Prologue
BLAKE
The quad’s quiet this late. No chatter, no music, just the hum of the floodlights and the occasional groan of the old flagpole in the wind. I keep my hood up. Northgate is mostly safe, and campus security would have nothing better to do than catch me cutting across the lawn at midnight.
I tell myself it isn’t a big deal. I’m not breaking in anywhere, not stealing, not vandalizing. Just picking something up. Still, my hands shake as I scan the benches lining the courtyard.
We agreed on the one under the east-facing window of the library—the spot where the cameras don’t quite reach. I checked twice: once by scoping the angle during the day, once by watching the looped feed my contact sent me. Security at Northgate is more decorative than functional because nothing ever happens here.
Despite that, every sound makes me flinch, every shadow stretches too long. It feels less like I’m grabbing a handoff and more like I’m trespassing on my own campus.
I move quickly. Two turns along the outer path, past a stairwell leading down to the basement that doubles as the prosthetics lab—half workshop, half research space where wedesign and test limbs and run gait analysis—and I’m at the spot we agreed on.
It’s the kind of place you’d choose if you wanted something hidden in plain sight. No one lingers here. No foot traffic after hours except for the occasional grad student cutting through after a late night of studying in the library, or a janitor wheeling a recycling bin across the pavement.
If you’ve got something you don’t want anyone else to find, this is as good a place as any to stash it.
What I’m looking for is both evidence and insurance. Proof. And if I let it disappear—if I let them continue to bury what’s happening—then the people who let hazing wreck lives at Briarwood get to walk away clean. No consequences. No fallout.
Briarwood isn’t just some random school, either. They’re the program everyone whispers about when schedules come out, the team known for brutal tackles and bruised kneecaps, for treating ninety minutes of soccer like open season on whoever’s unlucky enough to share the pitch.
Coaches shrug it off as “grit,” but everyone who’s ever played them knows better. They don’t care about the game—they care about dominance, about grinding down opponents until they quit. It’s been that way for years, bad reputation baked into every stat line and headline. And if hazing is what’s happening behind closed doors there, if the same ruthlessness that bleeds onto the field is shaping everything else they do, then covering this up only guarantees it keeps happening.
And I can’t stomach the idea of their team hoisting trophies, soaking up praise, while that truth festers underneath it all.
Northgate has its own tradition, though nothing close to what Briarwood’s gotten away with. The Red Card Rites happen every fall—an obnoxious ritual where senior boys on the team pick a junior girl to torment for the season. Harmless pranks, mostly. Sticky notes covering your locker, Gatorade dumped inyour bag, your cleats hidden in the laundry room before practice. It’s irritating, exhausting, but never dangerous.
Everyone dreads it when it’s their turn, me included, but it’s more of a nuisance than anything else—a reminder that our campus has its own brand of ridiculous patriarchal bullshit without ever tipping into the kind of brutality Briarwood’s known for.
I drop to my knees beside the bench, heart banging in my throat, and reach underneath. My fingers scrape old gum, splinters, then finally catch on the smooth edge of a piece of tape. A quick yank, and something small and hard comes free.
The flash drive I came here for.
I slide it into the pocket of my hoodie and stand, scanning the shadows again. Nothing moves, no one’s watching that I can see.
Then I run.
My pulse hammers in my ears the whole way back across the quad, through the cut of shadow between buildings, and into the alley where I stashed my bike.
By the time I’m pedaling through the dark—hood up, drizzle smacking against my face, adrenaline burning hot behind my ribs—I’m already rehearsing the lie I’ll use if campus security stops me. Something about a late study session, a caffeine run, whatever sounds harmless enough to keep them from asking what I’ve got zipped in my pocket.
Because this isn’t about Northgate.
It’s about Briarwood—their men’s and women’s teams don’t have harmless prank wars, they have hazing scandals no one talks about. My contact showed me enough to know the rumors are true, and she was too scared to blow the whistle herself.
So I told her I’d do it. I’d take the proof. I’d make it public.
Every push of the pedals reminds me it’s there, a lump of plastic that feels more like a loaded weapon. But it’s mine now.And if what’s on it is half as bad as she says, then someone’s finally going to pay for it.
Chapter 1
Blake
This is how I die. Not in some grand, cinematic way. Just… alone with the biggest fuckwad in all of Northgate, melting inside this poor life decision of a sweater, trapped in a tin can suspended by a couple of flimsy cables.
Okay, so they’re probably notthatflimsy, but tell that to my nervous system. I’m already picturing the headlines:Tragic elevator failure cuts short promising career in biomechanical engineering.Which is such bullshit, because I actually like what I do, despite what led me here. I like figuring out how bodies move and how to build things that help them move better: joints, braces, prosthetics—the kind of stuff that changes lives.
Nobody expected me to end up here, least of all the people back in my hometown. Where I’m from, girls didn’t get shiny new cleats or club travel teams—we got hand-me-down uniforms and the reminder that sports were just a hobby until we grew out of them. I spent years training in the dark with a beat-up ball, the kind of thing most kids would’ve ditched after a season. It got me a partial scholarship, though, and I wasn’t about to waste it.
