Chapter 1
Nolan
I was in the middle of warming up for practice when I spotted the new guy. No one had mentioned his name, but we’d all heard we were getting a new center fielder pulled up from the minors.
Having been burned by someone I’d considered a friend once, I hadn’t made that same mistake in the years that had followed. Billy had ruined my life when he’d stolen my phone and given it to my father. Something I hadn’t known about until I got home from that weeklong road trip and walked into the mayhem they had caused in my absence.
But when none other than my old college roommate stepped onto the field, a swagger in his step as he stepped onto a major league diamond for the first time as a starting player, all the rage I’d kept buried from the moment I’d lost the future I’d been dreaming of rushed to the surface.
No way he didn’t know I was one of the starting pitchers. No way he didn’t know I was the top dog of the entire team. And there sure as fuck was no way he’d forgotten what he’d done to me all those years ago.
One minute I was throwing the ball to my catcher, stretching out my pitching arm to loosen up for the day. The next thing I knew, I had Billy on the ground, beating the hell out of him.
It took six guys to get me off him, and by then, Billy was out cold. If they hadn’t pulled me away from him, I would have killed him, no doubt about it. I spat on his feet as I was dragged back even farther. He was bleeding so badly, it was hard to tell where it was all coming from, and I vaguely heard someone say that the new outfielder had a broken arm.
All the coaches were cursing. One because I’d busted up my pitching hand and would need to get an X-ray to make sure nothing was broken or torn. Another because he was going to have to bring up another outfielder to take Billy’s place. The others were pissed because I’d just unleashed years of wrath, and they thought that made me unpredictable.
As far as they—and the rest of the world—were concerned, Nolan Krenshaw was an emotionless pitching machine. That was what they had called me from the first time I’d stood on the pitcher’s mound, throwing the first perfect game of the year only two games into my rookie season. Photos of me with dead eyes and a blank face had been plastered everywhere from Boston to Japan, and every sports broadcaster in the world had said I had a long, bright future ahead of me in baseball.
What they didn’t know, what they couldn’t see because I’d buried it so deep it would take an excavation team to uncover, was the hatred, the seething rage, and the bone-crushing pain that constantly lived inside me. Those monstrous, dark emotions scratched at the back of my brain, trapped in the cell I’d locked them away in when Zariah had stood before me and said she hated me…and then told me the reason why.
From that moment, when I’d realized that everything good in my life had been stolen right along with my phone, I’d turned off my emotions.
Until Billy had walked out onto the baseball field, laughing with a few of the other guys, looking like he owned the world. Like he’d had no part in destroying my own. There was no holding the darkness at bay any longer when I saw that motherfucker. There was no containing the monster that wanted vengeance for what had been taken from me.
I was dragged into the locker room, where the trainers and a medic were waiting to check over my hand and arm. The GM was already bitching and threatening to trade me, and I found myself fighting a grin. I wanted to be traded. Had been looking for a way to get down to New York from the day I’d been drafted—fuck, before that. But the agent I’d gotten stuck with after I’d lost Zariah hadn’t been trying hard enough to get me there. Not when the money was so good in Boston, and he was getting plenty from his cut of my deal.
The Mets, the Yankees—fuck, I didn’t care which team I was put on. I didn’t even care how much money they offered. I just wanted to be in New York.
And since my contract with my agent was up, that meant I could make a call. One I’d been desperate for a reason to make for so damn long. Day after day, I’d dialed that number over and over again, but never once hit send. Not when I knew she would only tell me to go to hell.
But maybe…
Maybe enough time had passed, and she would talk to me this time.
My assistant walked into the locker room, a combination of shock and horror on his face as he took in all the chaos going on because of me. I motioned Stewart over with my right hand since the medic was still poking and prodding my left. But before I could instruct him what to do, the team owner stormed into the room.
“You better get yourself a good lawyer, Krenshaw. I don’t care if you have been the MVP the last four seasons or that you got us to the World Series the past two years in a row. I don’t tolerate that kind of violence on my team.”
“I know a great lawyer, actually,” I told him with a careless half shrug. A particularly tender spot was pinched on my wrist, and I pushed the trainer off me. “That X-ray set up yet?”
“An MRI might be a good idea, too,” the trainer said, but he was speaking more to the owner than to me.
I flexed my left hand, causing pain to radiate up my entire arm, but it only made me grin. I wasn’t a violent man, but there were two people in the world who deserved for me to beat them to death. Billy was one of them, my father the other. Since dear old Pop had gone into hiding after fucking up my life, Billy had gotten the rage I’d been storing up for the both of them.
But maybe he’d done me a favor in the process.
Picking up my phone with my uninjured hand, I pulled up Zariah’s contact information and started typing one-handed.