Overture (North Security 1)

My cheeks flame at the words.

A low growl fills the room, raising the hair on the back of my neck. “Touching them?”

“Not like that,” I say quickly. “At least not yet.” I heard this only secondhand. Cody confided in Laney, who broke his confidence enough to share it with me.

“Then what is it like?” Liam bites off the words.

“He gives them a hug if they lose a game. Or he’ll give a player a massage if he has a tight muscle. Things like that.” I shake my head, struggling to explain. We couldn’t go to the authorities with something like that, couldn’t risk everything on a bad feeling. What if no one believed us? What if Coach Price retaliated against Cody for saying something? The boys already started pairing off when they go to the locker room, but it’s only a matter of time.

“What was the money for?” Liam asks, his voice strangely calm. Gone is the panting, raging man who hovered over me only a few minutes ago. This is the high-paid security operative. “Were you trying to pay him to leave?”

“Kind of. It was for a video.”

“A video of what?”

“I don’t know,” I confess, my cheeks burning in the dark. “Laney did some digging at the school in Austin where he worked last. Apparently there was some scandal that they hushed up. And this guy had some kind of incriminating video file.”

“So you were going to buy the video. And then what?”

I blink. “What do you mean?”

His voice goes subzero. “What were you going to do with the file, Samantha?”

That was the easy part, wasn’t it? Only we never got that far. “We’d blackmail him, make him leave the boys alone, make him resign his position.”

A low growl. “Did it occur to you that he might have bought your silence a different way? By hurting you? Threatening you? Killing you?”

My stomach turns over. “We would have been careful.”

The long pause that follows makes me think of every bad thing that could have happened to Laney or Cody. If anything would happen to me, I know that Liam North would blame himself.

“Careful,” he says, his voice hollow. “There is no amount of careful that would be good enough. How dare you risk your life like that? Do you know what I would do if you—”

Shock makes me breathless. “You risk your life all the time. You send men and women to risk their lives for North Security. But I can’t do the same thing?”

“No, goddamn you.”

I flinch from the venom in his voice. “That’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair, Samantha. That’s something Cody and his teammates already learned, and it’s something you’re going to have to learn, too.”

“So you aren’t going to do anything to help?”

“It’s not my business.”

Acid rises in my throat. “What if you had said that about me?”

Something dark moves through the forest of his eyes. “I didn’t.”

“What’s so different between me and Cody? Why would you help me but not him?”

“Don’t ask me that, Samantha.”

“No! I’ve had enough of being quiet, of being the good little girl who does what she’s told. If you won’t help him, I’m going to.”

A harsh laugh. “Don’t push me. I’m about two seconds away from locking you up.”

Indignation and a strange secret desire rise inside me. The indignation wins. “You can’t lock me up. I’m an adult now.”