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.
Ifhe 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 fromher, 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 gotdrafted 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 tolddaddy.
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 inrecent, 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 — andrememberedthem. 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 offwhen 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 mybest selfthis 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.
