Page 7 of Sinner
Trust.
Hope.
How was he supposed to believe in any of that now? After everything? The events of the past twenty-four hours kept playing on repeat in his mind, but it was as though it washappening to someone else. Like he was on the outside looking in. Watching some horror flick with a terrible ending where the good guys didn’t just lose, they never uncovered the villain in the first place.
“You were right," he murmured when Briant shifted on the opposite end of the alcove. “I should never have come here.”
His older cousin looked worse for wear, haggard and pale. He’d tried to speak a few times since Nix had arrived, but Nix hadn’t been very receptive.
He didn’t know what to say.
Briant had come to Foxglove for him, and Nix had come for Briant’s deceased sister Branwen. Theirs was a connected misfortune wherein the one at fault was impossible to identify.
Was it Branwen for starting all of this? For luring Nix here to do her dirty work, with little to no clues offered?
Or was it Nix’s, for not only trusting the wrong person, but also leaving his only surviving cousin alone with said person?
Was it Briant’s for coming at all? To a place he hadn’t been invited?
They weren’t close, not the way Nix and Branwen had been. Hell, Briant hadn't even been all that close to his sister; that's why she’d left the note leading Nix here for him instead.
Though…to be fair, it’d recently come to his attention that Nix had mistaken how close they’d been as well.
In the end, he hadn’t really known her at all.
“They’re worried about you.” Briant stared at the closed bedroom door, cupping a steaming glass of amber tea in a large glass mug. There was a matching cup set on the end table, along with a half-filled pot. West had brought it not too long ago. “It’s unexpected.”
“Because they’re Demons?” Nix stupidly asked, figuring he owed a break in the silent treatment, even though he wasn’tfeeling up to it. “Or because one of them hospitalized you not too long ago?”
Yejun had apologized, but Nix didn’t expect Briant to let bygones be bygones. A part of him wasn’t over it yet either, though he was trying.
Things between him and the artist were rocky at best, but it was better than it’d been; had been in the process of improving every day. There was no point in staying angry forever. Nix bore mating bites on his neck from both Lake and West. The Demons were a full package. He couldn’t take two of them and leave out the third.And he didn’t want to.
Yejun Sang might not have sunk his teeth into Nix’s flesh like the others, but his claim was every bit as strong. Nix knew that. Yejun knew it too.
Lake must have foreseen this happening when he’d chosen to give Nix the mark without consulting any of them beforehand. He must have known it was the best way to trap them all, force Nix permanently into their lives, no matter what any of them wanted.
In the beginning, he’d been mad about that.
Now…
“Juri insisted they were just using you,” Briant surprised him by admitting, and Nix finally found his mind clearing enough for those words to fully register. “He told me he was doing all of this in part to make it up to us…I had my doubts, considering he was holding me hostage, but it’s crystal clear now.”
Briant held up the mug, staring at the tea for a long moment before he took a sip. “Their feelings for you are real.” He turned his head and met Nix’s gaze. “As are your feelings for them.”
Nix had known how Briant saw them, and if he hadn’t, Juri had made that stance clear at the Club House. “I’m notbrainwashed.” He snorted at the sound of that. “Maybe I am. Either way, I’ve made peace with it. I like them, cousin. I like them a lot. I won’t leave them.”
“Even if it means you continue to put yourself in harm's way?”
“Especially then.” If they were in danger, that was even more of a reason for Nix to stick around. “They need me.”
“You need each other.”
Juri had kidnapped Briant and locked him up in an old hotel waiting to be renovated. He’d left him food and water, but little else, obviously expecting things to move quickly once he went to Nix with his plan. He’d forced Nix to help, but it’d blown up in his face at the end.
“Someone poisoned him,” Nix said, trying not to picture the horrifying event. “Do you have any idea who could have done that?”
It was a long shot. Juri had spent that entire day on campus, so it wasn't like Briant was the last person to have seen him.
