Page 9 of Wicked Games (Silvercrest U #1)

KILLIAN

“I’m not seeing anything.” Jax looks up from his tablet. “The logs are clean. Too clean,” he adds. “The only swipes to get into the basement or the pool last night are Felix’s.”

“Yeah, I saw that too.” I lean back against the fancy settee in the twins’ room. “Where are we on the camera footage?”

“Just waiting for Axel to send the override code.” Jace pulls his butterfly knife out of his pocket and flips it around in a move that would make a serial killer nervous. “Shouldn’t be too long.”

“Do you think he’s lying?” Jax asks.

I shake my head. “I doubt it. His head injury is real, and you didn’t hear him hacking last night. I thought he was going to cough up a lung. Fucker had me Googling secondary drowning at five in the morning because I thought he was gonna croak.”

“Got it.” Jace snaps his blade closed and tucks it into his pocket.

I wait as he taps on the screen of his tablet, using the code he was sent to bypass the security locks on the CCTV system of the house.

“You should have access now too.” Jace doesn’t look up from his screen.

“Keep checking the logs. Go back a week,” I tell Jax as I open the link Jace sent me on my own tablet. “See if anything jumps out at you.”

Jace might be a brilliant strategist and hacker, but Jax’s pattern recognition skills and equally impressive talent for solving puzzles are unmatched. If anyone can figure out what the fuck is going on, it’s them.

Jax nods, and the three of us focus on our screens.

According to the key logs, Felix swiped his card to enter the basement five minutes before midnight.

Instead of going straight to those recordings, I open the camera in the hallway outside my room.

I’ll get a better feel for what went down if I track Felix’s movements from the time he left our room.

“Do you want me to tell you what I found or keep looking?” Jace asks.

“Does it tell us who did this?” I glance at him.

He shakes his head.

“Then keep looking,” I say, moving the counter on the recording so it starts playing at quarter to twelve. “Check the back and side entrances, the basement windows, and the cellar. Whatever you have access to.”

“Roger that.”

I start the playback, and less than thirty seconds later, Felix steps out of my room with a black duffle bag slung over his shoulder and wearing the same clothes I found him in.

I study the recording, taking in every detail of the frames as I look for anything out of place or any indication that he’s being followed.

It’s easy enough to switch cameras as he moves through the house, and I track him as he walks down the hall, bounds down the stairs to the main floor, then cuts across the lobby and uses his card to get into the open part of the basement.

I need to enter a few codes to switch to the basement cameras since they’re on a different system, but it isn’t long before I have Felix in my sights as he comes through the basement door and hurries down to the main hallway.

Most of the basement is off limits to everyone except a select few senior members and the Rebel leaders.

It’s a maze of tunnels and corridors that go several stories underground and is where most of the house and society business happens.

This area is heavily protected, and even with the clearance we have and our statuses as founding legacies, Axel refused to give us access to the cameras or the swipe logs off the main system and is checking them himself.

The rest of the basement is open to all members. That’s where our storage lockers are, as well as the pool, an empty meeting hall that no one uses, and another storage area for the house staff.

Nothing out of the ordinary jumps out at me as I watch Felix make a beeline for the pool and swipe his ID card to open the door.

Hitting the 2x speed option, I wait to see if anyone follows him inside. I watch the feed for almost twenty minutes, but there’s nothing.

Felix said he only swam a few laps before he was attacked, but even after over thirty minutes, the hallway is still empty.

Pushing down my building frustration, I switch to the cameras inside the pool and start the playback a few seconds before he enters.

The pool is empty as he drops his bag on a chair that’s set up against one wall and kicks off his slides.

“Anything?” I ask the twins, my eyes glued to the screen as Felix whips off his tee and tosses it on his bag.

“Nope,” Jax says.

“Negative,” Jace mumbles.

A weird feeling settles in my stomach as I watch Felix strip off his shorts and stretch his arms above his head. He’s wearing a tiny swimsuit that sits so low on his hips it barely seems big enough to cover his dick.

Another of Felix’s many idiosyncrasies is that under his buttoned-up nerd exterior, he’s actually in amazing shape.

But instead of showing off his hard work, he covers up with his preppy-boy wardrobe.

You’d never know it by looking at him, but his muscles are long and lean, and while he’s not sculpted, he has good definition.

