gaze locked on the chessboard. Instead of freaking out, he marched across the room to inspect it, and I couldn’t stop my smile as he picked up the piece and looked at it like he was waiting for it to come to life and tell him what happened.
After a few seconds of having a staring contest with the piece, he put it back in the spot I moved it to and stared at the board for about a minute, his expression shifting from surprised to pleased to confused before finally settling on determined as he moved one of the black pieces in a counter move.
The little smile he gave the board, and the triumphant nod that looked like he was saying Game on, fucker, told me everything I need to know.
He wants to keep playing too.
I finish skimming the article in front of me and close my tablet down. Just like every other article or source I’ve read over the past few days, there’s nothing new in it.
I probably should try to catch up with Jace and take a break from my sleuthing, but I’m not in the mood to hang out with Xave right now.
He’s my cousin, and I’d take a bullet for him, but he and Jace together are a lot.
They play off each other, and they love to hype each other up and act like morons.
Usually I just let them do their thing and laugh at whatever they fuck up, but I’m not in the right headspace to deal with that tonight.
I could go climbing. It’s almost eleven, so the woods would be pitch dark, but that’s never stopped me before when I’ve gotten the urge to climb at night.
But that isn’t a good idea either because the cliffs are close to Boone House, and I’d just end up in Myles's tree and watching through the window.
Sometimes I wish I were more like my brother and didn’t keep such a tight lid on myself.
I don’t hook up because before Myles, no one at school could offer me even a taste of what I wanted, and putting in the effort to have mediocre sex with some debutante who wants me to play the part of the gentle suitor who coaxes her into giving it up is about as much of a turn-on as jerking off with a handful of glass.
Jace, on the other hand, has no problems playing whatever part people want him to.
He sees it as a challenge, and he’s perfected his game to the point where he has just as much success convincing the straightest of straight guys to drop to their knees or bend over for him as he does getting girls to happily do the same.
And when he isn’t being a fuckboy, my brother gives zero fucks about pretty much anything and does whatever the hell he wants.
Our mom once said that I’m the calm to Jace’s chaos, and we’re two halves of the same soul that was put in different bodies.
Most people wouldn’t understand what she meant, but Jace and I have known that’s the case since we were toddlers, and her confirming it was the same as her telling us that we have gray eyes or that we’re still twins if we have different hairstyles.
As an identical twin herself, she understands us on a level that others can’t, and she and our dad never once tried to separate us.
Not even when pretty much everyone in their lives was telling them we’re codependent, and they were enabling us by not forcing us to be independent from each other.
Sometimes I hate being the calm one, but it’s necessary because, unlike my brother, I can’t regulate myself. Once I give in to that side of myself, I’m all in, and the results are never pretty.
Blowing out a frustrated sigh, I toss my tablet onto my bed and stand. My back is tight from being hunched over and reading for the last hour, and I take a second to raise my arms above my head and stretch.