Chapter 6
Dante
I couldn’t concentrate today.
I hadn’t been able to since I walked out of the room last night and saw her rounding a corner of the library. I did my squats, but my mind was on the evening before.
How much had she heard?
That fucker, Knox, had been texting me all last night. Okay, he hadn’t texted me all night. He’d texted three times, but from him, once was too many.
I knew what I was doing was risky, but I kept telling myself it was only for a short time.
The campus had been quiet by the time I got back to my apartment. Dustin was still out, and the low sound of ESPN from Noah’s room meant he was home but wouldn’t be coming out anytime soon. It’s possible that the guy studied film more than I did.
I’d gone into my room, tossed my bag on the couch, pulled my phone from the hidden zip pocket, and glared at it. The burner lit up without a contact list, just the way I liked it.
One message waiting.
Fucker: I need more than the basketball team
It’s what he’d called me for, it’s what I’d hung up on him for already. I sat down, kicked my feet onto the coffee table, and wondered if I could tell him to go fuck himself. But I needed those painkillers, and he was the only one I knew who could get them for me.
A bubble popped up almost immediately.
Fucker: Give me something else
I’d stared at the screen, thumb hovering. It would be easy to stop here. Tell him to take a long walk off a short pier. But my being reckless didn’t help me now, or keep Jiana out of his eyeline.
I wasn’t so stupid that I ever texted him back. I used a burner phone, and if — and it was a big if — he ever exposed me, then all he would have at most was a recording of my voice. That only worked if he had the smarts to record me.
If he recorded it, well, anyone could impersonate my Ohioan accent, and he’d need more than that for proof. I had no intention of giving him anything else that would hammer the nail in my coffin.
Knox was a low-level street thug and had more swagger than brains, but he was still successfully coercing me into dangerous territory by giving him insider info about players in the program . . . and I was supposed to be the one with the higher IQ.
I snorted in contempt at my stupidity. I should never have started this.
Being involved with him risked bringing my sister back into his grasp.
Jiana was doing well. She promised she’d stay away from him, and I believed her.
I just needed to make sure the fucker stayed away from her, and every time I had contact with him, I made that distance between them seem smaller and smaller.
Once I was out of here, and in the NFL, and had my rookie paycheck, I’d have her out of our town and far away from all the deadbeats she’d once called friends.
If I got a first-round Draft pick, I’d hit the jackpot.
Not only would I receive a signing bonus in the tens of millions, but I’d also have a base salary and income for me and my family that would be pretty much guaranteed.
Not to mention performance or roster bonuses.
Hell, I would be a millionaire even if I got drafted in the second or third rounds, and that was a hell of a lot more than my family had now.
First-round money would solve a lot of things. But Knox Ward needed to be gone before the Draft.
My own stupidity was not going to be the reason I lost that income.
My shoulder had been aching all day, and I needed a pill. Sitting in the library with Savannah wasn’t what I needed — the pain had built its intensity.
I was rude to her.
I knew I was.
Her father was the dean. I didn’t need to have his attention on me for any other reason than I brought in donations from the alumni.
I went back to the library to see if she was still there to smooth things over before she went and told daddy.
She wasn’t there. The place was dead; I hadn’t even heard anyone breathe. Something dull and shiny under her seat caught my attention, and when I picked it up, I saw it was a tool of some sort. A chisel? I put it in my backpack.
I took the burner out of my pocket and pressed dial. There was only one number in recent, and it was his.
“Good for ice hockey. Bench is deep. Won’t matter who’s out.” I just knew he was going to make some irritating remark, and I was more interested in why my pill bottle was only half full. So I’d asked.
Because there was no one in the library, or at least not close.
Until I heard the voices in the hallway outside.
I hung up. When I got to the hallway, the unmistakable golden hair caught the light as Savannah Cole practically ran around the corner.
What was she coming back for? The chisel?
On impulse, I followed her. I didn’t want to chase her, but I could orchestrate ‘running into her’ and see how she reacted.
I wasn’t expecting her to head to the college sheds, and I definitely wasn’t prepared to see her unlock a door of one of them and then disappear inside.
I waited a few minutes, but even on my best of days, I couldn’t think of a bullshit excuse as to why I would be there. I had no choice but to go to the dorm and write the night off.
