Page 84 of They Break Beauty

She blew out a breath of frustration and reached into her bag.

In the next moment, she was pulling out a small silver cube the size of a golf ball, a piece of hardware I recognized all too well.

“That’s mine.”

She frowned. “You weren’t around, so Mason stole it from you while you were gone?”

“Looks like. Is your laptop in that bag?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.” I reached out and took the device from her, studying it. “You already switched it off.”

“Yeah, I figured that much out. Although its off-switch really wasn’t easy to find. It’s hidden in the design really well.”

“That was the goal when it was developed by Knightsridge Engineering. This is actually an early prototype. The ones these days are much smaller—easier to conceal.”

“For cyber terrorism? It’s scrambled all my files, even programs, every single thing on the local network.”

“It didn’t just do that. It siphoned everything first, made copies in essence, then scrambled it, as you put it.”

“I see. So Hex is looking for intel on me as well as trying to bully me out of here.”

“I’ll handle the former and as for the latter, there’s no way that’s happening.”

She adjusted her bag on her shoulder and folded her arms across her chest. “Right. So you can do it yourself.”

“I did gather intel on you, yes. But not for nefarious purposes. To protect you and to get to know you, so I could approach you in the right way.”

“That sounds beyond manipulative.”

“No. In the right way meaning so as not to hurt you—emotionally. After what you endured six years ago, I knew there’d be scars. I wanted to make sure I understood those and the way you wore them before I came into contact with you.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Is this your maniacal and twisted way of saying you were afraid of scaring me off?”

“Actually, yeah.” I stepped closer, aware of her tensing, so I pulled up shy of her personal space. “As for bullying you, that wasn’t my intention at all.” I shoved a hand through my hair. “It was because I saw you, Wildflower. I saw you standing in the shadows of who you were, afraid to be that person again because it was attached to all that trauma. I saw you hurting. And that hurt was ruling your every action. You don’t even talk to your father anymore because of it, because he’s a reminder of that time, of the pieces of you that you lost during that hell and were too afraid to recover all of this time.” I took a risk—something I normally had no qualms about, but something that had proved different when it came to her and had me holding off on going all out as I normally would with little concern for the fallout—and grasped her hands, holding them between us.

She didn’t pull away.

“And I see all that because it was me for a long time too. I went the other way eventually. Too far, some might say. Maybe even me sometimes. So much has been about trying to prove I’m not that naïve and helpless kid bound in that room unable to save himself—unable to save you.”

“Levi,” she uttered sadly. “It wasn’t your job to save me. You were just a kid then.”

“But it fell to you. And what you did for me, it hurt you.”

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment as she uttered, “It was my choice to make and I don’t regret it. It spared you. That’s what mattered.” When she opened them, they swam with agonizing emotion. “I don’t talk about it, I don’t like to think about it, and sometimes I pretend it wasn’t real at all. Because the truth is, I do see them when the lights go out.” She squeezed my hands. “I see the demons.”

“You remember me calling them that during those two weeks,” I realized aloud.

She nodded.

I watched her suck in a breath and take a moment, clearly needing to say more.

I waited, trying to maintain patience that normally didn’t come easy to me.

And then she told me, “I saw you as a threat when you first showed up in front of me. I thought having you around me or anywhere near at all would unearth all that trauma and pain I’d spent so much energy trying to bury. But being around you, our interactions, it started to make me realize that I hadn’t really buried it at all. I’d been running. I hadn’t actually faced it.” She smiled sadly. “And you… you’re the only one who knows what happened to me, to us. The only one who could ever hope to understand, somebody I don’t need to confess it all to. And you were right, there is a connection between us all these years later, because what happened bound us together in a way that nobody else can understand.”

“More than that, Brianna. The way I handled it and you handled it were polar opposite approaches, from one extreme to another. But together there’s a balance neither of us were able to strike individually.”

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