Total pages in book: 186
Estimated words: 176552 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 883(@200wpm)___ 706(@250wpm)___ 589(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 176552 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 883(@200wpm)___ 706(@250wpm)___ 589(@300wpm)
Two of his hockey teammates joined in without asking questions. Graves tackled a lineman straight to the asphalt like he’d been itching for the excuse. Another guy charged blindly toward our side, but he didn’t make it far. Rook hit him low and hard, grin stretched wide, like he was born for this. I didn’t know where the fuck he came from or how he wound up outside.
The Nest’s neon lights shone above us, casting the whole scene in an almost holy glow as if the universe had decided to spotlight this moment in Crowsfell history. Dougie burst through the diner doors just in time to dodge a flying root beer bottle.
“Jesus Christ, it’s a Wednesday!” he shouted as it shattered against the building.
Inside, the staff barely reacted. One waitress shook her head with a visible sigh, still balancing a tray of milkshakes. They knew better than to get involved. I stayed where I’d been standing since the start of it all, leaning back against the brick wall outside the main doors, pulling my phone out to check the time. I laughed when a text came in right on point.
Uncle B
You have 20 minutes.
As the Chief of Police, when he said twenty, it meant we had eighteen and a half before flashing lights showed up and started asking questions none of us were going to answer.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SANJANA
Music drifted from the TV, a fitting playlist on my Spotify that matched my mood and gave me some background noise. I was curled up in Ryder’s old hoodie and a pair of long fuzzy socks, comfortable, but not quite settled. I’d kept myself busy with a combination of homework and house chores. Anything to keep my thoughts from drifting back to the night prior and everything that happened before the shitshow at The Nest.
I had done a decent job of putting my focus elsewhere. I even managed to lock in a day with the girls next week to get our nails filled and shop for the last pieces of our costumes before we were stuck scraping the bottom of the barrel to finish our looks. Hunt or no Hunt, we weren’t missing the Soirée Nick was hosting. By the time that party hit, we’d be just hours away from winning, the damn thing. Was that borderline delusional, considering how sideways everything had gone the past few days? Absolutely. But delusion was just a coin toss away from determination in my book.
I smothered a yawn and debated if I wanted to throw pants on for a Hemlock & Bean run, or nourish myself with actual food, like a hot pocket. I had no desire whatsoever to cook anything that required actual effort. The guys had brought my car back at some point, which let me know Ryder carried the extra fob with him at all times. I hadn’t spoken to any of them since, but I did see about four different views of the Nest brawl. Roxxi had dropped one into our group chat, Ari shared a link to another, and the rest were all over social media.
Nick had responded that he looked good from every angle he’d been recorded in, setting off Cade, and then Xander, who had been filmed watching the whole event with Ryder at some point, while eating loaded fries. Cloe muted our chat, and I followed her lead for the day. I wasn’t sure what to make of the brawl, how violent it got, or how little it shocked me. I wasn’t speaking to Ashton either. I checked to make sure he wasn’t concussed or bleeding out after witnessing my boys take turns walking him like a dog, and then I went about my day.
That didn’t stop his apology texts kept coming in waves.
On the one hand, I did understand him being upset. If roles were reversed, I would be too. He had a right to feel and process, but to raise his voice at me the way he did? No. I wasn’t his freaking child. When I stepped back, it wasn’t because I thought he’d hurt me, but because some subconscious part of me didn’t know if he would. That realization said more about my trust in him than it did about the fight we’d had. I didn’t want or need apologies; I simply wanted to be done. The only reason I hadn’t told him right then was to stop us from being an even bigger spectacle than we had started to be.
Stretching, I glanced at the half-finished math assignment spread across the coffee table. My textbook lay open to a chapter on proportional models and compound interest, but the formulas on the page looked more like hieroglyphics than anything I could reason through. I’d only managed to solve two of the twenty problems, and for the past fifteen minutes, I’d just been staring at equation three, wondering how it was even possible for a single problem to include both logarithms and nested parentheses.