Page 32 of Unspoken Truths

Damn, she’s one tough woman, but her husband simply sighs.

“How long has Rachelle been cutting, Julia? There was an incident at school that triggered it,” he explains as he lays his stepdaughter down on the couch.

Julia sinks down onto a love seat, eyes on her daughter.

“I don’t even know when it started,” she breathes. “Rachelle is very quiet, hardly tells me anything, Emil. Half the time, it’s hard to pull anything out of her.”

Tomas comes in to carefully clean up Rachelle’s legs, disinfecting the cuts and applying the liquid stitches. Mr. Emil covered her with a blanket before he started so she’d be properly concealed from Tomas’ gaze. I can only imagine how upset I would be at him seeing anymore than he should of Rachelle, Mr. Emil’s protective instincts may end up with his man in a body bag.

The beautiful girl on the couch is complicated, tortured, and I’ll be damned if the Kings break her. There’s so much spirit inside of her, too.

I know she doesn’t trust me, but I want to earn that and so much more.

Come on, baby. Show me those pretty blue-green eyes.Rachelle whimpers on the couch, blinking slowly before opening her eyes.

“What happened?” she whispers.

That’s so much more than I expected, and I whisper a few words of prayer up to the big guy. I don’t go to church anymore, but I’ll take all the help I can get right now.

Something tells me I’m going to need it.

CHAPTER6

JARED

“Mind telling me why Professor Richardson went to bat for the little mouse today and told me to check my facts about the definition of rape and consent?” I ask, dropping into my seat by the pool.

I called a meeting for the Kings after school, but I’m one of the last to arrive. I had to talk to the swim coach about the upcoming meet, the normal bullshit where he reminds me of what’s at stake. Trust me, I know.

It’s not easy being one of the best swimmers on the team, there’s a lot of pressure. I’ll make captain next year, and then keep the title through senior year. Every step is another milestone made possible. There’s a large amount of things I want to accomplish while at Carlysle Prep, but first I need to deal with the bullshit in front of me.

Nothing is too far to make our way of life possible, but I need to know if there needs to be a correction to the information shared between us.

“That would be because the article I wrote used a great deal of fiction,” Theo explains. “I didn’t have time to tell you since right after she saw the newspaper, I had to head to class.”

“What about later?” Ignacio asks. “Not once did you disseminate that information.”

His voice is cold, detached, which signals how pissed he is. There are reports that his father carried her out of the school, passed out. Someone also told Elijah that there was blood on her thighs, but I don’t know how true that is.

“You’re right,” Theo says, sighing. “I may have hyper fixated on the end goal.”

Grabbing his laptop out of his backpack, he fires it up. We wait as patiently as possible, knowing he’s giving us the intel we’ve asked for, but that it’ll take time for him to hack into it.

“The Brevard county prison system should probably update their firewalls,” he mutters, turning the computer toward us. “The notes attached to his case at the public attorney’s office should also do the same, since I also was able to access the official documents for his case. He spilled his guts to his attorney. Do you want the recording or just the cliff notes?”

My stomachs rolls before I grit my teeth. “Cliff notes, please.”

I want to get rid of this girl, I don’t want to be contemplating murder for a piece of shit I have no business caring about. She needs to disappear, because my heart has no place to grow for anyone.

Elijah and Ignacio nod with tight nods, and Theo begins.

“Colton told his lawyer that he started dating the little mouse’s mother because she was pretty and sucked dick on their first date,” he says. “Julia Thomas worked a lot of hours, and he would surprise her with flowers or some bullshit when she came back to the apartment. He doesn’t say how he had her schedule, which is odd to me. Anyway, the night he assaulted Rachelle, Colton broke in through the window in Julia’s bedroom to wait for her.”

“Fuck, I wonder if Dad knows what shitty taste she has in men,” Ignacio mutters.

“I did some digging on that too through her social media account,” Theo says. “I had a little time before you got here, after all.”

“I thought you were doing research for school, asshole,” Elijah says.

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