by Amy Love
She’d already let her grades plummet once this year because of Gryff—it wasn’t going to happen again. She knew she had to be stronger than that, not only for herself, but for her father, too.
“So, I think that went well enough,” Holstein remarked, his voice cutting through the dull fog of her mind, sharp like a whip. Beth looked up from her things, needing a few seconds to digest what the heck had actually come out of his mouth. He was such a handsome man, Professor Holstein, with his chestnut brown hair and bright blue eyes, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up to his elbows. Not as muscular as Gryff—not of a classic academic handsome. Sometimes she found it hard not to stare, if only to admire how attractive he was, though Beth had no real interest in the man who had morphed into her mentor beyond admiring his physical handsomeness.
Oh, and that he was highly intelligent. That, too. But Beth didn’t want classic good looks and an academic’s mind. Not anymore, anyway. Not now that she had seen what else was out there.
“Beth?”
“Yeah, I think it went well,” she repeated back to him, having no real opinion on the issue. “Hopefully they all bring their case studies next time so you can give them some tips.”
“Hmm.” She looked down from his penetrating gaze, though it took her a second to remember what she was doing. Packing. Getting ready to head back to her apartment. “Beth? Are you okay?”
Her eyebrows shot up, her eyes flickering to him. “What?”
“Are you okay?” Holstein tossed the whiteboard eraser down, then crossed his arms as he studied her. “You seem a little… out of it today. Well, the last couple of days.”
“Oh?” Was it that obvious? She’d been trying so hard to seem normal, to keep going on with her life as if she hadn’t broken her own heart by walking out the door at Gryff’s apartment. That night she’d been so tempted to go back, to tell him that she knew he wasn’t ignoring her evidence on purpose, but she couldn’t. He refused to listen to her. Refused to see logic, or even listen to the information she had. As far as she was concerned that night, Gryff was trying to drive a wedge between her and her father, to alienate her from the man who had raised her, albeit with a strict hand and an inability to tell him he was proud of her, but he’d raised her all the same. While she might have been falling head-over-heels in love with Gryff, and even that she wasn’t entirely sure of, Beth knew that her loyalty ought to be with her father.
Mostly because she knew he was innocent.
But also because that was what he deserved after all these years of being a single parent. Beth owed him more than the benefit of the doubt, and she refused to let Gryff fill her head with lies.
Or half-truths for that matter.
“You seem distracted,” Holstein noted, a kindness in his voice that she appreciated. “Is everything okay?”
“Uh…” She tucked her hair behind her ears, feeling a blush creep up. Oh, why keep it to herself? There was no shame in admitting it. “I think my boyfriend and I are kind of… I think I broke up with him.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “You think?”
“I just, uh…” Her blush worsened as he grinned, and Beth suddenly felt the urge to run out of there. “I don’t know. I’m in a weird headspace. I’m sorry if it’s affecting my work.”
“Your work’s been fine, Beth,” he insisted, as she finally switched into high gear as she packed. “I only say it because I noticed something was off. We spend a lot of time together, after all.”
“Right.” A nervous laugh slipped out as she grabbed her stuff, not even bothering to pull on her jacket, and made a beeline for the door. “Well, see you in class tomorrow!”
She barely heard his goodbye as she booked it out the door, not stopping until she was down the hall and halfway through the flight of stairs that led to the outdoors. Beth stopped on one of the landings to slowly pull on her jacket, the fog settling back in. Once she was all zipped up, she trudged onward, the memory of what had just happened feeling exactly so—just a memory of something that wouldn’t matter, regardless of how silly she felt in the moment.
Using her body weight to push open the metal door at the bottom of the stairwell, she stumbled outside and cringed when she found herself in a light misting of rain. Darkness had settled across Blackwoods campus, and in the soft light of the occasional lamp along the walkways she saw a thick sheet of rain spitting down, which would probably be ice by tomorrow. Miserable, she pulled her hood up, tucked her chin into her coat, and started the slow, forced march back to her dorm. While passing one of the parking lots, she swore she heard the revving of a motorcycle engine. Her heart pounded in her chest as she sought out the source of the sound. Suddenly, everything was moving rapidly again, as if someone had pressed the fast-forward on a remote, but it all came crumbling to a stop when she spotted the biker.
With a woman wrapped around him.
It wasn’t Gryff, thank god. She wasn’t sure she could handle seeing him with someone else so soon—or at all. But the bike was different than his, smaller, and the rider was tall and trim, nothing like her hulking, bulk of muscle Master. Licking her lips, she watched them go, wishing it was her and Gryff zooming off into the night and knowing that she was the reason they weren’t.
No. Her gaze narrowed, and she turned sharply in the direction of her dorm building. Their end wasn’t her fault, not entirely. Gryff was the one who refused to look at her evidence. Gryff was the stubborn one. He wouldn’t even entertain the information she had retrieved from her father’s office, not for a second.
