“I was only supposed to rough you up, you little bitch,” he says, glaring at me. “To scare you from poking around the locker room and to keep you away for good. But you still had to be a nosy little bitch, up to no good, and hooking up with one of the Leviathans to boot. So now you’re making me have to do this.”
My head is getting very woozy, to the point that I start to wonder if this is a dream.
I see stars and I wonder if they’re the last thing I’ll ever see. Black and white swirls mixed in with this awful man’s ugly face.
But just before I pass out, I hear a voice.
“Stacy!”
Elias.
Is this for real?
Did Elias just come to rescue me once again?
Will I be able to be saved in time to live?
Or am I losing so much oxygen that I’m hallucinating?
Maybe Elias isn’t really here at all, but my mind and heart just wish that he was here so badly that they conjured up his voice.
Chapter 18
Elias
I can’t believe I’m having to beat up this asshole all over again.
I tried to beat him to Stacy’s place, because I had figured out who he is and what he’s up to, but the one piece of information I didn’t have was Stacy’s address. And of course she took so damn long to give it to me, because she thought I wanted sex when what I really wanted was to save her life.
Sure, I always want to fuck her.
But right now, I need to rescue her.
Luckily, she gave me her address just in the nick of time. I texted her back to warn her not to open the door.
She must not have gotten the text.
Or maybe this creep barged his way in some other way.
Whatever the case, I’m about to take him out. I’m swinging, punching, hitting at him, hoping I don’t get injured for the game in the process, but knowing that this is much more important.
He finally loosens his grip around Stacy’s neck and tries to defend himself, badly. He takes a wild swing into the air before falling into a heap on the couch.
Stacy is already on the other side of the couch, having fainted from lack of blood flow to her brain.
“Stacy!” I call out, rushing over to her after making sure that this creep is down for the count. “Stacy! Wake up!”
My mind is flooded with bad possibilities of what life would be like without her.
What if she leaves my life almost just as soon as she’d come into it? Just as soon as I was starting to fall in love with her?
“Elias?” she coughs, waking up just as I realize what I was thinking.
I had just told myself I’m in love with her.
“Stacy,” I say, rushing to put my arms around her. “You’re okay. He’s safe. You’re fine. I’m here. I have you.”
The soothing tone of my reassuring words – the rhythm of which came out in a comforting cadence I wasn’t expecting to use – seems to calm her down. She’s still breathing fast though, her chest visibly rising and falling with each beat of her heart.
“Oh, my God,” she says. “What happened? Who is he? How did you know to…”
“Stacy, I found out who he was,” I tell her. “My friend Joseph does computer forensics for the Army and I asked him to hack into the security camera at the Leviathans’ locker room. It took him a while – I guess the NFL locks these down more securely than we’d think – but he figured it out. The tapes then showed him that it was Kirsten Donnelly who has been coming and going into the locker room while the Leviathans aren’t there. She was sleeping with Mo Bradley—”
“Mo Bradley?” Stacy says, and, despite her desperate state, she laughs.
“I know, right?” I tell her.
Mo was the worst player on the team, a total dweeb. Coach Kramer had taken pity on him at some point and set him up as his assistant of sorts, so that he’d have something to do since he was always benched.
I assume this arrangement involved Mo having keys to individual lockers and other areas of the locker room that were off limits to regular players. I also assume Kirsten slept with him to get his keys and access to the locker rooms and lockers.
“She must really hate me and be out to get me, to have slept with Mo,” Stacy says.
“Yeah, well, she’s clearly jealous and wanted to take you down. She hired this goon—” I point at the intruder, who is still passed out on the couch— “to come attack you. I think initially he was just trying to scare you off, hoping that maybe you’d quit the beat if you were afraid to go anywhere near the locker room, and then Kirsten would be rid of the competition.”