Page 214 of Vile Boys

She fishes her dress off the floor and swiftly puts it on before she marches out the door.

I take a deep breath.

In the end, she still couldn’t do it.

Crystal

“Darling, wait, please!”Blaine yells after me. “Don’t leave us.”

“Leave me alone,” I yell back as I storm toward the stairs.

“Crystal, don’t do this. We can talk this out,” Caleb calls out.

“It’s too late,” Ares says, his voice making me want to scream. “It was always too late. She made up her mind long ago.”

He’s right.

I did.

And if I could, I would thrust this knife into my own goddamn heart to stop it from getting in the way of killing my father’s murderer.

But that would mean the end of me too.

And he knows.

He always knew I would come for him, so he set me up to fall …

Because I quite literally fell for him.

I fell for my father’s murderer.

I open the front door and run out, slamming it shut behind me, determined never to return to the Tartarus House …

A hellhole of my own making.

BLAINE

I watch her storm out the front door, shattering my heart into a million pieces.

I thought I could be there for her through thick and thin, but even I can’t force her to stay around someone she wants to kill so badly.

Now more than ever, I wish I wasn’t bound to Ares’s life.

I was almost ready to stab him with that knife myself.

I close the door and hang my head in defeat. “We lost her because of you.”

“Why? Why didn’t you tell us the truth?” Caleb growls at Ares.

“You think I’m proud of lying?” Ares says, slumping in his chair.

“You knew this would happen and chose not to tell us.”

“What should I have said, then? Crystal, the tiny innocent-looking blonde, wants to kill me? You think you would’ve believed me?”

“You could’ve at least tried,” Caleb says.

Ares snorts. “Stop lying to yourself. You were smitten with her.”

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