But perhaps he had a point, the little voice at the back of her head cried, refusing to be squashed and silenced no matter how many times she tried. It was the voice of logic, of reason, who whispered that maybe, just maybe, Gryff had a point. After all, if her father had been involved in illicit dealings, why would he make a record of it in his personal journals? Did she expect to find her father, or any criminal for that matter, holding the smoking gun?
Beth groaned, coming to a stop near the entryway to her dorm building. Normally the steps were littered with people smoking or drinking or just being in the way in general, but the weather had kept them all indoors. There, before her, stood warmth and solitude, but she couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that she didn’t deserve either until she got to the bottom of it. If Gryff was right and all her evidence was circumstantial, she would need to find something better, something harder, to prove her father’s innocence.
And then she would have to forgive Gryff, somehow, because his questioning of her logic might actually lead her to the truth.
“Shit,” she muttered, taking a few more steps toward the door of the building looming ahead before stopping. She bit her lower lip, staring at the door hard as the rain continued to drench her.
Then, against her better judgement, she turned back and headed for campus again. She had to find more. She had to get something more than circumstantial bullshit. This was her first real test, to prove her knowledge of the law, to find a way to fight for the innocent. So far she was doing a mediocre job, just as she’d done for most of her years in law school.
Today, she needed to step up and do more, be better. Her grades were good but her drive was low—and that needed to change. Two profoundly influential men in her life hinged on the amount of effort she put in at that very moment. Her father, who she needed to save, and Gryff… who may or may not deserve another chance. The fate of her relationship with both depended on what she found.
And this time she wasn’t about to snoop through her father’s office. No, Beth still went to the administration building, but she went to the lower levels, and before long, she found herself standing at the doors of campus security with the intention of going through her father’s private study when she was done. Beyond those heavy doors might be the proof she needed, the video evidence to put this matter to rest once and for all.
Chapter 34
“Holy…” Gryff pulled the little tab back so that the grainy black
and white video would start again, then exhaled softly at the sight of the man there. “Shit…”
He’d been at it for hours, to the point where he wasn’t sure his brain was still working anymore. Thunder and lightning rattled the world outside, the gentle rainstorm of the night turning into a raging storm come the following early morning. The worse the storm grew, the harder and faster Gryff worked, spurred on by the energy in the air, pushing himself closer and closer toward the truth.
Everyone in his phonebook who could even remotely help was called. Guys who owed him favors, big and small, had to cash in. He looked deeper into the scandals at the university, snooped around the behind-the-scenes power players as best he could. Although his brain was practically fried by the time one of his contacts sent him the video, he was still coherent enough to recognize the son of a bitch caught paying a very well-known freelance hitman on camera. Short and beefy, the man carried himself as if he was just a little too big for his britches. Where Dean Darryl Truman was hawkish in all his features, Vice-Dean Phillip Crest was stocky, as if he were the muscle behind the dean, ready to inforce regulations and crack skulls if people didn’t instantly obey.
Gryff had seen the man before, of course. His picture was usually somewhere close to the dean’s in official publications. Crest came from money, his family one of the wealthy founders of Blackwoods centuries earlier. The only reason Gryff hadn’t honed in on him a little closer during his initial investigation was that Phillip Crest didn’t seem to be able to wield the same power as the dean did with university finances. Legally, the dean was responsible for the allocations of funds.
But murder wasn’t exactly a legal business, was it? Just as Beth had thought she could prove her father’s innocence by showing circumstantial, surface-level evidence to give proof to his whereabouts, Gryff hadn’t suspected Phillip Crest because, on the outside, the man was clean. On the surface-level, he was squeaky as freshly polished bike rims. But below the surface was where everyone had their demons, and clearly Crest had more to speak of than the average man.
Moments later, the contact who sent him the video confirmed that Phillip Crest had orchestrated the meeting. For a fleeting few minutes, Gryff had wondered if Crest was just doing the dean’s dirty work. After all, he was an underling. If the dean said jump, the vice dean theoretically asked how high.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Gryff’s contact confirmed quickly that Phillip Crest had been the one to organize the hit. He paid for it in cash. The evidence was caught on the bike-mounted camera of one of the freelancers present, who then sold the footage to Gryff’s contact—who then had Gryff buy it from him, and it didn’t come cheap.
But he had the info now to pull the suspicion off Darryl Truman. All things considered, Beth’s dad probably wasn’t even involved. As Gryff stared at the video again, dumbfounded that he had started all of this around an innocent man, he knew he had to make things right. Sure, Darryl might have been an asshole, and maybe he played the political game well in the university sphere. Not all of his money movements were legal, but hell, he wasn’t paying off hitmen to kill any of the Steel Phoenixes.
No, that privilege fell to Phillip Crest.
Pushing away from his desk, he all but ran to the front door and yanked it open, ready to brave the fierce storm outside if it meant saving Beth’s dad. She had been right all along. He should have fucking listened to her.
Because the real villain was still at large, under no surveillance by Gryff’s MC, and if he didn’t act fast, Phillip Crest would surely kill again.
