Page 21 of Cross Checked
“Justice.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s enough of one.”
Briggs Lawson had been my lab partner freshman year, which sounded cute and harmless until you understood Briggs and I both approached science the same way we approached life—with alarming confidence, questionable impulse control, and a complete willingness to touch things labeled do not touch. Briggs was not a biological genious, so I kept him from failing biology. He had kept me from sitting alone in the back of lecture halls pretending I didn’t care that college felt too big and loud and full of strangers who already seemed to know where they belonged.
By October, he was saving me seats at their games. By November, he had introduced me to Rider, Easton, and half the Fury roster like I was some stray cat he’d found behind the arena and decided the team was collectively responsible for feeding. Somewhere between shared notes, cafeteria coffee, and him texting me at midnight to ask if mitochondria were “the battery ones,” Briggs had accidentally become one of my people.
Which was probably how this happened.
He could drag me into chaos because, in a weird way, he had been one of the first people at KFU to make chaos feel safe.
“Briggs,” I said, trying not to trip over someone’s discarded sneaker, “I am in the middle of an academic conversation.”
“You’ve been academically flirting for ten minutes. I’m intervening.”
“I have not.”
He looked over his shoulder at Cade. “Has she?”
Cade’s mouth curved. “I plead the Fifth.”
I gasped. “Coward.”
“Strategic,” Cade corrected.
Charm pointed at Cade while following us. “Don’t go anywhere, Mercer. She still has to academically interrogate you.”
“Academically?” Briggs asked.
“That word too big?” Charm patted him on the head. “It means school-related.”
Briggs gave her a wounded look. “I know words. Bliss taught me several during our lab-partner era.”
“I taught you the word hypothesis because you kept calling it a science guess.”
“It was a science guess.”
“It was not.”
“It was a guess,” Briggs said, guiding me into the dining room, “about science.”
Cade’s low laugh followed us through the noise, and stupidly, I felt it settle somewhere warm under my ribs.
The dining room had already devolved into chaos by the time we got there. Somebody had shoved the table against the wall to make room for beer pong while music blasted loud enough to rattle the overhead light fixture. Bodies packed shoulder-to-shoulder around the game screaming at absolutely nothing while Rider stood at one end of the table looking unfairly calm for someone about to weaponize hand-eye coordination against intoxicated college students.
Cade leaned against the doorway watching the room with that same controlled expression, beer bottle loose in his hand while chaos exploded around him.
Our eyes met again instantly.
“This is already rigged,” Rider said.
“Because you’re scared?” I shot back.
“Because Briggs is incapable of losing quietly.”
“Losing builds character,” Briggs said.
