Page 31 of Fight or Flight
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 instudent 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.
