2

“This is fucking bullshit,” Chris muttered, not for the first time.

He had no problem with the fact they’d had to turn around to help Ella. Ella was great. Ella was his friend. They didn’t even have football practice that morning, so it wasn’t as though the change in plan would make them late for anything.

No, he had a problem with having to give a ride to the person he hated most in the world. Olivia fucking Warner.

Noah met his gaze in the rearview mirror. “If you hate it that much, you can find your own way to campus.”

“It’s not that long a drive,” Brady said. He sent Noah a pointed look. “You can last that long without attacking an innocent woman, can’t you?”

“Olivia’s hardly innocent,” Chris reminded his teammate, who’d been defending Olivia at every turn.

Sometimes, it was like he was more protective than her own brother. All Chris knew was that the blonde didn’t deserve his or anyone else’s loyalty.

Noah turned in his seat and glared at him from between the front headrests of his Jeep. “I swear, Chris, if you say one fucking word against her when she’s in this car, I’ll pull over and you can walk to Georgetown.”

Chris gritted his teeth together. He knew Olivia was Noah’s sister—half-sister, technically—but he hated that his friend’s loyalties lay with her instead of with him. “Fine,” he ground out. “I won’t say a word to the person who helped kill my brother.”

Brady shook his head. “Fucking hell, man.”

Chris heard a familiar laugh and looked past Noah’s stern face to see Ella smiling at a rather miserable-looking Olivia as they made their way down the driveway. He hadn’t seen much of Olivia since that night, and this was the first time he’d seen her leg without a cast. She was still using crutches, though.

“Not a goddamned word,” Noah ordered before opening his door and getting out of the Jeep to greet Satan’s mistress herself.

Olivia smiled up at her older brother, forgoing a hug in favor of a wave. Probably because hugging someone while using crutches wasn’t easy. But maybe because she was a cold-hearted bitch. It was hard to say.

Chris pressed his lips together and shook his head in disgust. Instead of spending her days in a prison cell, his brother’s killer was going to college and making friends with good people who should have known better. It was a disgrace. Paige deserved better. His three-month-old nephew, who Lucas hadn’t gotten to meet, deserved better.

Thanks to her, Luke would never know the man he’d been named after. Yet there she was, smiling.

“She looks tired,” Brady noted.

Chris rolled his eyes before taking a closer look at Olivia. It was hard to tell with the makeup she was wearing, but he could see the bags under her eyes. “Good.” She should be suffering after what she’d done.

“Really?” Brady asked, his sickened tone telling Chris exactly what he thought of the cold response.

“If she’s struggling to sleep, I’m glad. It’s not nearly enough of a consequence, but it’s something.”

He kept his eyes on her as Noah gestured for her to go to the car. He willed her to go around the Jeep and get in on Brady’s side, but of course, she chose the closest door. His door.

Chris wanted to demand she get in on the other side. He wanted to tell Olivia to get an Uber so they wouldn’t need to share the same air. Instead, he opened the door before she reached it and slid closer to Brady.

Despite his misplaced loyalties, Noah was his friend, and he wouldn’t risk losing him because of Olivia. No matter how hard it was to swallow his anger.

Ella got in the passenger seat and immediately sent Chris a warning look over her shoulder. Chris gave her his best angelic smile before turning his attention back to the reason for his annoyance. Olivia reached the open door, and when she looked up and met Chris’s gaze, she seemed to wilt. Her barely-there smile turned into a wince, and her shoulders drooped under his attention.

“Oh,” she murmured, the word inaudible but clear to see on her lips. She must have assumed Brady was the one who’d opened the door for her.

“Hey, Olivia,” Brady said from beside him.

She looked past Chris, and her tentative smile returned. “Hi, Brady.”

Noah appeared beside her and rested his hand on her shoulder, making her flinch. The reaction was almost imperceptible, but Chris noted it. He was making her jittery. Good .

“Why so jumpy, Princess?” Chris asked, not even trying to hide his disdain. She was a spoiled brat, and what could have been an endearment became an insult on his bitter tongue.

Noah sent him a scathing glare, but Chris paid his friend little mind, too busy watching the way Olivia’s shoulders caved in further.

“Can I put your crutches and bag in the trunk?” Noah asked his half-sister.

