Chapter Thirteen
Sloane
?
I woke up the next morning on my own couch, alone, with a blanket over me that I hadn't pulled up myself and a text on my phone from a number with no name.
they know you talked to reyes. stop now. last nice warning.
I read it the way you'd read a diagnosis—once for the words, once for the meaning, once to see if you could argue with it. You couldn't. Last nice implied a next one that wasn't.
Cade was gone. He'd left the blanket and a glass of water on the coffee table and no note, which I understood, because notes are evidence and we didn't leave evidence.
But the empty apartment after a night where he'd let me hold him while he cried felt like a specific kind of cold, and I sat there with the threat in one hand and the cold in the other and did the only thing I know how to do when I'm scared, which is get angry and get to work.
I screenshotted the text. I started a file.
Threats: 1. I dated it. I noted the time the message came in—2:14 a.m., which meant it had landed while I slept, which meant Cade had been awake when it came, which meant Cade had seen it.
I sat with that for a second. He'd seen it and left a glass of water and said nothing.
I filed that too, in a different folder, the one I didn't have a name for yet, the one that would matter later.
"Oh good, you're catastrophizing in your work voice," said Brielle, emerging from her room in last night's eyeliner and a robe, holding two mugs because she's a better person than me. "I can tell because you've got the little line between your eyebrows. The investigative line. Talk."
So I told her. Not all of it. None of the Cade of it.
Just the threat, the watching, the shape of the thing I was chasing, and Brielle—stylish, loud, the only person who could make me feel both completely loved and completely seen-through in a single sentence—sat down across from me, set both mugs down, and folded her hands like a woman about to deliver a verdict.
"Okay. Two things. One, you need to tell Mara and probably campus security, because 'last nice warning' is a sentence people say in court later, when they're explaining to a jury what they should have done.
And two—" She tilted her head, and her voice went gentle in a way that was so much scarier than loud Brielle.
"When were you going to tell me about the football player whose hoodie is currently on your kitchen chair, and whose name you have very conspicuously not said once in three weeks? "
I looked at the kitchen chair.
There was a hoodie on it. Gray. Enormous. Smelling, even from here, like the soap I now thought about more than I thought about my own byline.
"It's not—" I started.
"Sloane." Brielle picked up her mug. "I have watched you not-look at one specific man at two separate events now with a discipline that would frighten a nun.
You don't not-look at people you don't care about.
You just don't look at them. The not-looking is the tell.
It's the loudest thing you do." She sipped.
"I'm not going to tell anyone. I'm offended you'd even think— but you're investigating his team and getting threats from a no-name number at two in the morning, and you've got his hoodie and a face like you're falling off a building and enjoying the view.
So I'm going to say the thing your mom would say if she were nicer about it.
" She set the mug down and looked at me, all the loud gone, just the love.
"Be careful. Not just careful that you don't get caught.
Careful that you don't lose the thing in you that made you good before any of this.
You came here to break a story, not to break your own heart on a defensive back.
Don't let the second one eat the first one. Okay?"
I didn't answer. I put on the hoodie, which did not help my case at all, and Brielle let it go, because she's family, and family knows when you've heard them and there's nothing left to say.
"There's a party tonight," she said, changing lanes with the mercy of long practice.
"Wideout's place, the loud one, Carter? Half the team'll be there.
You should come. Work it if you have to, you absolute freak, but also—just be a person at a party for once.
People are starting to forget you're twenty-one and not a federal investigation in a ponytail. "
A party. Half the team. Sources, loosened by beer, in a house where nobody would expect a reporter to be a reporter.
And him.
"Yeah," I said, casual, a master of disguise fooling absolutely no one. "I could come for an hour."
Brielle smiled into her mug like she'd won something, which she had.
?
Miles Carter's house was the kind of college rental that's one citation away from condemned and one good night away from legend.
Bass through the floor, red cups, a beer pong table that had clearly been wept on, eighty people pretending the season wasn't grinding them to powder.
I knew the second I walked in that it was a goldmine and a minefield and that I'd brought a recorder to both.
I worked it like Mara taught me. Sunshine deployed, harmless-intern energy, oh my god I love your team, what's it actually like.
Players talk at parties. They're tired and they're young and somebody's finally asking them about something other than the depth chart, and three beers in, a backup tight end told me, unprompted, that "the training room's a joke this year, nobody'll write you down as hurt, you're either green or you're cut," and I laughed like he'd told a joke and felt the words go straight into the file behind my ribs.
Another guy, a freshman, told me he'd learned in week two not to limp where a coach could see you.
You learn to walk it off before you get to the building, he said, like it was advice, like it was wisdom somebody had handed down to him, and maybe it was.
This was the thing Reyes had told me on the phone, the machine, running so smoothly that the boys inside it didn't even feel the gears anymore. They thought it was just how football worked. They thought the silence was theirs.
I saw Cade across the room exactly once.
He saw me. We did the discipline. He turned back to whatever Jaxon Holt was saying—Jaxon, the quarterback, polished and golden and laughing at something with his eyes somewhere else entirely, that checking-the-exits thing he did—and I turned back to the tight end, and we were both very good, and not looking at him cost me something physical, a held breath I'd been carrying for three weeks and was starting to think I'd carry forever.
The minefield went off around eleven.
I'd drifted toward the back of the house, toward the kitchen, chasing a thread—someone had said Mercer's here, can you believe that guy comes to these, and the idea of Dale Mercer at a player party with his khakis and his phone had set off every alarm I owned.
I went to confirm it. I found the hallway by the back door instead, and in the hallway I found a man I didn't know, thirties, too old for this, polo shirt, the soft heavy build of a guy who used to play and now did something adjacent to it for money.
"Sloane Pierce," he said. Not a question. He had a beer he wasn't drinking, same as me, same as all of us, all night, a houseful of people holding props. "The reporter. You're smaller than I pictured."
The hallway was narrow. He wasn't blocking it, exactly. He was just in it, in the way a man learns to be in a space so that a woman has to ask him to move, so that moving becomes a thing she has to transact for, a small toll, a reminder of who decides.
"And you're not on the roster," I said, bright, recorder running in my pocket, my whole body going into the still place. "Booster? Staff? You've got a real 'I have opinions about the offensive line' energy."
"Friend of the program." He smiled. It didn't get near his eyes.
"You've been making some calls. Bothering some people who used to play here.
Old news, that stuff. Sad stuff. Kids who couldn't cut it, telling stories to make themselves feel better about not making it.
" He took a half-step. The hallway got smaller.
"A girl could get a real reputation, calling people up, twisting what hurt boys say.
That kind of reputation, it follows you.
Past school. Into the part where you're trying to get a real job and somebody who knows somebody makes a call. " Lower. "You hear me?"
I heard him. My heart was going and my smile was nailed on and my whole body had gone into the bright still place I go when a powerful man decides to teach me that staying quiet is the same as being safe, the exact lesson my mother handed me a knife to refuse, and I was three seconds from doing the dumb brave thing and saying something I couldn't take back—
—when the hallway went dark, because something large stepped into the mouth of it and took all the light.
?
Cade didn't say anything at first.
That was the terrifying part, the part I'd seen on a field and never up close.
He just arrived, filled the hallway behind the man, and the man felt the temperature change before he turned around, the way you feel weather coming, and when he turned and saw who it was, all the smooth went out of his face at once, like a tablecloth pulled off a table.
"Lawson," he said. "We're just—talking."