Chapter 7 #2
“Yejun is taking a call from his sister,” Nix explained, coming toward them and grabbing a towel tossed over West’s desk chair in the process.
He dried his hair off, not commenting when both Lake and West looked him over.
“I grabbed the blanket from the couch. My wet clothes are still outside on the patio.”
“You knew we saw you?” Lake tilted his head.
“Yeah.” Nix dropped the towel and untied the blanket from around his waist, then climbed over West, settling himself snuggly between the two of them as though it was the most casual thing in the world.
Like he’d spent his entire life there instead of just the past year.
Like he belonged.
“Satisfied?” West lay back down and shifted onto his side, propping his head up on his hand as he stared at Nix.
Nix closed his eyes and hummed. “If you’re asking if I’ve taken enough cock for the night, the answer is definitely no. But give me some time to recover, okay? I’m still sorting through how I feel about everything. Momentary distractions are necessary, but they can’t happen all at once.”
“Is that what we are to you now?” Lake drawled, lying down at his other side and mirroring West’s move. “Distractions?”
“And dicks,” West added with a grin. “Nixie puts up with us for what we’re packing. Isn’t that right?”
“It isn’t wrong,” Nix replied, but it was clear he was only playing into the joke and didn’t fully mean it.
Maybe that was how all of this had started, but there was more between them than sex now. So much more.
“What did you mean by maybe the poisoner wasn’t trying to kill him?
” As much fun as this was, they had important things to discuss.
He hadn’t gotten the chance to since yesterday, not with Nix holing himself up almost immediately.
There were a lot of things he wanted to ask, but they’d take them one by one.
“West got so sick, he needed to be hospitalized for days,” Nix explained. “But that wasn’t the case with the Emperor or the Royal Consort. They were discovered early in the morning, already dead.”
“They could have simply been leading up to it,” Lake pointed out. “Maybe there’s a certain number of doses needed before it kills.”
“That would only make me believe even more that the intention wasn’t for West to die.”
“How so?”
“Because the timing would have been off,” West followed, blowing Lake a mocking kiss afterward when Lake scowled.
Right. It was so obvious, he really should have been able to guess Nix’s line of thinking.
“As soon as the emperor died, whoever was responsible for slipping her the poison would have disappeared. Even though Branwen obviously isn’t the person assigned to the emperor, it still wouldn’t make sense to trust her to finish her task and take West out after the fact.
” Nix pursed his lips and stared up at the ceiling, contemplating.
“The coroner said they’d died from a strange disease, but if West, who rarely if ever met with the emperor, suddenly died from the same cause, and yet no one who was actually around them did…That would draw too much attention.”
“Their cover story would be blown apart,” Lake agreed.
They’d already suspected the coroner had been brought in on it.
As soon as he took the throne, he would be removing the entire medical staff at the palace and replacing them with more trustworthy people.
But… “Hendrix has the kind of power needed to keep people quiet.”
“Let’s say you’re onto something,” West spoke up. “Why would Hendrix go through all that trouble to poison me if they didn't also want me dead?”
“To keep you guys distracted?” Nix shrugged. “Or to teach you a lesson.”
“A lesson?”
“All signs lead to Hendrix, it’s got to be him. No one else qualifies or is capable. He hated you guys, but for the reasons stated earlier, he couldn’t risk murdering you too. It could have just been meant as a warning. I don't know. I’m just throwing things out there.”
“I’m guessing that means there wasn’t any more evidence in Juri’s things,” West sighed.
“No.”
“There’s another reason for Hendrix to have done it. To get me to return home.” Lake frowned, wheels turning. The others quieted down, proof they were also thinking about it, and coming to the same conclusion he just had.
The death of the emperor would have forced Lake back for that funeral, but since there was a period of mourning where he couldn’t be crowned, he could have easily gone back to Vail University, where he’d been studying on the planet Vitality, until the end of mourning.
Only a threat against West or Yejun would have been enough to keep him.
“Hendrix knows me. He knows I’d transfer if either of you were in danger.”
“If it is him, he obviously figured out we’d try to solve this ourselves and not escalate it,” West said.
“Hendrix knows how deeply rooted our trust issues are.” Lake would never rely on the Club or the High Council with something like this.
“There was really nothing that could help us prove it was him? Like, maybe Hendrix placed Juri next to you as another spy?” West asked, seeming to regret mentioning Juri again.
Nix didn’t seem affected by it in the least. “I don’t think so. From what he told Briant, it sounds like Juri was also manipulated.”
“What do you mean?”
Nix repeated what his cousin had told him, and while it solidified some of their theories, there wasn’t anything there that could confirm their suspicions about Hendrix.
Was one poorly coded email really enough to pin this on Lake’s uncle?
Or was their need to be done with this clouding their judgment?