Beautiful Fiend: Chapter 34

I don’t turn my phone on until I get home. I’m fucking limping as I walk into my house, the pain tearing me apart.

The longest night of my life, and yet, I would do it all over again for Billie.

I throw my phone on my bed while it turns on and go to the bathroom. I scrub myself raw in the shower, making sure to get rid of their touches. My brain is burning up from all the thoughts going through my mind. From the flashes of their hands on me.

Nausea overtakes me and I have to swallow back bile. The only way I can get through this is by thinking of Billie. I imagine the warmth of her small body against mine, her Bambi eyes peering up at me, and her bright smile whenever she sees me.

I think of her tough voice when she’s unhappy about something and the way in which she can fight anything. Her strength makes me stronger.

As soon as I walk back into my bedroom, I grab my phone, wanting to call her. To hear her voice. A deathly grip takes hold of my stomach as soon as I open her texts.

I go to my voicemails, listening to her panicked voice when she talks about a job I supposedly wanted her to do. And when she mentions Sawyer, I see red.

The bastard sent her to the Wolves after I told him she would never do another job again.

I try calling Billie right away, but she doesn’t pick up. Fuck.

Sawyer is fucking dead.

Before I can get to him though, I have to check if she’s okay.

I must call her twenty times on my way to her house. I can’t really feel the pain in my body anymore, too anxious to know what happened to the girl I love. It’s pouring out, and I’m well over the speed limit in our town streets. It doesn’t matter, though. All that matters is getting to her.

I turn the corner to her street with my tire screeching behind me before speeding down to her house. I leave my car in front of the house, barely parked, before running to her window. Inside, her blinds are down but enough slats are broken so I can see her sleeping on her bed. Her back is to me, and her long light-brown hair is the only thing showing as the comforter swallows her.

“Billie!” I scream as I hit her window. At least she’s alive and home.

I try to open the window, but it’s locked, so I knock again. She can’t hear me. I’m soaked from the rain by the time I notice the wires of her earphones and realize she must have fallen asleep with her music on.

I run to the front door, not caring that her family hates me, then violently knock many times. It’s her sister Emma who opens the door.

“You’ve got some fucking nerve, King,” she hisses.

“I need to see her. Please.” I push past, not caring that I might hurt Emma in the process. She grabs me by the arm, but I shrug her off easily.

Their front door opens into their living room, so I’m not far from the hallway that leads to Billie’s bedroom. But once I’m past Emma, I come face to face with Xi.

“The fucker truly got a death wish,” he snaps, advancing toward me. I put my hands in front of me, but he doesn’t stop. His punch is swift and strong.

I stumble back, not defending myself.

“I’m not here to fight. I just want to see Billie.”

“Fight?” Emma seethes. “You’re lucky we haven’t killed you yet. With the state she came back in—”

“What state?” I ask, but Xi is on me again.

“Get the fuck out of here.” He pushes me. “If I see you near her again, I swear you’re dead, King.”

“Just let me see her!” I rage.

“You’re never seeing her again,” Emma tells me. “Was it revenge for the fire? Is that why you did that to her? She wasn’t involved in any of this.”

“Did what?” I choke. “What happened?” I try to shove past them, but Xi punches me again. My entire body is dead from the night I just had, and I can’t find the strength to fight back. Worse, my mind is crushed by what happened at the Bakers’ house. I just need to see her. I just need to see the light of my life. She’ll give me the strength I need to make it right.

Someone else comes in from the hallway, closing the door behind him. I recognize Lik, Xi’s brother.

“Would you look at that? A dead man walking.”

He and Xi are on me the next second. I take the hits because I somehow feel like I deserve them. I didn’t hurt Billie last night, but I’m the one who put her in this situation, after all. All the bad things that happened to her happened because of me.

It’s nothing to take a beating compared to everything she took for me.

As soon as they give me a break, I spit blood on their floor, doing my best to stand back up.

“Fight back, motherfucker,” Xi pants. “Give me what I want, so I can rightly fuck you up.”

“I just want to see her…” I repeat. “Just talk—”

“Get out.”

Her broken voice makes me look past the two men. She’s wrapped in a blanket, her tiny body trembling.

This time, I bulldoze past them. No one can fucking stop me when I want to get to my girl.

I freeze when I see her face up close. He broke her. I know it was Sawyer.

“Little bee,” I push out in a trembling voice. “What happened?” I try to grab her, but she retreats back.

