Page 93 of Martyr

“Except, he isn’t even a hacker, is he?”

West blew out a breath. “We don’t know, but probably not.”

“My cousin didn’t plant bugs on Yejun’s paintings.”

“No, that was me.”

“You were trying to spy on Lake’s uncle?”

“Let me go in order.” West moved back to rest against the headboard. “I’m going to keep calling this unknown assailant hacker, mostly out of habit, but also because we need to to keep up the ruse. Anyway, according to Iris, she was slipping me something that would make me sick but wasn’t life-threatening.She’d been told her hacker friend needed me out of the way so he could get his hands on the Enigma database.”

“Wouldn’t he have to break in here to do that?”

“Yes, which is why it’s a pretty bullshit excuse. But she believed him. Who knows, maybe there was some truth in it. Maybe he intended to make me sick, knock out Yejun, and sneak in after all. Unlikely, but possible. She was in love with the hacker and claimed not to know his true identity. She said she spoke to him exclusively through the app.”

Nix’s eyes narrowed. “Which means you already knew all about Serendipity.”

“Sorry.”

“I feel like an idiot.”

“Don’t. It may seem like we were manipulating you for fun, but that’s not the case at all. At first, lying to you was to protect us. Shortly after, however, it became about keeping you safe as well. We threw you out as bait, the less you knew the better.”

Whoever had approached Iris, they’d managed to convince her to join their side and do all of these things. She’d somehow believed in the nonsense and risked her life to complete these tasks. This person they were after was clever and, no doubt, charismatic. If they’d revealed the truth to Nix, there was a high chance he’d be swayed to the hacker's side as well. So long as he didn’t know anything, he couldn’t spill their secret.

West just hoped Nix saw it that way and he didn’t end up making things worse by trying to be honest.

Chapter 22:

Nix sat cross-legged in the center of West’s bed, rearranging the information he had in his head like a warped jigsaw puzzle left out in the rain. Just as he thought he’d fit certain pieces together, he’d realize the edges weren’t quite as seamless as initially believed.

Lake had told him Iris had tried to break into the Club House systems via his uncle’s computers.

West was saying that wasn’t true. In actuality, he was the one behind that hack, as an attempt to gather intel on Hendrix Bardin.

Yejun now hated Nix because he was related to Iris, whose actual crime against them was a murder attempt.

“This is so convoluted.” If they’d told him the truth from the beginning, it wouldn’t be, and Nix sort of hated how he understood West’s explanation over why they hadn’t. “If this involves the Emperor, that means Iris should have been tried for treason and sentenced to death.”

“Lake wanted that,” West replied, then confessed, “I did too. Yejun wouldn’t allow it. Since he was the one who’d interrogated her, we agreed to let him make the final decision. He was livid, but he said she’d broken down when the Emperor’s death was announced the same day I slipped into a coma.Because of that, my condition was hidden. I wasn’t even brought to the hospital. I was left here and a doctor and his medical team came and stayed with me.”

Nix didn’t want to know what happened to that team after they were done healing him. He didn’t think he could stomach any more tonight. “You said Iris said she’d never met this person, the hacker, in real life before?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lie.”

“I’m—”

“Not yours,” Nix shook his head. “I mean hers. She lied to Yejun. In her letter, it was very clear she’d met this person. They were dating, at least, she thought they were dating.”

West hummed. “Yejun said it seemed like she was attached to the hacker. Called her a crazy cult follower. We bought that they hadn’t met because someone had remotely hacked into her multi-slate and deleted every thread of data relating to them. Chats, texts, calls, even messages on social media were erased.”

Nix frowned. “That’s where you picked up his signature?”

“He left it on purpose,” West growled. “But hey, at least we were able to prove you weren’t who we were after, right?”

“Oh yeah,” he drawled, “I’ve definitely come out of that completely unscathed.”

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