Page 42 of Forever Relentless

Her face didn’t change, but her thumb twitched as if she stopped it from moving, and she saw me notice it.

“This just needs to be a quiet conversation,” Dante spoke softly, breaking the tension. “We aren’t going to tell him anything,” he gave a half-shrug, “you already know that.”

Diana bit her lip as she looked towards the closed door. “Not here, okay. I . . . just not here.”

“Where?”

“Off campus.” She saw our looks and rolled her eyes. “Come on, what am I going to do? Go for a beer with you? Be realistic — I’m older, I’m staff. I don’t associate with students in my spare time.”

“So your idea is to take us off campus, which is not the perfect place to accidentally run into you outside of here, and meet you in town, where it won’t look suspicious at all?”

Diana flushed. “Okay, that would look worse.”

Dante scratched his ear. “So . . .”

She looked at me, and I looked back. “I’ll talk to Briar,” she mumbled. “Just you two, though, okay. I don’t need the whole tag-team act you five have going for you.”

I frowned. “She told you already?”

She gave a slight shake of her head. “Just go. Ask your questions later.”

Dante held back, but then he nodded. “See you soon.”

I followed him out wordlessly, and he rolled his shoulder as we walked back to the locker room. Whether he was selling the act of having had treatment, or he was loosening his shoulder up, I wasn’t sure.

On the walk back to the dorm, he gave me a look. “Never would have put that together,” he admitted.

“Between Hadley’s ‘ticks’ and Briar’s defensiveness, I think I was more attuned to it than I would have been if I hadn’t dealt with either of them first, know what I mean?”

“You noticed Briar hides behind her hair,” Dante said, and now he was almost smiling, the bastard, even in the middle of everything that had happened. “That’s a very specific thing to have cataloged about a woman you told to sit and stay.”

“Drop it,” I told him, without heat.

He laughed out loud, and I pretended I couldn’t hear him, and when he nudged me with his elbow, I tried not to roll my eyes, which only made him laugh louder.

Dick.

We showered and changed in silence. That was the good thing about Dante: when he wasn’t being an ass, unlike Dust, he didn’t feel the need to fill the void with narrative.

We left the locker room together and headed to the dorm building. Dante’s head was lowered as we walked. “How do you think she’s involved?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, I just know she is.” I blew out a loud breath. “Man, everywhere we turn we uncover something else under the rock named Mason Sterling.”

Dante nodded. “The way things are going, at this rate, I’m ready just to sit on the steps of the NCAA and tell them to do their worst.”

“Really?” I tried to hide my look of surprise, but I didn’t succeed.

“No,” he said with a sigh of defeat. “Because there’s still a part of me that hopes we can avoid all of the fallout and declare and just get drafted and never, ever, think of here again.”

I nodded grimly. “Yeah, I know what you mean. When they show the games during the season, and the team comes on and says their college, do you think we can lie?”

He grinned at the foolishness of my question. It would be impossible not to say what college you came from, especially since being national championship winners would only put us more in the spotlight and give us higher Draft value.

“We can’t let him win. He could bench us all next season just because of who he is,” he reasoned, knowing what I was thinking.

“Need my Draft value to be the best it can be,” I told him with a grunt.

“Yeah, same.”