Page 120 of Fight or Flight
“Get off the cross, you drama queen.” He tosses me a look over his shoulder as he heads over to his desk.
“No thanks. I quite like it up here.”
“Of course you do,” he says, putting the pages in his desk.
“Have I ever told you that you remind me of a slinky?” I give him a sweet-as-pie smile when he turns back around to face me. “I’d smile so hard if you fell down the stairs.”
“And you remind me of a pizza cutter,” he says in an amused voice as he grabs his hoodie off his bed. “All edge and no fucking point.”
“Guilty.” I grin at him. “Say hi to Myles for me.”
He glances over his shoulder as he heads for the door. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“No promises.”
He pauses and gives me a pointed look. “How about don’t do anything stupid that I’m going to have to waste my time fixing.”
“No promises,” I repeat. “But I’ll give it the old college try.”
His look makes it clear he knows I’ll do nothing of the sort, but he doesn’t say anything as he leaves our room.
I spin back around so I’m facing my computer and start shutting it down.
According to the report from campus FD and the files I got from their system, the fire was caused by faulty wiring, and the door locked itself when the alarm went off because of a glitch in the fire suppression system caused by a flawed update that was recently pushed through.
Just to be sure that it really was all a coincidence, I pulled the security cam footage from the room, and there’s nothing suspicious in it that I can see.
The video shows smoke coming out of the outlet and one of the guys at the poker table shouting about a fire when he notices it. Everyone jumps up and runs to the door, except Shane, who sort of freezes for a minute or so like he’s sleepwalking. When he snaps out of it, he stumbles away from the table but trips on the leg of an overturned chair and falls to the floor, hitting his head on the side of the table as he does.
The smoke in the room gets too thick to see any more, but there’s no sign of anyone in the hall when the door closes after the alarm goes off. There’s also no evidence that anyone hacked into the system or had any sort of control over the door.
I even had Myles go over my findings to make sure I didn’t miss anything, and he came to the same conclusions that I did.
Which means we have a mole, but no Firestarter in our midst, and Shane really was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The other thing that was making my brain itchy is how the fire was contained to such a small area of the wall when it should have spread much faster and further, but that question was answered when I found memos and accounting records showing that both the interior and exterior of the house were painted with fire-resistant paint four years ago after a small kitchen fire nearly destroyed the entire mess hall, and that the paint jobs are touched up every summer as an extra precaution.
At least that means that Shane’s not in danger, and we don’t have to worry about burning to death in this firetrap of a house, but we’re still no closer to figuring out who the mole is.
I’ve also spent the past week going over the files on the hard drive we stole, and just like the one Myles found, it’s full of incredibly damning photos and videos of members going back almost 10 years. It’s also crammed with sensitive information about several influential members of the alumni, their businesses, and non-members of their immediate families.
Our family isn’t in there, but there are pics of Xave and Killian that they definitely wouldn’t want getting out. There are also some of Shane that could do some real damage to him and his family’s reputation, and I found a few of his brother, even though he was only at Silvercrest for a semester before the fire.
There’s also a shit ton about other guys in the frat and their families, but I don’t really care about any of that beyond it giving me a better understanding of the situation and more plot points to connect.
The only good news is that, from what I can tell, the drive is the only copy of the files, so unless whoever’s been passing the info on kept their own copies, no one else will ever see them, and the secrets within them will disappear with it.
That doesn’t really help us now that we’re living with a traitor, but a win is a win.
My computer finally finishes shutting down, and I push my chair back.
I need to get out of my room for a while. I’ve been cooped up for too long, and the restless energy crackling under my skin is only going to get worse the longer I stay here.
My phone pings with a text, and I pull it out of my hoodie pocket to check my notifications.
Shane: is this jace’s phone?
More texts come in before I can answer him.
