The multi-slate Sila typically wore, the one strapped to his brother’s wrist, went off then, and without skipping a beat he tapped the button and accepted the call.
“Where are you?” Sila’s voice trickled through.
“Talking with Professor Delmar. Want to say hi? You’re on speaker.” He sent Bay a taunting look.
Bay held his breath, waiting for Sila’s reaction, but he wasn’t expecting the flippant response that came through the speakers on the side of the device.
“Touché, brother.”
Rin grinned. “That’s what you get for sharing shit with Kelevra.”
“So you mentioned the pill then?”
He shared a confused look with Bay. “What pill?”
“The one I got off of your Imperial,” Sila said. “The one I slipped to Castle that night the staff met for their back-to-school celebration.”
“You what?!” both Rin and Bay exclaimed at the same time.
“I assumed you were doing your best big brother impression and attempting to warn Kitten off of me,” Sila continued. “Turns out you didn’t even have anything real in your arsenal to work with.”
Bay felt a bit light headed and braced himself against the podium as he considered that admission. That night, Castle had taken it up a notch when he’d cornered Bay, but he’d assumed it was due to alcohol consumption. Now Sila was saying it’d actually been because he’d drugged the man?
To what end? Surely the goal hadn’t been so he could swoop in and play hero? Although…Bay had accepted the messages but ignored all attempts at phone calls up until that point, hadn’t he? Sila had successfully gotten him to answer his call, and then he’d won him over with his act of kindness when he’d torn Castle off of him before things could go too far.
“You…Set me up?” Bay shouldn’t be surprised. It was everything Rin had literally just warned him about, after all. He waited for the anger to come, for the disgust and the humiliation over having fallen for it but none of those feelings came. He was upset, sure, but not livid.
Even knowing that Sila had put him at risk that night by drugging Castle, Bay didn’t regret anything that had transpired between them since.
Probably because a stupid part of himself was convinced that he’d never really been in any danger to begin with. That Sila had been there the whole time to ensure Castle never got the chance to do anything more than fondle him a little and—
“I must be certifiably insane,” Bay said to himself, running a hand down his face, partially knocking his glasses askew in the process so he needed to correct them.
“Still want to play with me, Kitten?” Sila asked, all buttery soft words spoken through the device attached to his twin, like he couldn’t care less about their audience or how shameless he was being.
“Hey,” Rin’s voice dropped lower but he didn’t switch the device off of speaker even though it was obvious he wanted to, “you do realize you’re outing yourself right now, right?”
“I know you’d never do anything to hurt me,” Sila told him. “Which means all you really wanted to do was test the waters and see if the professor could be trusted with our secret. But since we’re already in the process of tossing it all out there, why not go all in? You should tell him about Ally Orld.”
Rin glanced at Bay, but spoke to his brother. “This is risky.”
“You’re currently standing in a room alone with the guy who’s responsible for August Bril’s death.”
“What?” Bay shook his head, staring at the multi-slate as though he could see Sila through it even though that wasn’t the case. “I am not!”
“You slipped him poisoned tea,” Sila reminded.
“Yes, but it wouldn’t have killed him!” He held up a hand to Rin. “Honestly, all it did was make him a little delirious. He would have acted like a fool and eventually passed out somewhere, that’s all. He wouldn’t have died!”
“He would if you made him vulnerable to attack,” Sila corrected.
“Attack from who?”
“Come on, Kitten, you aren’t that naïve. Admit it, part of you suspected as much when you heard August’s body had been found the other day. And what about Lan?”
With Lan, Bay had thought it was his fault, since he’d been the one to drug the guy just before he’d supposedly crashed his car into a tree. Hearing that it’d actually been Sila? That was a relief. Not because it got him off the hook—Lan took advantage of people, Bay doing the same had merely been karmic justice—but because in his own fucked up way, that was Sila showing Bay he cared.
“This,” Rin shook his head, “sounds very much like a you two problem to me.”
