Chapter 20 #2
The elevator takes too long, so I use the stairs.
He’s on the second-floor landing.
Quinton Whitmore, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, standing exactly where I’d have to pass him. Like he knew which room, and when it would finish, and which way I’d come out.
“Congratulations,” he says.
I stop three steps above him. The stairwell is empty and his voice comes back off the concrete.
“Get out of my way, Quinton.”
“Kinsley’s finished.” He doesn’t move. “Suspended, no-contact order, probably expelled inside a month. You must be delighted.”
“I’m not discussing this with you.”
“No. I don’t imagine you are.” He pushes off the wall and comes up one step. One is enough to change the geometry. He’s taller than me by nearly a foot, and from here he’s looking down. “The thing about Kinsley is she was never especially bright. Good at being angry. Bad at thinking ahead.”
“Unlike you.”
His smile is nothing like any I’ve seen on him. Not charming, not warm, not the careful performance he’s been running since the first day he sat down beside me in Hawthorne’s class. This one is flat and cold and real.
“Unlike me,” he agrees. “I’ve been thinking ahead since Gray and I were sixteen and he took the only thing that mattered to me. I’ve been thinking ahead since I watched your little pack assemble itself and realized Gray finally had something worth breaking.”
The mask is gone completely. No warmth anywhere in his face, no concern in his voice, nothing left of the helpful classmate who tore down photographs and offered to walk me home. This is what has been underneath the whole time.
“You never cared about me at all.”
“I cared what you represented. An Omega playing house with eight Alphas, one of whom ruined my life. You were useful. You were fun.” He takes another step. The railing is against my back now. “And you were easy. Give a lonely girl some attention and she’ll follow you anywhere.”
“I didn’t follow you anywhere.”
“No. You didn’t.” He sounds annoyed, which is the first honest thing he’s given me. “That was the problem. You were supposed to trust me over them. You were supposed to come to me when it got hard and let me take the whole thing apart from the inside. You kept going back.”
“Because they’re worth going back to.”
“They’re territorial animals fighting over a toy.” He’s close enough now that I get his cologne, sandalwood and leather, a smell I used to think was pleasant. “When the novelty wears off and they work out what they’ve actually signed, they’ll drop you the way every Alpha drops every Omega.”
“You don’t know anything about them.”
“I’ve known Gray since we were children. He’s his father’s son, and you’ve met his father.” He leans in and drops his voice. “You think you’re special. Sophia thought she was special.”
“You assaulted Sophia.”
His shoulders come up half an inch before he puts them back down.
“Sophia had a different understanding of that evening. So did the school that cleared me.”
“The school your father paid.”
That one he doesn’t answer, which is its own answer.
“Kinsley was sloppy,” he says instead, quiet and certain. “I’m not.”
And there’s the whole plan, handed over in five words. She takes the fall. Nothing in Tyler’s folder has his name on it. He walks out of this building and goes back to class.
“You sound rehearsed.”
“I’ve prepared for a number of things.” He’s in my space now, not touching me, close enough that I’d have to push past him, and the railing is cold through my jacket.
“In a few weeks, when the noise dies down, the administration starts asking about your designation and your team’s conduct and your coaches’ oversight. All of it comes apart anyway.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a forecast. I don’t have to threaten you.
The institution will do it for me.” He reaches out and touches my chin with the tips of his fingers, tilting my face up.
“You’re an Omega on a men’s crew with claim marks under your collar and a pack filing in progress.
You think the university lets that stand?
You think the conference does? The AVNC? ”
I don’t pull away and I don’t flinch.
“Take your hand off me.”
“Or what? You’ll file another complaint?” He smiles. “Go ahead. My word against yours in an empty stairwell. No witnesses. No cameras. A concerned classmate checking on his project partner after a difficult hearing.”
“Or,” I say, and my voice comes out very calm, “I’ll break your fingers.”
The smile goes.
“You think I’m the same girl who sat across from you at Common Grounds and swallowed every word?
