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1
Isaac
You’ve heard of the domino effect, right? It takes just one fucking spark to ignite an entire chain reaction. The kind that blows up and everyone gets burned who is in the ring of fire. One damn thing you have no control over for the panic to spread. For shit to hit the fan.
It was happening around me. Everything was going down in flames. I didn’t know how to stop it.
It was one of those defining moments. When the men came forward and the boys fell to the back of the line.
I could see it on their faces. Some were ready to stake their claim. Some ready to tuck their tails under their balls and get the hell out.
I had to decide what Isaac Price wanted. What I would take from this. How I would walk away a winner.
Because that’s who I was.
I stared at my phone. Blinking again, I wiped the sweat from my eye with the back of my hand. I needed to get in the damn shower. Practice had been hot as hell. I peeled the wet shirt over my head, and checked to see if the message was still there. I wanted to make sure this wasn’t some kind of sick joke.
“Fuck,” I murmured. “The old man died? No.” I shook my head.
“What did you say?” Dylan punched me in the side, laughing. “You realize I out-caught you by at least fifty out there today? Better watch out or one of those rookies is going to give you his seat on the bench.”
He had just walked out of the ice bath. His towel was tucked around his waist. There was a puddle collecting on the floor under his feet.
Dylan and the rest of the team didn’t know what I did. They hadn’t been punched in the gut. Yet.
“I thought you slept off last night,” he joked. “It was the brunette, wasn’t it? She did you in. I knew when I saw those hips she was going to be one hell of a ride.”
I shook my head. “It’s not her.”
Crawling out of bed this morning seemed like it happened a week ago. I had left the girl sleeping while I dressed for work. I was never late to practice. It was an old military habit I couldn’t break.
It was ingrained in my character. Late meant disrespect. Late meant you didn’t give a shit about yourself. It didn’t matter how hot the girl was I left under my sheets—she didn’t mean more than my character and reputation.
I was here on time like I was every day.
“Then what is it?” Dylan looked confused. He had taken a blonde home from the bar. He drank until he didn’t remember her name. And like always, he was the last one at practice.
I turned toward my best friend. I held my phone toward his face. “Read it.” He leaned forward.
His eyes darted back and forth, scanning the team alert text.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “Is this for real?”
I nodded. “I guess so. It’s from HR. They wouldn’t pull a prank like this. No way.”
Sure, it was from the official Warriors office, but someone should have walked down here and told us in person. I looked around. Some guys were still in the showers. Most were walking around in towels. A few hadn’t bothered to put on a damn shred of clothing. I waited for it to happen. I waited for the news to break. I waited for the jokes to stop. For the banter to cease. In seconds, they wouldn’t care what happened at practice today. They wouldn?
?t care they were still sweating.
It was as if someone had a bat and started taking swings through the locker room. The rowdy bullshit quieted down as everyone checked their phones.
I saw it. The domino effect was happening.
Dylan’s eyes pinched together. “I hadn’t heard he was sick.”
“Me either.” I was too busy learning plays and winning games. I also didn’t follow the McCade headlines.
“I don’t know if this is good or bad.”
We watched as the others reacted. There weren’t any tears. There weren’t going to be any. We stood in a place the man had built and left to fall down around us. There was anger in the air. It dripped off my teammates just like the sweat did.
I heard someone slam their hand into the wall.
I sat on the bench in front of my locker. I didn’t like change. I never had. I was the kind of man who ate the same thing for breakfast. I ran the same routes around the city every day. I had a favorite white T-shirt, and a favorite black one. I had the same game-day ritual no matter what city we played in. I drank the same Texas beer. Listened to the same stations.
I didn’t like change. I liked consistency. I counted on it.
And this was a big one. The kind of news that had the potential to turn everything on its head. Worse than a sack that knocked the wind out of you for days. This was chaos. The kind of shakeup that could ruin the season. Destroy the team. Pit us against each other in the worst fucking way.
The owner of the Warriors was dead.
2
Vanessa
Two Weeks Later
I sat in the family box every Sunday. I had for the past twenty-six years. Each and every weekend of the entire football season was planned for me. I was either in Warrior Stadium or on the road wherever the team traveled. It never occurred to me that there might be something else I could do with my time on game day. I’d never had the option.
That's what it meant to be a McCade. Football was the family life. The family dynasty. It was what kept us together. At least that’s what we wanted people in this town to think. The McCade bloodline breathed nothing but football.
It ran through our pores, pulsing in our veins as if it kept us alive as oxygen. It was the dominant gene that separated McCades from everyone else.
But all that changed the night my grandfather died. Everything changed with one final heartbeat.
I couldn’t let myself relive those moments. The world was watching me. Waiting to see how I handled the next step as if it was the fourth quarter and the Warriors were down by three. The problem was I wasn’t a quarterback. I wasn’t trained to deal with intense pressure and stress. I didn’t feel like someone had handed me the ball in a well-drawn out play with instructions. Instead, I felt as if I was at the bottom of a pile and the weight of twenty men was crushing the air from my lungs.
I walked into his office. It was the corner room of the executive level in the Warriors’ suite. I remembered when I used to play on the floor as a child. My grandfather didn't want to be bothered with me so he would shoo me into a corner with a box of Warriors’ stationary and tell me to keep quiet during his meetings.
He would leave me there for hours with a collection of pens and pencils. Sometimes one of his secretaries would bring me juice, or check on me when I was left alone. As I grew, the doodles turned to sketches. Over the years, the sketches turned into a portfolio. That portfolio landed me in Texas’s most prestigious school of art. It was ironic how spending time inside the Warriors’ kingdom shaped my true passion. How my grandfather could dismiss it as a little hobby. A small distraction. Something a girl did to occupy her time.
