Ithan Holstrom’s steps were unhurried, his gray T-shirt pulling across the considerable expanse of his muscled back. He’d been a cocky twenty-year-old when Connor died, a history major like Danika and the star of CCU’s sunball team, rumored to be going pro as soon as his brother gave the nod. He could have gone pro right after high school, but Connor, who had raised Ithan since their parents had died five years earlier, had insisted that a degree came first, sports second. Ithan, who had idolized Connor, had always folded on it, despite Bronson’s pleas with Connor to let the kid go pro.

Connor’s Shadow, they’d teased Ithan.

He’d filled out since then. At last started truly resembling his older brother—even the shade of his golden-brown hair was like a spike through her chest.

I’m crazy about you. I don’t want anyone else. I haven’t for a long while.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t stop seeing, hearing those words, feeling the giant fucking rip in the space-time continuum where Connor should have been, in a world where nothing bad could ever, ever happen—

Ithan stopped before another set of glass doors. He opened one, the muscles in his long arm rippling as he held it for them.

Hunt went first, no doubt scanning the space in the span of a blink.

Bryce managed to look up at Ithan as she passed.

His white teeth shone as he bared them at her.

Gone was the cocky boy she’d teased; gone was the boy who’d tried out flirting on her so he could use the techniques on Nathalie, who had laughed when Ithan asked her out but told him to wait a few more years; gone was the boy who had relentlessly questioned Bryce about when she’d finally start dating his brother and wouldn’t take never for an answer.

A honed predator now stood in his place. Who had surely not forgotten the leaked messages she’d sent and received that horrible night. That she’d been fucking some random in the club bathroom while Connor—Connor, who had just spilled his heart to her—was slaughtered.

Bryce lowered her eyes, hating it, hating every second of this fucked-up visit.

Ithan smiled, as if savoring her shame.

He’d dropped out of CCU after Connor had died. Quit playing sunball. She only knew because she’d caught a game on TV one night two months later and the commentators had still been discussing it. No one, not his coaches, not his friends, not his packmates, could convince him to return. He’d walked away from the sport and never looked back, apparently.