Page 66 of Through the Flames
Rolling to my side, my eyes squinted toward the crack at the bottom of the door.
Okay. So he either wanted to kill me or check on my bedtime.
Which, honestly? Kinda sweet.
I chuckled at my own thoughts before burying deeper into the blanket and muttering, “Creepy hot robot. Of course, I’d be into that.”
Because fantasizing about impossible guys was safer. Always had been.
Seventeen
Hunter
Ella’s chaos had steadily been spreading through the house, infesting it, like she had infested me.
Quite the neat metaphor, considering the only room she hadn’t unleashed her mess on was my bedroom.
She would soon, but for now everything was still the same. My desk was spotless. There wasn’t a speck of dust to be found on my keyboard. Every single cable was coiled and arranged with precision.
Just the way I liked it.
Yet, I couldn’t fucking wait for her to turn everything upside down in here, exactly how she’d done with the rest of my life.
In the distance, down the hall, I could hear her laugh on a phone call. Muffled. Familiar.
My fingers twitched on the trackpad, even though my body remained still. The scent of her detergent on my hoodie was slowly driving me to the brink of madness.
Maybe it’d been a mistake to start using it on my clothes as well, but it seemed less suspicious.
A secure folder opened with a few clicks, containing rows upon rows of receipts.
Redacted medical logs, backdated test results, a scan of Dom’s signature — forged,twice— surveillance screencaps.
And finally, a list of players. Some were marked clean, others expendable.
Coach had been slipping players substances without telling them and calling them “performance enhancers,” all the while hiding them from anyone who could stop him.
Dom had signed a few forms, mostly out of trust, but he wasn’t the mastermind; he was a pawn.
The school’s compliance office monitored programs to ensure players weren’t being taken advantage of and to keep the NCAA off their backs.
They checked medical logs, verified eligibility, flagged inconsistencies, and monitored unusual activity.
In theory, they were supposed to catch things like this. In this case, however, Coach had covered his tracks perfectly, forging signatures, backdating logs and mislabeling tests.
Compliance would review the files eventually, but nothing was raising a red flag yet. I had a window of opportunity, and I wasn’t about to waste it.
I leaned back, just enough to crack my neck as I stared at the screen unblinkingly.
They were going to let Dom burn for it, use him as the face of a “rogue accident,” or however they wanted to label this bullshit.
I had my eye on this for a while, but it took me a while to find out who was responsible.
If I didn’t intervene, the alumni would simply disappear, Coach would retire in peace, and she would fucking cry.
Unless I moved the board.
And I always moved the board, especially to my advantage.