“Don’t touch me,” she says, her voice cracking. I move my hands away, fisting them as I force myself not to touch her.

“Billie, talk to me.”

“Where were you?” she croaks. One of her eyes is swollen shut, but the other fills with tears she doesn’t hold back.

I don’t find the strength to answer. She couldn’t take the truth. She would never let me sacrifice myself for her. She couldn’t live with it because she’s good. She grew up just like me, and I turned into the biggest asshole while she became a good person.

When my silence stretches for too long, she gazes right into my eyes and kills me.

“Leave.”

I don’t know what it is exactly—the look in her eyes or her cold tone—but I fall to my knees in front of her. The toll of yesterday and seeing her like this is too much for me. I can already feel I’m losing myself without her.

“Little bee, I beg you don’t do this to me. Don’t give up. I’m going to fix this.”

She shakes her head, determined.

“I love you,” I say, staring up at her. “I know this has been hard. I know everything is against us, but I’m in love with you, Billie. You can’t take this away from me. You can leave me, but you can’t take away the love I have for you. That’s never going to end.”

“Caden, stop,” she chokes as she moves backward. I grab her legs, wrapping my hands on the side of her thighs.

“Tell me you don’t love me. Tell me this was nothing to you and you can live without me.”

“You’re embarrassing yourself, please.” She doesn’t say it in a mean way. More in that she feels bad for me.

“Breaking up with me won’t change the fact that our love is forever. You can’t end a love as strong as ours, Billie.”

“Please…leave.”

“She said leave.” I feel Xi grabbing the back of my shirt and hauling me up. He shoves me away from her and toward the door.

“I’ll wait,” I tell her as I pierce my eyes into hers. “I’ll wait until you’re ready to love me again.”

I let Xi kick me to the curb. There’s no point fighting. Not here, not now.

But fuck that, if she thinks this is over.

It’s never over.

I knock so hard on Ethan and Elliot’s door it’s impossible for them to ignore me. Elliot is the one who answers. He’s in his boxers, his hair a mess, and I can only assume he was sleeping since it’s barely eight.

I shoulder past him right away, storming into his house.

“What the fuck happened?”

Ethan comes out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee in his hands and is ready for the day.

“Man, where have you been?” Elliot asks, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Shit’s been going down.”

“And by that, do you mean Sawyer beat the shit out of Billie, and neither of you told me?”

“We tried calling you,” he defends himself. Ethan stays silent, not feeling the need to justify anything.

“Why call me when you could fucking intervene? Did you see what he did to her?!” I bark. “What the fuck even happened? Was it just him?”

I’m barely sane on a good day, but their silence tips me over the edge. “Fucking answer me!” I rage as I flip their coffee table over.

“Take a seat,” Ethan says calmly. “And stop breaking our house.”

I’m panting, ready to punch him in the face, but I manage to hold myself back. I need them on my side. So I sit down with Elliot while Ethan settles on an opposite armchair.

“Sawyer fucked up,” Ethan says.

There’s a silence, the brothers exchanging a look before Elliot adds, “And so did Jade.”

I run my hands against my face, trying to check if this is reality.

“What the fuck happened,” I growl. I haven’t slept in more than twenty-four hours, and nothing makes sense anymore. I’m running on adrenaline, not even feeling the bruises on my face from Lik and Xi. I want to fucking die and go to a different universe where none of this happened. Where Billie and I can simply be. Without anyone getting in the way.

“From what I understand,” Elliot starts. “Sawyer told Billie you were sending her on a job last night. So she went. I’m not sure, I wasn’t there for any of that. All I know is Sawyer called me and told us to come over. When we arrived, Jade and Hook were there too. They had bags of weapons in the living room, and I could tell by Jade being all excited that they were up to no good.”

“Yeah. I believe they fucking were, Elliot,” I snap. “Why would Billie go on the job? She knows I don’t want her to do them anymore.”

“I don’t know. All I know is that Billie showed up at Sawyer’s saying her car had been broken into and the merchandise was gone. She didn’t know it was Sawyer who stole it. He clearly had planned it all.”

“Him and Jade,” Ethan adds. He’s calm. Deadly calm. I can tell he is fuming at his ex-girlfriend.

