Page 144 of Play Dirty

Heavy.

Wrong.

I kept going, clip after clip. Game after game. Bad reads. Open nets. Shots he should’ve had. Shots he didn’t even try to have.

“Oh my God,” Sebastian whispered.

Ares was on the edge of his seat. His body was tight. Tense.

“We trusted him.”

Grayson didn’t respond. He didn’t look at anyone, either.

And suddenly — the room felt colder. Not because of the storm. Because of what we were seeing.

“He was throwing,” I said.

No one argued. No one corrected me.

Ares stood.

“Good.”

I finally looked at him. “Good?”

His mouth curved slightly.

“Now we’ve got something to take from him.”

I stared back at the frozen frame on the screen. At a goal that never should’ve gone in. At a team that thought they were just losing.

At everything that had been taken from them.

From us.

“I have more if you need to see them,” I said quietly. “But by now…”

“Run them.”

I didn’t blink, I just ran the clips. And we watched. Together. Goal by miserable goal.

No one argued this time. No one said a word.

Because now?

We weren’t just watching film anymore.

We were hunting.

~ 43 ~

HAVEN

The blizzard rolled on, sweeping the outside world away. It erased our footprints, our snowballs; all evidence of our time together, during the brief lull between storm fronts.

By the time we made it to the old study —which the Reavers had transitioned into full blown gym — the windows were completely swallowed. Snow pressed thick against the glass, muting the outside world into something distant and irrelevant.

Inside?