Silence hushed through a crowd of hundreds of people. They held their breaths.
Cara, who was taken aback by his sudden outburst, shuddered.
Daryl was in a good mood just a millisecond before, humiliating Thomas really lightened up his general morale for the day. And then he had to be hit with the revelation that his car had been damaged badly. Of course his mood went for a nosedive!
He had just bought the car last month. It cost him half of his allowance, and now someone crashed it. How could he not be enraged?
Now, the underlying point behind his lividity was less because it was a BMW 525, it cost him a bit more than 8 thousand dollars, which was hardly unaffordable, and more because it dealt a huge blow to his ego.
Everyone in this entire university knew that spot as Daryl’s specific spot for his ride! The fact that someone crashed his car kicked off his knee-jerk assumption that it was done explicitly to challenge his reign. Now that was unforgivable!
No one dared to answer him. Daryl’s reputation in Waltz University was so pervasive that even those who knew who the culprit was dared not speak. They would not want to draw his aggression to themselves.
Thomas was so terrified that he almost peed his pants. He was already deadly afraid of Daryl, but now that he damaged the man’s car, Thomas knew Daryl was going to lynch him, guaranteed.
His animus toward Zayn intensified. If it were not for this useless piece of trash, Thomas would have never crashed onto Daryl’s car. And now, the same guy who was stopping him from fleeing when he had a chance, there was no other way to see this than Zayn clinging to this chance for revenge against Thomas…
And he hated every second of it!
“Please, Zayn, I’m begging you… Just let me go already! Daryl is the tyrant of the academy, man. If he knows I’m the one who did this… He’ll snap my neck!” Thomas started to plead. It was the first time he ever spoke Zayn’s name without a lick of contempt.
Zayn smiled. “What are you so afraid of? With me around, no one could lay a finger on you.”
Thomas had no idea whence Zayn’s foolhardiness was coming, or why he thought he could prop himself up as more than he really was. Thomas suspected that Zayn must have truly gone mad.
“I’ll repeat this one more time, who the hell crashed my car?! Any of you who could call that piece of sh*t out will earn 150 dollars!” Daryl spoke again with sharp, cold steel girding his voice.
Money makes the world go around, and 150 dollars could make a university student stand up. In a flash, someone decided to be the fink and pointed at Thomas, shouting, “Thomas Carter did it, Richmond!”
Daryl and everyone in his cabal instantly directed their gaze to Thomas.
The named culprit felt a mountain’s weight crashing onto him, and his knees turned into jelly. Had Zayn not held onto him, Thomas might very likely drop to the ground already.
“It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!” he yelled, desperate. More and more in the crowd spoke against him.
“It was him, Richmond! I saw it with my own eyes!”
“Exactly, a lot of us were witnesses! He was driving that Audi, and then he stepped onto that pedal and rammed his car right at your BMW. It was intentional!”
“I think Thomas’s challenging your authority…”
The mob wedged in one or two of their inflammatory commentaries, and all of them made it clear that Thomas was the one who did it. Daryl’s expression darkened as he started striding toward Thomas, and with a mirthless, scornful smirk, he said, “Well, well, well. You’ve got a pair, don’t you, Simp? Crashing my own car to get back on me?”
Several of his underlings behind him fanned out into a semicircle, their eyes locked on Thomas like loaded guns. All Daryl needed was to give them the command, and the semicircle would close in on Thomas and pound the living daylight out of him.
Thomas’s lips were visibly quivering. He was so frightened that he could not squeeze a single sound edgewise. Tears rolled in his eyes until, finally, his voice leaped out of his throat into an accusation, “It wasn’t me, it was him! This has nothing to do with me, Richmond!”
Thomas had decided to direct their guns toward Zayn.
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