With her platinum blonde hair and those pale blue eyes, she looked like the ice queen she was. Based on the way everyone was treating her, however, they didn’t see what Chris did.

“Oh. Sure,” she replied. She rested her left foot more firmly on the ground and let him take the crutches from her. The backpack came next. She was guilty of involuntary manslaughter, and she was being waited on hand and foot. “Thanks.”

Noah disappeared around the back of the Jeep, and Olivia turned her focus to getting in the car. Chris watched her careful and slow movements, wondering if they were due to his proximity or her injury.

She closed the door after settling in next to him, and when her fingers brushed against his when she buckled herself in, Chris yanked his hand away and crossed his arms across his chest. He wished the accidental graze of their fingers was the end of it. Of course it wasn’t, though.

The Jeep was big, but he had a humongous football player sitting next to him, and he wasn’t exactly small himself. Which meant that even with Olivia squishing herself as firmly against the door as possible, their thighs were touching and her shoulder was practically digging into his arm.

Worse than that, the scent of her perfume or shampoo was teasing his nostrils. She smelled like vanilla, and he hated how much he liked the scent. She’d smelled the same when he’d hugged her on his birthday, and it affected him just as strongly now as it did then.

Only now, the thing standing between them wasn’t her boyfriend. It was the things she’d done.

“How are you?” Brady asked her once Noah had spent what felt like an eternity putting her things in the trunk and had returned to the driver’s seat.

“Okay,” she replied. “And you?”

Noah started reversing out the driveway, and Chris felt Olivia’s body stiffen beside his. He glanced over and saw that her hands were curled into fists and her eyes were closed tightly. Being in the car crash had clearly left more scars on her than the one hidden behind her new haircut.

“No complaints,” Brady said. “How’s the leg?”

“It’s fine,” she lied. If she still needed crutches, it was far from fine.

Noah had mentioned once to Chris and Asher that her broken femur had been a compound fracture—as in bone sticking through skin—so it wasn’t that surprising that she was still recovering.

“When do you get to lose the crutches?” Brady asked. It was the same question Chris would have asked, but the answers they were hoping to hear were far different.

As if sensing his dark thoughts, Olivia shifted away from Chris. She didn’t get far before Noah turned a corner, and her shoulder was again touching Chris’s upper arm.

“I can walk without them already, but not for long,” she explained. “But I should be able to get around without them in a few weeks.”

“Did you ask your physiotherapist about dancing again?”

Chris couldn’t help but narrow his eyes at his friend. The way he’d phrased the question made it sound like they’d spoken about it before then. Had he been chatting to Olivia? Had his visit to the hospital months ago been more than him just checking on a friendly acquaintance? And more importantly, why did Chris care?

“I did,” Olivia replied. “She said I’ll probably never get back to where I was before, but I can start dancing again once my leg is stronger.”

Chris would have expected her words to hold some hope or excitement. Instead, they sounded disinterested or detached.

“That’s great,” Brady said, apparently not catching on to her lack of enthusiasm.

“Super,” Chris chimed in sarcastically, unable to help himself. “She and her boyfriend killed my brother, and life just goes on.”

“Chris,” Noah snapped from the front of the car.

“It’s okay,” Olivia said. “He’s allowed to be angry.”

Her words surprised Chris, but they also rubbed him the wrong way. “Oh, I am, am I?” he asked, meeting her gaze with a glare as glacial as the color of her eyes. “How magnanimous of you to let me feel the way I do.”

Olivia lowered her gaze and tried again to move further away from him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, as though the two words could fix anything. As though they could undo what she’d done.

“Save your apologies,” he told her. “You won’t find any forgiveness from me.”

He could see the sheen in her eyes and the wobble of her bottom lip as she absorbed his words, but he didn’t allow that to soften his anger. She could have saved his brother, but she’d chosen to get in Drew’s car and become an accessory to his murder instead. She deserved his hatred.

The rest of the ride to campus was spent in stony silence. Chris knew Noah would give him hell for what he’d done. Based on the way Brady was sending daggers into the side of his face, the defensive lineman would also have a few words to say about it. Chris didn’t regret what he’d said, though.

Olivia needed to be reminded of what she’d stolen from Chris and his family. She couldn’t move on and be happy when Paige was still a wreck. She wasn’t allowed to recover and find peace when all Chris knew anymore was grief.