“Yeah,” Elliot huffs, running a hand through his bed hair. “Him and Jade,” he confirms. “They made Billie believe it was her fault and…”

Since Elliot doesn’t have the courage to keep going, Ethan takes over. “Sawyer beat her and wanted to rape her. He was making a point to show her you weren’t there when she needed you the most. They told her you were with someone else. Jade even had the necklace of hickeys to prove it. Obviously, Sawyer must have been the one to give it to her. Jade stopped Sawyer from raping her. She wanted her own revenge. Beat her up instead. Carved the Kings’ crown into her neck because Billie had given her a pathway for tears.”

I’m yanking at my hair now and need to get up. Anxious energy zaps through my body, forcing me to pace around the room.

“What…what the fuck?!” I rage. “What the fuck were you two doing? Watching the show and enjoying yourselves?”

“Man, I tried,” Elliot fights back, getting up too. “Have you ever tried to get past Hook? He’s a fucking mountain. He pushed me back once, twice. Threatened me. When Sawyer asks what crew you’re defending, you shut the fuck up and sit down like everyone would have.”

“No,” I seethe as I grab him by the collar of his shirt. “You fucking do something about it when an innocent girl is being beaten up.”

“Wake up, Caden!” he rages as he shoves me off him. “Billie is not innocent, she’s fucking NSC. The only person who put her in danger is you. At least I calmed them down. As soon as she passed out, I convinced them to leave her alone, to wait until the morning to do anything else. I bought her time. We defended your girl.”

Finding nothing to blame him with anymore, yet refusing to give up, I turn to Ethan. “Where the fuck were you, huh?”

“Where the fuck were you?” he says in a dangerously low voice. Ethan isn’t the kind to get fired up like Elliot or me. He’s the one who calms us down. He’s the kind who kills people silently. “Cause I went off looking for you as soon as it started. You weren’t answering your phone. You weren’t at your house. I called your fucking sister, Cade. I even checked Billie’s house and her gym. You were nowhere to be found. So, tell me. Where were you while we were trying to save your girl from Sawyer?”

I can’t reply, frozen by the reality of everything. I let men and women rape me last night to give Billie the chance to escape this hell hole.

And even that wasn’t enough.

I gave the money to that bitch so she would give Billie her spot in the tournament. In the end, I wasn’t there when it mattered the most. Who knows if she’ll ever be able to fight again after what happened. Who knows if she still wants to live?

I don’t know.

I might not ever know if she doesn’t speak to me again. She doesn’t want me anymore. She doesn’t want anything to do with me.

I understand the reason.

But I can’t accept it.

“Brother,” Elliot says softly as he puts a hand on my shoulder. “Where were you?”

How long was I out? Lost in my thoughts? Pressure is building behind my eyes and a headache strengthening in my skull. I’m exhausted, everything is too heavy. My throat is tight, and I’m choking on my own thoughts.

My legs give out on me, and I fall back. Thankfully I had paced until the sofa was behind me again, so it ends up catching me.

“Cade,” Ethan says as he slides nearer to me. “You can tell us anything. We’ve got your back.”

My head falls back, and I look at the ceiling. I failed Billie. My entire world is falling apart. Now is the time to open up to my best friends, my brothers. Now is the time to tell them the truth about what I’ve been doing in Stoneview for the last few months.

So I do.

It’s the most liberating thing I’ve ever done. To tell them what the tutoring indeed was. To tell them how I got Billie back into the boxing competition. That I would do anything for her, including losing control over my body for one night.

A silence overcomes us all when I’m done.

“That’s where I was,” I conclude. Tears are shining in Elliot’s eyes even though he’s not crying. Ethan wrapped an arm around my shoulders at some point, and I let him hold me close.

“Fuck,” Elliot whispers.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Ethan says steadily, keeping strong for all of us. “You did the right thing.”

I look at him. “How? I fucked it all up. It was all for nothing.”

“Don’t blame yourself for the greed of others. Whether it be the Stoneview billionaires or Sawyer. This was out of your control, and we will fix it, Cade. All together. I promise you.”

I nod, wiping my sweaty forehead. “Sawyer is going to die. Slowly and painfully. Today.” I get up and sway slightly.

“Sawyer is gonna die slowly and painfully,” Elliot confirms. “After you’ve rested. What you did last night…it’s heavy, Cade. Billie’s stuff has taken a toll on you too. You might be strong, but you need rest. Put all the chances on your side.”

I turn to Ethan, and he nods. “Have one of our rooms. Sawyer isn’t going anywhere, and we’ll be here when you wake up.”