Page 19 of Wicked Games

“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 anhour 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.

---