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He was so fucking right.
There was nothing I wouldn’t do to protect the people I loved.
“I’ll give him the money!” I blurted, voice cracking. “Find him, Gracie. Tell him not to fight. He’s gonna get hurt. Spanner’s gonna kick his ass. Bett doesn’t know shit about fighting.”
“You… you want me to go to the Pit?” Grace sounded awed.
“Fuck. No. But can you… go by my room and see if you can catch him before he leaves?”
“Yep. I’ll go right now! Call you back.”
When she ended the call, I tried Bett again.
No dice.
As my truck tires ate up the road, picking up speed now that I was out of the Nashville area, I remembered a million other angles to worry about. The media coverage wouldn’t just put Dalton and the Pit at risk, wouldn’t just screw up the senator’s campaign; it could also fuck with Bett’s chances at going pro.
Something I was starting to realize he wanted more than he was willing to acknowledge, even to himself.
I finally couldn’t help myself. I dialed Rowan.
“Hey! This is unexpected,” she said. “You usually text. Everything okay?”
“Hypothetically, if I knew about an event the media would go apeshit over, but I wanted them to never find out about it, what could I do to… I don’t know… black it out?”
“Are you talking about the McNeely fight?”
Fuck.
I smacked my palm on the steering wheel. “Yeah. I really need this not to get picked up. Dalton’s an idiot for agreeing to it, and he’s going to get busted.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?”
I scowled at the phone. “Meaning?”
“I don’t know. And it’s fine either way. But I got the sense your, ah, feelings had changed about a certain roommate of yours.”
“If you’re saying I don’t want him in a coma, you’re right,” I admitted. “And I don’t want the trouble this is going to cause when it gets out.”
“I heard the Pit’s confiscating phones.”
“Please. That won’t work, and we both know it.”
“You’re right. It won’t.” Rowan paused. “I was surprised Dalton was willing to risk it. The senator will have the place shut down. Won’t take him five minutes.”
“I know. Dalton kept going on about how much money he’ll make tonight. He thinks that’ll be enough to make a temporary shutdown worthwhile. Then, in a few months, when the heat dies down, he’ll start it back up. Maybe he figures by then, the senator either won’t be a senator anymore or will be so busy he won’t care.”
“You disagree?”
“I think Senator McNeely’s a vindictive asshole who’d take joy in making my uncle pay over and over again. Which is why I need to stop him from hearing about this in the first place.”
Rowan made a thoughtful noise. “I don’t know if you can stop it. But maybe you can spin it. Find a way to make the senator like the story. Want it out there. Or find a way to make a bigger story so the McNeely piece is so minor, no one gives a shit.”
We spent the rest of the drive racking our brains to come up with something. It turned out she knew a hell of a lot about Senator Corbett McNeely—about the people backing him and the people who did his dirty work, especially—and none of it was good.
In the end, we found only one idea that might work.
Bett needed to win the fight.
