Chapter Five: 9pm

Naomi's POV

Coach Reyes cut the engine in the lot behind the athletic complex and didn't move to get out.

"Listen to me," he said. "If he sees me with you, he or she'll run, or they get dangerous. I'm going to stay back, out of sight. Let him believe you're alone. I'll be close enough to hear everything."

"What if something goes wrong?" I asked. I was panicking terribly.

"Nothing's going to go wrong," he said. "Just stall if you can. Get him or her talking. I need to hear who this is."

I nodded, even though my legs felt like they belonged to someone else.

The boathouse sat at the edge of the river, a long wooden building smelling of algae and old rope.

Coach Reyes slipped in ahead of me and disappeared into the shadows near a stack of aluminum barricades before I'd even crossed the threshold.

I couldn't see him anymore. I had to trust he was still there.

"Hello?" I called out, my voice bouncing strangely off the water lapping somewhere below the floorboards.

A shape shifted near the far wall. "You're late," he said, his voice cracking halfway through the sentence, thinner and younger than I'd expected.

"I'm here," I said, trying to be brave. "What's the password?"

"Money first."

"You'll get it. Once I know this is real. Tell me who did this to me."

"That's not how this works," he said, shifting his weight, sounding less sure of himself than I expected a blackmailer to sound.

"Just say the name," I said, my voice cracking louder than I meant it to. "Please. Just tell me who set me up."

"I can't—" he started, and stopped himself.

Something metallic clattered near him, like he had bumped into equipment stacked against the wall in the dark.

"Who's there?" he snapped, his voice spiking with panic. "Did you bring somebody? Answer me!"

"I don't know who that is," I said, stepping forward without thinking, hands raised. "I didn't bring anybody. Please, I just need the name. Help me clear my name."

"Stay back!" he shouted, stumbling backward. "Stay where you are, I mean it!"

Something metallic caught the little light there was as he reached into his jacket.

"Gun!" Coach Reyes shouted, and shoved me hard enough that I stumbled into a stack of life jackets.

What happened next happened too fast for me to follow clearly in the dark.

Coach Reyes lunged forward. There was a grunt, a scuffle of feet against wood, a heavy thud that shook the floor under me.

"Your bag," the man's voice gasped out, close to the ground now. "I saw who—"

The sentence cut off into a wet, ragged breath.

Silence dropped over the boathouse so completely I could hear my own pulse in my ears.

"Coach?" I whispered.

"Stay back," he said, his voice tight in a way I'd never heard from him before.

He crouched over the shape on the floor for a long moment before he stood up slowly.

"He's not moving," Coach Reyes said. "He hit his head on the barricade behind him. Naomi, I think he's dead."

The words didn't feel real. Nothing that night felt real.

"You ki*led him," I said, hearing my own voice from somewhere far away. "Coach, you killed him."

"He had a gun," Coach Reyes said. "I didn't have a choice. Naomi, look at me. I didn't have a choice."

I couldn't stop staring at the shape on the floor, unmoving, silent, gone.

"We have to call someone," I said. "The police, an ambulance, something."

"And tell them what?" His voice hardened, closer to panic than I'd ever heard from him. "That we came here to pay off a blackmailer? That will end your career before it starts, and mine right along with it."

I didn't have an answer for that. I didn't have an answer for anything happening around me right now.

"We need to leave," he said, gripping my shoulders, forcing my eyes up to his. "Right now. I'll figure out what to do about this. I promise you."

He walked me back to the truck with one arm around me, holding me up more than guiding me.

Neither of us spoke on the drive home. The radio stayed off. The only sound was tires on wet asphalt.

He pulled up outside my house and put the truck in park without looking at me.

"I had to choose," he finally said, staring straight ahead. "Between his life and yours. I'd make that choice again every single time."

Something in my chest cracked open at that, guilt and gratitude tangled together until I couldn't tell them apart.

"You could have died in there," I said. "You put yourself in danger for me."

"I'd do it again," he said, and this time he looked at me, and the look on his face undid something I'd been holding together all week.

I thought about my mom, fielding gossip in her own shop because of me.

I thought about Octavia, unraveling in the pool that afternoon, snapping at me for reasons I still didn't understand.

I thought about the man on the boathouse floor, whoever he really was, and whatever he thought he'd stumbled onto that made all of this seem worth the risk to him.

Everyone around me was paying for something that was supposed to only cost me.

"Get some sleep," Coach Reyes said quietly. "We'll figure the rest out tomorrow."

I got out of the truck on legs that still didn't feel like mine, and watched his taillights disappear down the street before I went inside.

*** *** *** *** ***

SIX HOURS LATER

The sky over the river was still more gray than blue when the Maristen paramedic crew team arrived for their usual early morning jogs. They would start from the boathouse, all the way to the athelete complex, then back again.

Two of them hauling an eight-pound tire toward the dock stopped short at the sight of a man crumpled near the boathouse's side entrance.

"Hey," one of them said, dropping his end of the boat. "Hey, are you okay?"

The man's eyelids fluttered open, unfocused, his breathing shallow and uneven.

"I can't feel my legs," he rasped out, barely above a whisper.

"Don't move," one of them said, already pulling out his phone. "Don't try to move, okay? You're safe now. Help is coming."

His colleague knelt beside him, pressing a balled-up jacket under the man's head, watching his chest rise and fall with obvious effort.

"Stay with us," the first man said, phone pressed to his ear, voice climbing with urgency. "Yeah, we need an ambulance at the university boathouse, now. There's a man here, he's alive, but he's badly hurt."