Chapter 22: The Devil's Alliance

Liam

I found Tiffany exactly where I knew she'd be.

The auxiliary gym. Same as always. Running formations alone after she'd dismissed whoever was left of her squad, channeling whatever she was feeling into clean, precise movement because Tiffany Thompson did not process emotions; she choreographed them.

She saw me come through the door and stopped mid-turn. Her blonde hair was still perfect. Her expression was the careful neutral she wore when she was deciding how much to let show.

I let the door swing shut behind me.

"Clear out," I said to Amber and Jessica, who were gathering their bags by the far wall with the speed of people who had learned to read the room.

They were gone in thirty seconds.

The auxiliary gym was quiet. Just Tiffany and me and the hum of the overhead fluorescents and the distant sound of the varsity soccer team practicing on the far field.

Tiffany crossed her arms. "You have a lot of nerve."

"I know." I walked toward her, unhurried, and stopped about six feet away. "You did well today."

She blinked. Whatever she had prepared herself to hear, it wasn't that.

"Excuse me?"

"The cafeteria." I held her gaze. "The milk. The speech. All of it." I tilted my head. "You did exactly what I needed you to do."

Tiffany stared at me for a long moment. Then something shifted in her expression, the carefully maintained anger softening at the edges, replaced by something more familiar. More calculating.

"You're serious," she said slowly.

"When am I not?"

She studied me. "You told me not to touch her. You told me in this exact gym two weeks ago that the whole point was to make her believe—"

"The whole point," I said, "is to make her fall. And nothing accelerates that faster than a threat. "I put my hands in my pockets.

"Think about it, Tiff. She's been suspicious since day one. Smart girl, careful, always watching. I could take her to a hundred nice dinners and she'd spend every one of them looking for the angle." I paused.

"But now? Now she's been publicly humiliated. She's cold and embarrassed, and her notebook has milk on it, and the only person who showed up was me."

Tiffany was very still.

"I came in at the right moment," I continued. "I said the right thing. I gave her my hoodie. " I watched Tiffany's jaw tighten at that last detail and kept going.

"And now, for the first time since this whole thing started, Daisy Henrico is not thinking about whether my feelings are real. She's thinking about the fact that I was there. That I came. "I let that settle.

"You handed me that."

Tiffany was quiet for a long moment.

"So I'm useful," she said finally. Her voice was flat.

"You're very useful," I said. "You always have been."

Something moved across her face, and there was a version of Tiffany Thompson underneath the performance that I had known since we were fifteen, one that was sharper and lonelier than anything she showed the school, and I watched it surface briefly before she locked it back down.

"Are you proud of me?" she said. She said it lightly, like a joke, but it wasn't a joke.

"Yeah," I said. "I am."

She looked at me for a moment. Then she let out a short, dry laugh that didn't reach her eyes. "You know this is insane, right? The lengths you're going to for a bet."

"It's not just the bet anymore," I said. "You know that."

"The grades thing."

"My father sat on the phone with Coach last week for forty-five minutes discussing my forty-yard dash times." I said it evenly, without weight, because the weight was there regardless of how I said it.

"The conference went well because Daisy prepped me for that calc quiz. If my grades stay up through the championship, the Berkeley conversation goes forward without complications." I looked at her directly. "So yeah. It's not just the bet. But the bet is still the bet."

Tiffany absorbed this. She walked to the bench along the wall and sat down, crossing her legs, her sheer skirt falling in a perfect line. She looked like she was conducting a meeting.

"So what do you need from me?" she said.

"Keep doing what you're doing," I said. "Not the physical stuff—the milk was a one-time move; if you do it again, it looks desperate, and it'll generate sympathy for her that I can't use." I sat down on the bench a few feet away.

"But the pressure. The social stuff. Keep reminding the school that she doesn't belong. Keep the question alive. Because every time the school doubts her, she leans on me harder."

Tiffany was watching me with an expression I recognized—the one she got when she was running numbers.

"And what do I get out of this?" she said.

"When it's over," I said, "and it will be over in less than two months, Daisy goes back to being invisible, and you go back to being the only name anyone remembers.