A plan.
Time.
Patience.
All words that felt like torture when his eyes looked at me like that.
He drove me home with the headlights off until the last turn, parking down the road like Maven had earlier. He walked me to the edge of the trees, pulled me into his arms one last time, his forehead pressed to mine.
“I want to do this the careful way, but if you need me… I’m here. You understand? Everything else can get fucked to hell in the process, but if you need me—”
“I’ll call. I promise.”
He nodded, and both of us held onto each other longer than we should have, our throats tight with the way each word was breaking us.
Sneaking back into my house felt more wrong than the act of cheating did. The bed smelled like Nathan, like a life I was already half-out of. My skin still hummed with Shane, my senses full of him.
I curled onto my side, staring into the dark.
It will be over soon.
We have a plan.
I will be free.
I repeated it until sleep finally claimed me, clinging to a promise that felt too good to be true.
Patience
Shane
Present
We decided the perfect time to take Nathan down was at Ariana’s birthday party.
I was already pissed the man had the audacity to use her birthday as an opportunity to schmooze the people he wanted to impress, anyway, so it felt like poetic justice. Ariana lived most of her life with her birthday on the back burner, her family never separating it from Christmas. I’d made sure when we were together to make her feel special, but it was clear Nathan hadn’t done the same.
That would all be over soon.
The weeks leading up to it were a careful dance — measured, deliberate, and invisible to anyone who wasn’t inside the job.
Ariana moved through her days like she always had: gracious, capable, accommodating. No one would’ve guessed what she was doing behind closed doors. She copied emails when Nathan stepped out of the room. Took photos of financial ledgers she wasn’t meant to see. She recorded one late-night conversation when his voice sharpened just enough for her to know he was talking to someone he shouldn’t have been, his threats loud and clear. She gathered documentation tied to Sweet Dreams when she realized money was moving into theorganization without making its way to the final budget, which made us wonder if the nonprofit was somehow being used to hide the money he was pulling in from Vegas. She flagged upcoming “meetings” with sponsors whose names set off alarms the moment she mentioned them to me.
All the while, our conversations were scarce and too short. She’d sneak away and call me from her burner phone whenever she could, and I’d always answer scared to death that it would be her needing me rather than just a check in.
“I’m scared,” she admitted more than once.
And I was, too.
But we were in it together, and we had a team.
On my end, I kept quiet and played Coach. We were well into the season now and it was easy to stay busy and off Nathan’s radar. But in that act, I was able to covertly do my own digging — casual conversations with staff, a question here, a comment there. I noted every odd practice incident, every moment that didn’t sit right. I screenshotted betting line shifts that made no sense unless you knew where to look. I talked to medical trainers off the record, noting which ones sweat at my questions versus which ones were confused by my implications.
In the end, I compiled it all into a timeline so clean and airtight it couldn’t be dismissed as coincidence.
Will, Jaxson, Vince, Aleks, and Carter played their roles without ever needing the full picture. Same with the girls: Livia, Maven, Grace, Mia, and Chloe. Information passed between us easily, supported by our friendship over the years. I pulled Will into the mix more than the others, telling him how crucial his testimony would be in all of this. Of course, I’d had to calm him down when I told him I was fairly certain the medical staff had been pushing him toward his injury instead of away from it. He was murderous and rightly so, but I reminded him they wouldget theirs when the ringleader was taken down — and he could help us do it.
The crew also acted as a barrier, the girls stealing Ariana away for girls’ nights whenever possible, and the guys keeping Nathan busy with our traps. Carter would be especially important. The night of Ariana’s party, he would go to Nathan and pretend he’d heard about “opportunities for advancement.” I knew he wouldn’t have to say it outright for Nathan to pounce, eager to bring another player into his scheme, and with Carter recording the whole conversation from his phone in his pocket, it would be an irrefutable source of proof.
