Page 61 of Mayhem

Family dinner. You’ve got a few hours.

There was no answer for almost a minute. I could picture him staring at his phone, trying to decide whether the absence of the Kings made coming here safer or considerably more stupid.

Then the typing bubble appeared.

I’m coming.

I cleared my laptop from the coffee table, mostly because I did not trust Nichlas around anything I needed for class, and carried my drink toward the windows while I waited.Nichlas had asked to talk, and I genuinely wanted to hear what version of our history had finally become unbearable enough for him to seek me out.

The elevator chimed eighteen minutes later. Nichlas stepped into the lounge cautiously, and for a moment neither of us spoke. His gaze went past me first, checking the room, then toward the hall leading deeper into the private floor before he finally seemed to believe I had told him the truth about being alone. He looked thinner than he had when I first found him at Aldrich.

The expensive clothes were still there, but they no longer helped. Fear had been eating him from places money could not pad. “You really are alone,” he said.

I leaned against the edge of Hunter’s desk and folded my arms. “You came all the way up here to verify my attendance?”

His mouth tightened, but he moved farther into the room. “I came because I can’t keep doing this.” Nichlas rubbed both palms against his thighs. “I don’t sleep. I can’t concentrate. Half the time I think you’re behind me when you aren’t, and when you actually are there you don’t even do anything. You just fucking look at me.”

“That sounds unpleasant.”

“It’s torture.”

Nichlas saw enough in my face to regret using it. “I know you hate me. I know why. But you keep acting like I woke up one morning and decided to sell you out because it was convenient, and that isn’t what happened.”

I pushed away from the desk. “Then tell me what happened.”

He blinked, clearly having prepared himself to fight harder for the opportunity.

“You wanted me to listen. I’m listening.”

Nichlas swallowed and glanced toward the nearest chair. He did not sit until I nodded toward it, and even then he perched near the edge instead of settling back. “At Westbridge, what we were doing had gotten bigger than we thought. We wanted to offer favors in exchange for a boost in status or whatever the fuck it was that you were after.”

I chuckled. “We knew exactly how big it was.” That part of undergrad had been a high. It had been the one reason I woke up and went to classes every day. Having people owe me was fantastic. Every where I went, I was important without being the center of attention. If people needed something, I was their bitch and when they owed me something, I got to be their nightmare.

Westbridge had been built on favors long before Nichlas and I touched it. We had simply been better at recognizing that favors became leverage the second somebody wanted to pretend they had never asked for one. A freshman needed an answer key. A senior needed a disciplinary complaint to disappear. Somebody’s father needed to know which student had been talking about a company investigation. Somebody else wanted photographs buried before they reached the wrong person. One favor became another, and eventually people stopped asking whether I could do something and started asking what I wanted in exchange.

Nichlas had helped keep the book because he liked order. Numbers, initials, dates, little marks beside debts that meant something only because we had decided they did.

He had never understood that the book was the least important part.

“You knew.” He looked at me quickly, then away again. “I didn’t. Not really. I knew how many people were in the book and how many favors moved through us, but I didn’t understand what it looked like from outside until people started asking questions.”

That caught enough of my attention that I moved to the opposite end of the coffee table instead of remaining across the room.

Nichlas kept going. “We started with stupid shit. Getting exams moved. Finding out who was sleeping with somebody’s boyfriend. Getting a roommate transferred. Then people started asking for things that mattered. Records. Access. Introductions. Information about professors, family businesses, drugs moving through houses, who had money problems. You kept track of all of it because people always came back wanting something else.”

I remembered.

“The Quorum started moving into Westbridge,” he said. “Not publicly. I didn’t even know who they were at first. Somebody approached me at a bar off campus and asked about the favors. I told them they had the wrong person, and two days later someone else found me after class with enough information to prove they didn’t.”

“What did they want?”

“The network. They said Westbridge was getting folded into something larger anyway and it could happen cleanly if we cooperated. They wanted names, debts, records, whatever we had that showed who belonged where.” His hands tightened together between his knees. “They knew there was a ledger.”

“And you told them you had it.”

He let out a heavy sigh, his shoulders falling slightly. “They said if I handed it over, they’d leave us alone. No retaliation, no trouble with the school, nothing going to our families. They made it sound like they were buying out an operation.” Nichlas finally looked at me properly. “I believed them.”

“You believed the people threatening you.”