Just as I’d been drifting off to sleep around three that morning, knowing I had to get up in two hours, Savannah Cole’s face crossed my mind. What had she heard? What if she asked me?
Savannah was the kind of person who noticed details — and remembered them. If she started looking too closely, would she be able to make a connection?
I lay in the dark with my eyes shut, wondering how fragile a connection has to be to qualify as a tenuous link.
I hadn’t appreciated the alarm clock going off, or Dust hammering on the wall, yelling, Switch the fucking thing off when I hadn’t woken up instantly like I always did.
Little to no sleep, a heavy conscience, and lack of food weren’t making me feel like my best self this morning.
“Spence, are you sleeping?” Coach Merriman suddenly shouted. I hadn’t heard him approach over the noise of the gym, so his screaming in my ear was not appreciated.
“If I was, I’m not now,” I snapped back at him.
His eyes gleamed, and I inwardly cursed.
“Are you giving me attitude number ten?”
Yes. “No, Coach.”
He looked at me, that calculated gleam in his eyes, and I just knew I was going to hate what was coming next. He smiled — and it was the kind of smile that never meant anything good for the person on the receiving end.
“Good. Then you won’t mind running scout team drills for the next forty-five minutes.”
What an asshole.
I stared at him. “Coach—”
“You want to burn that attitude off, or you want to keep testing my patience?”
I bit down on the answer I wanted to give and grabbed my helmet. Scout team drills meant extra reps, no breaks, and the privilege of making the defense look good in the process. Exactly what my already fried brain and sore body needed. Twelve pills were never going to last me at this rate.
Dust caught my eye from across the field and gave me a mock wave. Another asshole.
By the time Coach finally waved me off, sweat was pouring down my back, and my legs felt like wet concrete. I shoved my helmet under my arm and trudged toward the locker room.
Dust was leaning against his open locker, gulping from a water bottle like he’d just run a marathon instead of routes. “You look like death, man.”
“I feel like it.” I dropped down on the bench across from him, peeling my practice jersey off over my head. “Apparently, giving Merriman ‘attitude number ten’ is punishable by cardio death.”
“‘Attitude number ten?’” He grinned. “That’s the eyebrow raise with the side of smartass, right?”
“Yeah, well, apparently it’s a capital offense.”
From a couple of lockers down, Noah was pretending to scroll his phone, but I caught the way his head angled just slightly toward us. The guy had been here half a semester, still felt like a stranger, but he listened like it was his job when Coach was talking.
“You good for the run later?” Dust asked, tipping his chin toward the field schedule taped to the wall.
“Yeah,” I said, keeping it neutral. No need to invite conversation.
Noah’s thumb flicked over his screen, eyes steady on me like I was the day’s entertainment. He’d been caught listening to us and wasn’t hiding it.
I liked that.
I grabbed my towel and stood, letting the silence stretch before heading for the showers.
I was ready for training to be over today. At least in class, the professors expected my brain to be the only muscle working. I smiled as the water ran over me.
My first class was easy; I was guaranteed a quick nap.
The day was already picking up.
* * *
One nap later, two classes that weren’t in any way taxing, and I was feeling better. That was, until I saw my favorite tutor heading across the quad; her pace was as fast as it’d been last night, but her sense of awareness was lacking.
Savannah Cole, the girl whose friends call me Savvy was the reason I only got two hours of sleep. Kind of.
Her attention was on her backpack, and she was heading straight for a collision with someone if she didn’t pay attention soon. I made the rash decision to make that person me.
It was time Savvy and I became friends.
“Even in the offseason, people will get grumpy if you injure the star quarterback.”
She looked up at me, her eyes wide with surprise. Her hand was still in her bag, and her mouth was open like she was truly shocked I was speaking to her.
On a partly cloudy February afternoon, I realized something I hadn’t properly registered before.
She was more than pretty — pretty was an overused word, too small for what she was.
Sunlight seemed to have been invented just to catch in her hair, every pale-gold strand bright enough to burn if you looked too long.
Her eyes were a warm blue — calm on the surface, but I knew a storm was brewing beneath that warmth.
Her skin was a smooth, golden tan, the perfect kind of effortless beauty people paid stylists and photographers to fake.