All Chapters of The Girl He Never Knew : Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

ELENA'S POVI sat on the floor of Noah’s living room with my phone in one hand and a notebook open on my knee, the blue light of the screen the only illumination in the room.It was past two in the morning. Noah had finally fallen asleep on the couch behind me. He hadn’t pushed when I came back from the meeting with Lucas looking gutted. He hadn’t demanded the full story when I asked, out of nowhere, whether Lora had ever texted him about me. He had simply stayed close. I was grateful. I needed the silence to think without having to narrate the damage while it was still rearranging itself inside my chest.I opened the encrypted folder where I had saved every anonymous message since the first one arrived.There were more than I remembered.I started at the beginning and worked forward, line by line, timestamp by timestamp, matching each one against the private things I had only ever told one person.The first message had come the night my laptop was accessed and the private draft of th

ELENA’S POVBy mid-morning the campus was in chaos.The news of Jax’s expulsion moved faster than official channels. By the time the athletic department released its statement, the student body already had versions of the story that included gambling debts, a stolen playbook, and quiet side deals with someone off-campus. Group chats flooded with screenshots and speculation. I walked through it with my hood up and my hands in my jacket pockets, the recording of Lucas safely uploaded and already in the hands of campus security. The file had done what we needed it to do. Security had opened an investigation before noon. By early afternoon the first quiet interviews were happening behind closed doors. Lucas’s blackmail operation had begun to come apart in public view.I should have felt triumph.People looked at me longer than they used to. Some with the old suspicion left over from the leaked police report. Some with a new curiosity. A few with something that almost resembled respect. I

ELENA’S POVHalftime carried its own dense quiet beneath the noise.Above us the arena still roared—boots hammering the stands but in the service corridors the sound became something heavier, a physical weight that lived in the concrete and the exposed pipes. I had just filed the first-half notes from the press table. My fingers still held the heat of the keyboard. Noah had been dominant in a way that made the scouts sit forward in their seats, every possession seemed to bend around his decisions. Pride had sat under my sternum the entire half, tangled with the old want that always rose when I watched him like this—the knowledge of how that same focus felt when it turned on me in private, the memory of his hands and mouth and the way he said my name when he stopped pretending distance was safer.I stepped away from the long media table to find a thinner stretch of air. The corridor smelled of floor polish and warm bodies. A hand closed around my wrist before I could reach the end of t

ELENA'S POVThe concrete wall of the underground parking structure was cold against my back, sending a shiver straight through my media jacket. Metal dug into my wrists behind me—a thick, heavy zip-tie looping my hands tightly around a rusting overhead pipe.Above us, the faint, thunderous rumble of twenty thousand screaming fans vibrated down through the arena’s foundation. The game was in its final minutes, but down here in the dimly lit sub-basement, the air smelled of stale exhaust, damp dust, and copper.Jax paced back and forth in front of me. He wasn't violent yet. But his eyes were wide, bloodshot, and darting toward the heavy fire door every time the distant crowd cheered. He gripped a heavy metal wrench in his right hand, not threatening me with it directly, but clutching it like a weapon of sheer panic."Jax," I said softly, keeping my voice as even as possible and trying not to agitate him. "Look at me. You don't want to do this.""You don't get it, Elena!" he snapped, run

ELENA'S POV A good journalist knows that everyone has a story they are dying to tell, especially the people who think they've been backed into a corner. They just need someone to ask the right questions—or give them enough rope to hang themselves with. Jax was breathing hard, pacing a tight three-foot circle in front of me, the heavy metal wrench still clutched in his white-knuckled fist. His leftover morality was dealing with him. There was still the jovial and funny Jax I knew somewhere in there, buried under whatever Lora had talked him into becoming tonight. The sub-basement smelled like standing water and old rust, and somewhere above us a pipe ticked as it cooled. "Jax," I said softly, keeping my tone light, inquisitive, completely stripped of fear. "Your dad still lives down in North Ridgewood, right? The penthouse on 4th?" Jax stopped mid-stride. His head snapped toward me, his eyes wide and bloodshot. "How... how do you know about my dad?" "Because I do my research, Jax