Savannah
I returned to my room, dumped all my stuff, and then went to the athlete residences.
Armed only with my phone and my temper, I reached my destination pretty quickly. I wasn’t an athlete, but I could power walk like a she-demon who had just learned about a sale in hell.
I was about to freak out, so outside his dorm, I took a couple of deep breaths.
Should I be here? Had I even thought this through? Maybe I should have rehearsed? But when had Dante Spence ever given me time torehearseanything?
The front door opened, and a guy came out. He looked me up and down.
“You need in?” he asked me, walking out, his fingertips on the door.
“Um . . .”
He shrugged and kept walking, and I darted forward as the door began to close. I climbed the stairs on autopilot, unsure of which room was his, until I remembered the dorm number. It was 303, the same backward as it was forward. Stupid, the things you notice when you follow the quarterback up to his room to have sex with him.
Not that that had been my intention that night. I snorted, thinking,Sure, Savvy, keep lying to yourself.
My knock came sharp and too fast, and before I could bolt, the door opened.
Dante stood there in a black Henley and black shorts, damp hair sticking up any which way. He looked at me in surprise. My resolve wavered, but then the words crashed out of me, breathless and unpolished.
“I found something.”
His expression shifted. He pulled me inside and shut the door. “Sav.” His voice was low, warning. “What did you do?”
“I went through the records. The Academic Liaisons’ files. I shouldn’t have—” My hands shook as I fumbled in my back pocket for my phone. Still shaking, I opened my phone and showed him the pieced bits of text from Hadley’s blog. “But I did, and you need to see this.”
He took it, eyes flicking over the screen. The silence stretched, thicker with every second.
“I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this,” I said quickly, my words tumbling over each other. “But it’s so much more than grade altering. Read this.”
His eyes narrowed as he read. “Sav—”
“It got buried, scrubbed, but I found this draft cached. And a student named Hadley — she was the one who posted it.”
His gaze snapped to mine, sharp as a blade. “Hadley? Is she still—”
“Yes. Still here, I think. Still a student. And if she knew enough to post this last semester, then...” My throat closed around the rest. “Then it’s not as hidden as they think.”
His jaw worked, tight enough I could see the muscle twitching. He handed me back my phone, and I got the impression he wanted to throw it across the room. His hands clenched into fists at his sides. “Damn it, Sav, I told you not to do this.”
“I had to!” The desperation in my voice cracked through the room. “I needed to know what else they were hiding! This is so bad and they aren’t evenhidingit well. What happens when they decide you’re too much trouble?”
He closed the space between us in two strides, his presence crowding out every rational thought. “Youshouldn’t be the one digging.”
“But I did.” My chin lifted, shaky but defiant. “Because you matter to me, and I had to know and I am not going to watch this program chew you up and spit you out. Or Noah, or Dustin.” I took a shaky breath. “I had to tell you.”
For a moment, the mask slipped. Something raw flickered across his face, gone almost before I caught it.
“We already suspected,” he admitted softly. His hand came up, not touching, just hovering like he couldn’t decide if I would want him to touch me or not.
“You knew?” I took a step back.
“No.” He looked so pissed off, I believed him. “One of the redshirts mentioned a payout, and I overheard. That’s what the fight was about in the bar. We — Noah, Dust, and I — thought this was what was happening, but we weren’t sure.”
“And then what?” I asked. Everything depended on his answer, I knew it as sure as I knew my name.
