Page 94 of Villain
“Then, how do you know Iris?” Juri asked.
“I don’t.” Nix lifted his multi-slate and pulled up his saved photos, finding one of him and Branwen from a couple of years back at a family event. “This is her, right?”
Juri nodded. “Yeah. Iris Cherith.”
“She must have changed her name on campus.” But why? She’d kept her last name, so it clearly hadn’t been to conceal her identity entirely. He was pretty sure she’d never mentioned anything about the name Iris to him or the rest of the family either. “She’s my cousin. Her real name is Branwen.”
“Oh.” Juri seemed like he wasn’t sure what to say for a moment. “Sucks she was kicked out. I didn’t know her personally, but she seemed nice.”
“Do you happen to know any of her friends?” Nix thought she’d majored in history, so he hadn’t even considered checking with art students.
“Honestly?” Juri seemed uncomfortable. “The only person I know she was close with was Yejun. She took the beginners class in art as her elective and that’s how the two of them met, but that was the only one she signed up for, so I never had any classes with her myself.”
“What about West?” Lake was off-planet at the time, so Nix didn’t bother asking about him. “Did she hang out with him too?”
“Not that I know of, but I could be wrong. Like I said, I didn’t really know her, just that she was someone who hung around Yejun a lot. Then toward the end of last year, rumors went around that she’d done something to piss him off and was expelled.”
According to Yejun and the others, that something was working with the hacker after them. That didn’t sound anything like the person Nix knew, but apparently, he didn’t know her nearly as well as he’d thought. She’d been going by a different name and he’d never heard anything about that.
“When we spoke on the phone, it always sounded like she was hanging out with friends,” Nix divulged. “She said she was having a good time here.”
“She probably was,” Juri tried to reassure. “For what it’s worth, when I said she was close to him, I really mean it. They looked like they were legitimate friends. That’s why it was surprising to hear she’d done something that warranted being blacklisted from school. It happened pretty quickly, too. There were only three or four days left of the semester, but as soon as word got around about her expulsion, she was already gone.”
He’d foolishly convinced himself for over a week that the Demons had nothing to do with his cousin. Last night, his talk with Lake had only bolstered that idea, and yet now it felt like everything was falling apart and he was left standing on quicksand.
“Did you come here because of her?” Juri’s voice dropped low, even though they were the only two currently in the area, and the students walking the path were too far away to listen in on them. “Is that why you’ve gotten close to them?”
“No!” Nix dropped his head in his hand and groaned, speaking at a more level tone himself when he reiterated, “No, it just sort of happened this way. That’s why I’m so confused right now.”
“I tried to warn you they’re bad news,” Juri sighed. “You aren’t the first person they’ve fooled, and you won’t be the last. It’s sort of the price we all have to pay in order to attend this university. Deal with the revolving door of Demons. Keep our heads down. Pray they don’t take notice. Or do, if you’re into a quick fling.”
“Branwen wouldn’t have been,” Nix stated. “She wasn’t like that.”
Juri hummed. “I don’t think she and Yejun were in that kind of relationship either. It was actually a little weird to see them together. Usually, he sticks to himself while he works, but she was constantly around him and he never seemed bothered by her presence.”
“She told me she was close to someone here, I just never imagined…”
“This group is particularly bad. The story I told you in the library? That’s just one account of the things they’ve done since taking the mantel.”
The Demons of Foxglove Grove was a title, but that didn’t make every single person who bore the name the same.
“This is the first year in many that there are three of them, and they’re all already such prestigious members of the club,” Juri added. “They’ve been bred to control the planet through fear and aggression. Really, it’s no wonder they rule campus that way.”
“People still seem to like that,” Nix replied, only like was a strong word and even he thought it wasn’t entirely accurate in this situation. “Well. They want to fuck them, anyway.”
“They want to use them to get ahead,” Juri agreed. “To be frank, when we first met, I thought that’s what you were doing as well, but now…You came here because of your cousin, right? Is she refusing to tell you why she was expelled or something?”
As far as his family was concerned, Branwen never had been. She’d returned the day she was supposed to at the start of the summer break and said nothing about being kicked out. Though, it wasn’t too long after her arrival that she’d ended it, so there hadn’t been much of a chance for anyone to notice something was up or for her to confess.
“No,” Nix hadn’t spoken about this with anyone, but he was so drained at this point, he didn’t stop himself from saying, “She killed herself.”
“What?!”
His reaction proved to Nix that no one had heard anything about her death. Even thinking her name was Iris wouldn’t change that fact for Juri, but he truly had no notion she was gone.
People weren’t openly discussing her expulsion, but a part of Nix had assumed that was because they didn’t want to think about how she’d died. He should have known better than to assume anyone here held respect for the deceased.
“I’m so sorry,” Juri told him. “I had no idea. That’s…awful.”