Page 1 of Sinner
Chapter 1:
Nix didn’t remember how he’d gotten here, but it didn’t matter. Outside, the sky was dark, the light from the single lamp he’d thought to turn on spilling over the beige rug where he sat.
In Juri’s room.
With Juri’s laptop in his lap.
And remote access to Juri’s multi-slate pulled up on the screen.
It didn’t matter that he shouldn’t be there, that Juri—who had clearly hated the Demons—would be livid if he’d still been alive to feel anything at all. Didn’t matter that those same hated Demons were currently outside, guarding the door while Nix tirelessly worked to find answers.
The Ferds could go fuck themselves if they were upset over Nix’s intrusion.
Juri’s ghost could go fuck himself.
The mixture of fury and betrayal warred with numbness within him, a strange concoction he couldn’t think too hard on. By this point, betrayal was nothing new, and he feared a part of himself had actually become used to it.
But…on the other hand…
Nix had never had friends before.
Now Dew was dead.
Juri was dead.
Who was next?
Who was to blame here, really? Was it them for working against the Demons? Had Nix merely gotten involved with the wrong party, dooming himself to this fate from the start? Was he collateral damage?
Or were they?
Was this somehow all his fault?
Had Nix driven them—
Found it!
He broke through the last hidden, password-locked file on Juri’s devices, running it through the inscription program—also password-protected—kept on Juri’s multi-slate. Say what you will about the guy, but he clearly had something to hide.
He’d gone all out with the security measures, taking steps Nix wouldn’t have even thought of on his own. Then again, the biggest secret he’d ever kept was his real reason for enrolling at Foxglove Grove University, a secret that had broken wide open, costing him and the people around him.
It’d cost Juri too, it seemed.
A handful of deleted messages between the King account Serendipity and Branwen’s Enigma profile flooded the screen of the laptop. Nix had no clue why Juri would bother deleting them to cover his tracks, only to keep copies of a few, but it wasn’t like he could ask him that now, so he put the question to bed in his mind and focused on what he could understand.
There were maybe a dozen, and none of them seemed very noteworthy at first glance. Certainly not the type of thing worth keeping out of what Nix imagined had been hundreds of correspondences.
From conversations about favorite beverages, to hating certain professors, to discussing how Branwen had cut her hair differently…Nix read all of them thoroughly, not skipping over a single one, no matter how mundane. He’d come all this way to understand his cousin, and with each line read, he felt like he was doing that.
While simultaneously driving himself further away.
It wasn’t a full picture, only snippets, but the image they created seemed pretty obvious to him. Had that been why Juri had kept these ones specifically? Had he planned on telling Nix the truth after he’d used him to take down Lake and the others?
Or had it been out of sheer guilt? Guilt formed when Nix had told him how Branwen felt wronged by the King she’d beendating. Who she’d beenin lovewith.
Had Juri somehow recovered these files after they’d already been erased?
It frustrated Nix that he would never know. He’d never get answers about these chat logs and why they were kept.