Chapter 35
“Come on, you fuckers,” Gryff Reeves groaned into his phone. He’d been pacing so fast and so hard that he’d probably worn a track into the fake hardwood flooring of his apartment. If he heard one more fucking ring, he was going to lose it. “Pick up the phone you drunk assholes…”
It was unlikely that anyone would answer. It was almost three in the morning and the bar would be in the midst of closing, but he knew that some of the guys in the Steel Phoenix Motorcycle Club would be around doing closing duties. This wasn’t like a fucking retail store. If someone was calling the bar at closing time, something had to be up. He’d already tried to get ahold of Micky to share the revelation that Darryl Truman, Dean of Blackwoods University, wasn’t the guy they were looking for. Instead, they needed to turn their murderous gaze to Phillip Crest, vice-dean and all together asshole, who Gryff had just discovered was responsible for all the deaths in the motorcycle club over the last year.
Phillip Crest, just some suit, was the puppet master behind all the shit that had gone down in the mid-sized town of Blackwoods, and whomever he was working with, they were trying to run the Phoenixes out of town by any means necessary. Killing their guys. Stealing their coke. Whatever they had to do, Phillip and his associates—because there was no way some suit-wearing asshole who smiled and waved while cutting a ribbon at the opening of a new campus building was doing all of this alone—were behind everything.
And Gryff had sicced his fellow MC brothers on Dean Darryl Truman, the father of the woman he was steadily falling in love with. For all he knew, one of them could have been on the dean’s trail right now, ready to break his kneecaps and leave him in a gutter somewhere—and that would just be the start of it. Gryff wanted revenge and retribution for his fallen brothers just as much as the rest of them, but not at the cost of an innocent man’s life. He wanted to see justice delivered fairly, not dealt out to any random asshole. Sure, the evidence pointed to Darryl, if you looked at it in a certain light, but tonight, as a storm raged outside his window, Gryff Reeves finally learned the truth, and he had to share it with someone—anyone—who mattered before an innocent man was hurt.
Before Beth lost her father because of a mistake Gryff made. Before she lost the only family she had in this world. He would never, ever be able to forgive himself if he hurt her like that. And she was all that mattered. Her dad was a bit of an asshole—controlling and harsh, keeping Beth on a tight leash and well under his thumb. If someone sucker-punched him out of the blue one day, Gryff wouldn’t shed a tear. Maybe the guy would learn some respect.
But he cared that Beth had all the key players in her life still. He cared about her happiness—that she wasn’t alone in this world. After all, they had lost each other recently, torn apart by this fucking mess Phillip Crest had dragged them all into…one way or another. She’d suffered enough. Gryff owed it to her to tell her that she was right—that her dad had actually been innocent of the crimes Gryff accused him of all along.
“Pick up the phone!” Gryff shouted into his cell when the answering machine kicked in. “I know you fuckers are there!”
Seeing red, he pulled the phone away and slammed his thumb over the disconnect button, then hurried for his coat. If he couldn’t reach them over the phone, he’d just have to do it in person. However, as he was rushing out the door, Gryff realized he couldn’t go to the club big shots, which Gryff had thought he was a part of for a long time, without any evidence. They already thought his judgement was compromised because he was with Beth for a time. If he walked into the club’s bar, Phoenix Rises, with nothing to back up his claims, they’d all assuming he was protecting Beth still. Apparently, his word didn’t count for what it used to.
Which was fair. He had taken ten fucking years to find the perp behind all the murders. His club brothers had a right to treat him how they were treating him, but no more. He had the monster responsible for all those unnecessary deaths now. The madness was going to stop—tonight, if Gryff had his way. Shouldn’t be too difficult to find Phillip Crest’s home address.
He was halfway through moving all the necessary files onto a USB stick when his phone started to buzz. Without looking at it, Gryff snatched it off his cluttered desk, swiped his finger across the screen, and then pressed it to his ear.
“Yeah,” he said absently, his eyes fixed to the little download bar as it recorded how much he’d transferred over from his d
esktop to the memory stick. The little thing didn’t hold a lot, but as long as he could get the video of Phillip meeting with one of the freelance hitmen, he should be good.
“A very good morning to you, Mr. Reeves,” an unfamiliar man’s voice crooned through the phone. Gryff sat up straighter with a frown. For some reason, his stomach knotted. Unfamiliar, and yet…
“Who is this?”
“I think you know who this is.”
“It’s too fucking early for guessing games.”
“But you’re up anyway, so why not give it a try?”
He gritted his teeth, eyes narrowed at the screen, and then snapped, “I’m hanging up—”
“Surely you know who this is,” the voice continued, smooth and calm, oblivious to Gryff’s spike in temper. “You’ve recently acquired a video of me that should have stayed private.” Gryff’s eyes widened. “I’d like to assume you can put two and two together, Mr. Reeves. Gryff Reeves.”
“Crest,” he growled, sitting back in his chair. His gaze did a quick sweep of the room, as a paranoid thought that somehow Phillip was watching him swept through his brain. Nothing seemed out of place, but they could fit cameras into just about anything these days.