” I hold his eyes. “I have eight Alphas who would take you apart if I asked. I have a Title IX coordinator already building a file with your name on it. I have Tyler Wu, who has been three moves ahead of you since he found your second account. And I have a written statement from a woman you did this to before me.”
I take one step forward, into his space. He doesn’t move back. He does stop talking.
“You spent months trying to cut me off from the people who actually care about me. Trying to turn me into another Sophia, too frightened and too ashamed to fight.” My voice drops. “I’m not Sophia. And you are nowhere near as clever as you think.”
His hand comes off my chin.
“We’re done. Walk away clean from Kinsley’s mess, I don’t care.
But if you come near me again, or near anyone on my team, or if you look at us across a parking lot, I will make it my life’s work that every school you apply to and every firm that considers you and every board your father sits on knows exactly what you are. ”
“And what’s that?”
“A predator who peaked in prep school.”
The stairwell door opens a floor below and Bo’s voice comes up the concrete, tight and fast.
“Reese?”
Quinton steps back smoothly, like it was always his idea. His hands go into his pockets and the mask comes back on, not all the way, just enough. The pleasant expression. The easy shoulders. His eyes stay flat.
“Up here,” I call.
Bo takes the stairs two at a time and comes around the landing. He reads the whole thing inside a second, me against the railing, Quinton a step above me with his body between me and the way down.
Bo doesn’t say a word. He just moves, putting himself between us with the same instinct that puts him in seven seat, the wall between the stroke and everything behind it.
Gray arrives two seconds later. His eyes find Quinton, and everything in his face goes very quiet.
“Gray.” Quinton’s voice is conversational. “It’s been a while.”
“Walk away.”
“I was congratulating Reese on her hearing. Good result. She should be proud.”
“Walk away now.”
Quinton looks at me over Bo’s shoulder with that flat, cold smile. “See you in class, Reese. We’ve still got that project to finish.”
He goes down the stairs without hurrying. The footsteps echo and fade. The door opens and shuts.
Bo turns to me. “Are you okay? Did he touch you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Reese.”
“He talked. I talked. That’s all of it.” My hands are shaking, so I press them flat against my thighs. “He isn’t going to stop. He thinks nothing can reach him.”
“He’s wrong,” Gray says. He says it quietly, which is worse than shouting. Gray shouting means he’s angry. Gray quiet means he’s already decided.
“We should go,” I say. “Before he comes back to congratulate me again.”
Bo’s hand finds the small of my back, warm and steady. Gray falls in on the other side, close enough that our arms brush every few steps. Neither of them says anything, and neither of them needs to.
We go down the rest of the stairs, through the lobby, out the front doors into the afternoon. The sky has gone flat and low with rain coming. Students stream past on the sidewalk. Nobody looks twice at a girl walking between two very tall men toward the parking lot.
Bo’s truck is in the second row. He opens the passenger door and I get in. Gray takes the back without being asked. Bo comes around, starts the engine, and pulls out.
Nobody turns on the radio.
The campus goes by. The boathouse. The athletics complex. The road out to the house where the other six of them are waiting to hear how it went.
I should call Tyler. I should text the group. I should report the stairwell to Okafor while it’s fresh and get it documented and added to the file. I should do all the strategic things the version of me who walked into that hearing this morning would already be doing.
Instead I sit in Bo’s passenger seat and press my palms together in my lap to keep them still.
Bo drives with one hand on the wheel. The other rests on the center console, palm up and open. An offer, not a request.
I take it. His fingers close around mine, warm and rough off the oars, and he squeezes once without looking over.
Gray’s hand comes onto my shoulder from the back seat.
Not the brief touch from after the filing.
He leaves it there, his thumb working into the tight muscle at the base of my neck, and I can feel the tremor in his fingers.
Whatever he’s holding onto isn’t only anger.
It’s the leash he’s kept on himself since February, and it’s coming apart in his hands.
I close my eyes. The truck hums under us. Bo anchors me from one side and Gray burns through my jacket from the other, and none of us says a word the whole way home.