Chapter 10: The Real Target

Chapter 10: The Real Target

The rain had stopped, but the storm had moved inside. Back in the spartan sanctuary of Dane’s apartment, the air was thick with unspoken fears and the damp, earthy scent of their rain-soaked clothes. Ellie was wrapped in a thick, worn sweatshirt of his that smelled of him—motor oil, clean soap, and something uniquely masculine—while her own clothes dripped onto a towel by the radiator. They moved around the small space with a quiet, synchronized purpose, making coffee, finding dry blankets. The argument in the storm had burned away all pretense, leaving them with a raw, terrifying clarity. They were allies now, bound not by a contract but by a common threat.

Dane finally broke the silence, his voice low and gravelly. He was staring at the gash on his forearm, the scar that had started this whole chain of events. “The man in the alley,” he said, not looking at her. “The first one. The one with the crowbar.”

Ellie paused, her hands wrapped around a warm mug. “What about him?”

“He wasn’t one of Silas’s usual guys. They’re thugs. Cheap leather, crude, predictable. This guy… he was different. He wore a clean jacket, expensive shoes. And something else.” Dane’s brow furrowed in concentration, his mind replaying the violent memory. “On his lapel. A pin. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, just a glint of metal. But it was specific. A small, silver letter ‘R’, stylized, almost like a lightning bolt.”

Ellie’s analytical mind, trained to find meaning in symbols and brushstrokes, immediately kicked into gear. A pin wasn’t just decoration; it was a signifier. Affiliation. Identity. “R,” she murmured. “Like Remington?”

“It felt too on the nose,” Dane dismissed, shaking his head. “Too obvious. But after seeing him at your door, seeing that look in his eyes… I don’t know. Something’s not right. This isn’t just about the debt I took on.”

The other girl. Jenna. The debt he’d taken on to protect her. All the pieces were floating in the air, disconnected. They needed a board to pin them to, a framework to make sense of the chaos.

“The library,” Ellie said, her voice firm with newfound purpose. This was her turf. “The special collections have archives of everything. Old yearbooks, fraternity charters, town newspapers dating back a hundred years. If that symbol exists on campus, it’s in there.”

An hour later, they were ghosts in the hallowed halls of Blackwood University’s main library. Ellie, using a staff keycard she was only supposed to use for early-morning shelving, led them through the silent, sleeping building into the climate-controlled chill of the archives. The smell of old paper and leather binding was a comfort to her, a return to a world of logic and evidence.

They worked under the dim glow of a single green-shaded desk lamp, their heads close together. It was a strange and powerful intimacy, their intellectual connection proving as potent as the emotional current that had been humming between them for weeks. Dane, with his sharp, strategic mind, knew what questions to ask. Ellie, with her researcher’s skill, knew exactly where to find the answers.

“Start with the fraternities,” Dane suggested, his voice a whisper in the echoing silence. “The official ones first.”

They poured over Sigma Chi’s official records, finding nothing. The fraternity’s crest was a simple cross and stars. No stylized ‘R’. They moved onto defunct societies, poring over brittle, yellowed documents and leather-bound ledgers. Ellie’s fingers, deft and careful, turned the fragile pages. It was in an obscure, unofficial compendium of campus social clubs from the 1950s that she found it.

“Dane. Look.” Her whisper was sharp with discovery.

He leaned closer, his arm brushing hers. Tucked away in a section on "unsanctioned recruitment societies" was a small, hand-drawn sketch of the pin he’d described. A silver ‘R’, shaped like a jagged bolt of lightning.

Underneath, a single line of text: The Founder's Circle. Colloquially known as the ‘Remington Roundtable.’ By invitation only.

A list of founding family names followed. Blackwood was there, crossed out generations ago. But another name appeared again and again: Remington. They pulled the yearbooks, decade by decade. Caleb’s grandfather, a stern-faced man with the same polished smile, pictured with the Roundtable. Caleb’s father, Senator Remington, in his college days, the glint of the silver ‘R’ just visible on his letterman jacket. It was a dynasty of power, operating in the shadows of the university their family hadn’t founded, but clearly felt they owned.

“So Caleb’s part of a secret club,” Dane murmured, his eyes dark. “It’s elitist, arrogant, but it’s not a crime.”

“Not on its own,” Ellie agreed, her mind already racing to the next piece. “But Silas talked about his ‘associates.’ He’s a town criminal. The Roundtable is campus elite. Where do they intersect?” She turned to the terminal, her fingers flying across the keyboard, navigating the library’s digital archives of the Blackwood Town Chronicle. “Let’s look at the other girl. You said her name was Jenna?”

“Jenna Riley,” Dane supplied. “She was a student. Dropped out last semester. That’s all I know.”

Ellie typed the name into the search bar, filtering for articles and mentions within the university’s student paper archives. A photo appeared. A bright, determined-looking girl with dark, curly hair. She was listed as an investigative reporter for the Blackwood Beacon. Ellie’s eyes scanned the list of articles Jenna had published: exposés on unfair housing practices for students, misuse of athletic funds. The girl had teeth.

Then Ellie saw it. A final entry, dated from the middle of last semester. It wasn’t a published article, but a draft file saved on the paper’s internal server. Its access was restricted, but the headline was visible, stark and damning.

“Sigma Chi’s Secret Ledger: From Party Dues to Criminal Payoffs?”

Ellie’s breath caught in her throat. She read the headline aloud.

Dane went utterly still beside her. “What?”

“The sub-header is a direct quote,” Ellie whispered, her eyes wide as she read from the screen. “‘Sources claim fraternity funds, managed by president Caleb Remington, are being used to launder money for off-campus business interests, including those allegedly tied to local crime boss Silas Kane.’”

It all clicked into place, the disparate pieces slamming together with brutal, horrifying force.

Jenna Riley had gotten too close. She had uncovered the truth: Caleb wasn’t just a privileged fraternity president; he was using Sigma Chi’s massive, loosely-regulated treasury as a money laundering service for Silas’s criminal enterprise. The Remington Roundtable wasn’t just a social club; it was the mechanism, the old boys’ network that provided the muscle and the plausible deniability. The attacker in the alley wasn’t just a thug; he was a message from Caleb, delivered by a member of his inner circle.

Dane had found out what they planned to do to Jenna to silence her. He’d intervened, stepping in to stop them. He hadn’t just paid off a gambling debt; he had bought her safety and her silence, taking the entire weight of Silas’s wrath onto himself to keep her name out of it.

And Caleb, the golden boy, the political legacy, was at the center of it all. His polished image, his ambition—it was all funded and protected by a dark, criminal secret.

Ellie leaned back in the chair, the revelation washing over her in a wave of nausea. Her silly, naive crush. The ridiculous, life-altering contract. She had been so focused on navigating the superficial currents of the campus social scene that she hadn’t realized she was swimming in a cesspool.

She looked at Dane, whose face was a mask of cold, murderous rage. He wasn’t looking at the screen anymore. He was looking at her.

“Ellie,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet. “He didn’t know who I was protecting. He just knew I was protecting someone. When you showed up with me, when he saw you in my apartment… he thought you were the new Jenna. Another girl who got too close to me, who might know what I know.”

The truth was a cold stone in her stomach. Caleb’s jealousy wasn’t that of a spurned lover. It was the possessive paranoia of a criminal kingpin who thought his secrets were at risk. She wasn’t a romantic rival. She was a liability. A loose end.

The real target had never been just Dane. By making a deal with the devil in the alley, she had inadvertently painted a target on her own back.