Page 53 of Forever Relentless

“Whatever he’s about to say,” she told me, “we both know he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there, and the fault was all mine.”

My eyes flicked to his and back to hers. “I think we both know neither of us is innocent here, and it was a mistake on both parts. How’s that?”

Complete BS. I hit her. I should never have hit her. No matter the circumstances or anything else, I woke up swinging, and I shouldn’t have.

Savvy pretended to think about it. “Nope, but if it makes you feel better . . .”

She yelped when Dante pressed his hand against hers, which was still over his mouth, and from her glare, I assumed he’d bitten her to get her to take her hand away.

“You’re both in denial,” he grumbled. “But, it’s over, and we’ve moved on.”

Savvy took it for what it was. “So? How bad is the Tiffany-Mason thing?”

“It’s worse than we thought,” I told her.

I let Dante fill her in on what we’d learned. Savvy wasn’t Hadley. She never interrupted as Hadley would have. Savvy listened with only the occasional question, letting him talk. I said little because he pretty much covered it all.

When he was done, she looked so sad it was endearing.

“I think I might cry,” she admitted softly. “I . . . It’s so horrible.” She pushed herself off the couch and away from her man. “And we went charging into their lives, all guns blazing, ready to fight, ready to drag them to justice.” Her laugh was scornful. “We’re lucky they were willing to talk to us at all.”

I hadn’t looked at it that way. Now I was even more grateful that only Dante and I went tonight. From the look on his face, I knew he felt the same.

“We might have lost sight of the game plan,” I spoke mostly to Dante, and he nodded slowly.

“Yeah, we need to think more clearly,” he agreed, standing and going to Savvy. He pulled her into him, wrapping his arms around her, and she buried her head in his chest. He looked over her head at me, and I knew what he wasn’t saying.

“I’m going to go finish that paper I had,” I told him, getting to my feet. “We can catch up later when we tell Dust. Yeah?”

Savvy said something much like ‘thank you,’ but it was muffled in Dante’s hoodie.

In my room, I kicked off my sneakers and flopped onto the bed, wincing at the sound of the springs and the fact that my feet hung over the end of it.

My mind was racing with everything we’d learned tonight, and the memories of my past swirled around with it.

Not for the first time in the last few weeks, I wished I’d never transferred from my old college. Sure, I wouldn’t have had a national championship, but I also wouldn’t be involved with this.

With my eyes closed, I forced myself to make a pros and cons list of transferring to Wrighton, the home of the Lions.

It was a sad fact that there were now more cons than pros. Holding a championship trophy paled in comparison to everything else.

I liked my old school. I liked the program. The coaches were experienced, but they just weren’t pro-level experienced.

Wrighton Head Coach, Bobby Ray Sutherland, was. He was next level with experience. His record spoke for itself, which is probably what they counted on, because since coming here, I learned very quickly that the man fell short on his ability as a decent human being.

My transfer was so smooth it should have raised a flag. He played me immediately — no redshirt year, no sitting out.

Knowing everything as I did now, I had the chilling realization that maybe my transfer had been too smooth. Had I really been eligible, or had they made me eligible?

There were a lot of ways to own a player. A scholarship was one. A secret was better.

If it were the latter, my ass could be toast.

I sat up, my back against the wall, after grabbing a pad of paper and a pencil. I worked out the timeline for when I’d expressed interest in moving to a D1 school and when it actually happened.

They said I’d been fast-tracked, but I assumed that it was all within the rules and guidelines. I scribbled down everything I knew. As I’d said to Briar earlier, there was no one more invested in my career than me.

I knew every statistic about me.