Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jackson
Idon’t sleep.
Every time I shut my eyes I see Quinton’s hand around her arm and his face coming toward hers, and then the anger arrives and I have to get up and walk the room until it lets go of me.
Eli’s asleep in my bed. He went under around two, on his side with one hand tucked under his cheek. I should be next to him. I should be grateful for the conversation we finally had after months of pretending we weren’t having it.
Instead I’m at the window watching the trees move, thinking through all the ways I could hurt Quinton Whitmore.
Twenty-four hours. That’s what I gave Eli.
It’s been six.
My phone goes off on the nightstand and I get to it before the sound reaches him.
Tyler: Found something. Kitchen. Now.
I pull on sweats and get out without letting the door make a sound. The house is quiet, nothing but the refrigerator and the old wood settling, and the kitchen light is already on when I come down.
Tyler’s at the table with his laptop, an empty energy drink at his elbow and shadows under his eyes.
“Couldn’t sleep either?”
“No.” I take the chair across from him. “What have you got?”
He turns the screen. It’s a grid of screenshots, messages and posts laid out in order.
“Kinsley and Quinton have been talking for months,” he says. “Not on their main accounts. Kinsley has a second account she uses to talk about other girls. Quinton has one he uses for things I’d rather not describe.”
“How’d you get them?”
“She tagged the alt in a story once and deleted it inside two minutes, but nothing’s ever actually gone.” He scrolls. “Look at the dates. They started right after Reese joined the crew. And read how they talk to each other.”
I lean in.
It’s worse than I was ready for. Kinsley feeding him Reese’s schedule, her habits, which classes she sat in alone. Quinton reporting back when he managed to get coffee with her, when she started answering his texts, when she stopped looking over her shoulder for one of us.
Quinton: She trusts me now.
Kinsley: That was fast.
Quinton: She wanted somebody who wasn’t one of them.
Kinsley: Told you.
Then, three weeks ago, it changes.
Kinsley: She’s definitely Omega. Saw her taking pills that looked like suppressants.
Quinton: You sure?
Kinsley: Positive. Gray’s little pet is hiding her designation. We can blow the whole thing up.
Quinton: Not yet.
Kinsley: Why not?
Quinton: Because she trusts me. Let me see how far that gets us first.
Kinsley: Just don’t actually fall for her lol
Quinton: I’m not Gray.
Kinsley: That’s not an answer.
Quinton: She’s useful. That’s all.
My hands aren’t steady when I finish. Tyler watches me the way you’d watch weather.
“There’s more,” he says. “I went into Quinton’s history with Gray. The prep school years. The girl they both dated.”
“Sophia.”
“Yeah.” He pulls up another window. “She’s at UCLA now, studying psychology. I messaged her and told her I was at Sable Ridge and looking into Quinton because I had reason to believe he’d hurt somebody here. I asked if she’d be willing to tell me anything about what happened at prep school.”
“She answered?”
“Not at first. She wanted proof I was who I said I was. I sent her my student profile and told her she didn’t owe me anything. She wrote back about an hour later.”
He turns the screen again.
The first messages are careful, Sophia working out whether this is real or a trap with Quinton’s name on it. Once she decides Tyler isn’t connected to him, the rest comes out.
She didn’t leave because two Alphas were fighting over her. She left because Quinton wouldn’t accept an answer.
It started small. Turning up in places he had no way of knowing she’d be.
Texting constantly and getting angry when the replies came slowly.
Telling her Gray was dangerous. Telling her Gray had a bet running with the lacrosse team over who could get her first. Telling her Gray only wanted her to take something from Quinton.
She believed him, because he was charming and attentive and seemed so worried about her.
Then one night at a party he got her into a bedroom.
He didn’t rape me, she wrote. But only because somebody walked in. He had me against the wall with his hand over my mouth. I still have nightmares about his eyes.
She reported it. Quinton’s father made it go away. A week later she was on a plane to California.
I never told Gray the truth. I was too ashamed, and Quinton had convinced me they’d planned it together. It took years of therapy before I understood that Gray never did anything wrong, and by then it felt too late to reach out.
I read it three times. The words start coming apart and mixing into what Eli told me last night, the arm, the mouth, the hand coming up toward her face.
Same beginning. Same direction.
“He’s done this before,” I say. My own voice sounds like it’s coming from the next room. “This is what he does.”
“Looks like it.” Tyler closes that window but leaves the messages with Kinsley on the screen. “So what do we do with it?”
The answer’s obvious to me. Find him. Make him understand what happens.