Ignoring the weird heat moving through my belly, I focus on Felix as he does a few more stretches, then grabs his goggles and heads to the far end of the pool.

It doesn’t escape me that he’s at the shallow end as he lines himself up with the edge and gets into his ready stance. A moment later he dives into the pool and streaks through the water, not surfacing until he’s halfway to the other side, and transitions into a butterfly stroke.

I watch as he does two laps, being sure to monitor the area around the pool as he swims like the devil is chasing him. He’s moving so fast his arms are a blur against the water.

He finishes his third lap and starts his fourth.

Felix told me he was attacked at the end of his third lap. Did he make a mistake because he was fucked up from his head injury?

I keep watching the feed until he finishes his tenth lap, then the entire screen goes dark.

“What the fuck?” I mutter and move the playback counter forward. Five minutes later, the camera flicks back on, showing an empty pool with no signs that Felix was ever there.

Confused, I go back to the camera at the pool entrance and watch it at 2x speed, waiting for Felix to exit. After almost an hour of footage, I stop the playback and scrub my hand through my hair absently.

What the fuck is going on? Nothing I’m seeing makes any sense. Felix was in the pool like he said, but there’s no record of anyone else in the basement and no footage of him leaving.

“Check the feed in the lobby,” Jace suggests as he grabs his laptop off the table and opens it. “Around one thirty.”

I switch back to the primary system and open the lobby feed. At almost exactly one thirty, the door to the basement swings open, and Felix stumbles through it.

It’s obvious he’s hurt and disoriented as he lands hard on his knees in front of the door.

It takes him two tries to get back on his feet, then he lurches and stumbles into the wall a few feet away.

After another few seconds, he leans on the wall and half walks, half drags himself along it, using it as a prop to stay upright, as he crosses the lobby.

The walk should take less than thirty seconds, but it’s almost fifteen minutes before he gets to the elevator.

There isn’t a soul in the lobby as he pushes the button and collapses against the wall. When the doors slide open, he kind of throws himself inside and lands on the floor in the middle of the elevator.

I flip to the elevator camera and watch as he rides it to our floor and crawls off. I switch cameras again, and my gut twists as Felix crawls down the hallway, his arms and legs shaking as he drags himself over the thick carpets.

Movement on the screen draws my attention from Felix, and I zero in on William as he leaves his room. He doesn’t seem to notice Felix as he locks his door, his attention on his phone.

It isn’t until he’s taken a few steps in Felix’s direction that he looks up and skids to a stop.

Felix doesn’t make any indication that he sees William and keeps crawling along the floor. William looks around, like he’s seeing if this is a joke or some house business that he’s not aware of.

When he seems satisfied that the hall is empty, he points his phone at Felix and laughs.

“Mother. Fucker,” I hiss as it looks like William takes several pictures.

“William?” Jace asks, not looking up from his laptop.

“Yeah,” I confirm.

“I’ll handle it,” Jax says.

I give him a quick nod and focus back on the screen as William literally steps over Felix and continues on his way.

Felix finally reaches the door to my room and pulls his key out of his pocket.

The dorms are the only rooms in the house that don’t have electronic locks.

The entire building is wired with cameras, including dozens of hidden ones that are periodically moved around by the staff so we can’t keep track of them, and we’re fully aware we’re being watched at all times.

The only time we have any privacy is in our rooms, and the old-school locks and keys are meant to give us the illusion that we have any control at this school.

Felix drops his key twice, then spends almost a full minute fumbling to get it in the door before he’s finally able to unlock it.

The last thing I see before the door closes are his feet disappearing as he drags himself inside.

“What the fuck?” I mutter.

“What?” Jax asks, glancing up from his tablet.

“None of what I just saw makes sense.”

“Yeah, and I know why. There’s something wrong with the camera feeds,” Jace says, his fingers moving furiously over the keys of his laptop.

“Like they glitched out, or someone fucked with them?” Jax asks.

“Fucked with them,” Jace taps on one of the keys, then turns his laptop around.

Jax and I both lean forward. On the screen is a five second clip from the pool feed showing Felix moving fluidly under the water, then breaking the surface at the halfway mark of the pool and transitioning into his perfect butterfly stroke.