Eli’s in my head instead, level and reasonable. Give me twenty-four hours.
“Gray needs to see this,” I say.
“I know. It’s two in the morning and he’s going to come apart, so I wanted you first.” Tyler looks up at me. “You’re the only one who can keep him from doing something stupid.”
“Me?”
“You’re the only one he respects enough to listen to when he’s already angry. Everybody else he just runs over.” Tyler shrugs. “You don’t back up, and you don’t lie to him.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. Gray and I have never been close, not the way Eli and I are, not the easy way Zane is with everybody.
There’s an understanding, though. If Gray weren’t captain it would be me, not because I want it but because I could do it.
The difference is that Gray needs to lead.
I only need to keep what’s mine standing.
“There’s one other thing,” Tyler says.
He opens a map.
I lean closer.
“Kinsley and Quinton have both been tagged around the athletic complex late at night. Different days, different accounts, but there’s overlap.” He points to a cluster near the football fields. “Mostly here.”
“How late?”
“Midnight to five, usually.”
I look at the timestamps.
“Jackson.”
“I’m looking.”
“That’s not permission to go over there.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I know.” He shuts the map. “Which is why I’m telling you to leave it alone until we tell everybody.”
“Send me all of it.”
“Jackson.”
“Send it.”
He studies me for a second, then reaches for his energy drink and remembers it’s empty. “Fine. But if you go anywhere near Quinton tonight, I’m waking Eli.”
“Then sleep. You look like hell.”
“Thanks. So do you.”
I take my phone out to the back porch and let the cold get at my head. The sky’s going gray at the edges. In a few hours everybody will be up and we’ll have to work out how to handle this without taking ourselves apart in the process.
Right now I let myself have it. The anger and the fear underneath it and the flat refusal to lose any of these people.
Reese. Eli. Even Gray, with all his edges.
They’re mine, and Quinton Whitmore is about to find out what that means.
I go back up and lie down beside Eli, and it’s no good. I last maybe ten minutes before I’m staring at the ceiling again. He shifts beside me, reaching across the mattress in his sleep until his hand finds my arm, and that should be enough to keep me there.
It almost is.
Then I see Quinton’s hand around Reese’s arm again.
I ease out from under Eli’s hand and stand.
The keys are already in my fist before I make it downstairs.
I tell myself I’m taking the usual loop.
That’s bullshit, and I know it before I clear the driveway.
Tyler’s map sits in the back of my head as I ride the long way around campus. Nothing’s open and almost nobody’s out. I could turn toward the lake. Take the road behind the boathouse. Ride until the anger burns itself out and go home before Eli wakes up.
Instead I turn toward the athletic complex.
The stadium lot by the football fields is mostly empty at this hour. I cut the engine near the entrance, well away from the cluster Tyler showed me, and sit there watching moths work themselves half to death against the security lights.
For five minutes, nothing happens.
Then the interior light comes on inside a car at the far end of the lot, backed into the shadow of the trees.
Two people. Close together.
I don’t move.
The passenger door opens and somebody gets out and stretches. Big through the shoulders. He goes around to the driver’s side and leans in the window, and even from here the kiss goes on long enough to tell me this isn’t the first one.
He steps back and the car pulls out.
As it passes under a light, I get the driver’s face.
Kinsley Adams.
I stay where I am.
The man watches her go, then turns toward a G-Wagon parked two spaces down. He crosses under the security light, and there’s no mistaking him.
Quinton Whitmore.
Every part of me wants to start the bike.
Ride across the lot. Block him in. Get off and find out whether he still looks so fucking pleased with himself when somebody his own size puts hands on him.
I don’t.
I gave Eli twenty-four hours.
Quinton gets into the G-Wagon and drives away without ever looking in my direction. Neither of them has any idea I was here.
I pull out my phone.
Jackson: Saw Quinton and Kinsley at the football fields just now. Kissing.
Tyler answers inside ten seconds, which tells me he never went to bed.
Tyler: You’re sure it was them?
Jackson: Saw both their faces.
Tyler: Good. That puts them together in person. Corroborates the messages.
Jackson: What’s the play?
The dots go for a while.
Tyler: We tell everyone at breakfast. All of them. Then we work out how to take these two apart without anybody catching charges.
I put the phone away and start the bike.
The anger hasn’t gone anywhere, but it’s pointed at something now. Quinton thinks he’s been running this. He’s been doing it longer than us and he’s walked away clean every time before.
He’s never had eight of us come at him at once.
By the time we’re finished, he’s going to wish he had never looked in Reese Callahan’s direction.