Page 128 of You Were Always Mine
I shove the phone under a pile of towels, smothering its glow, its vibration, its threat—but the words have already carved themselves inside me.
The phone won’t stop buzzing. It feels like the whole tiled floor is trembling beneath me with every vibration. My stomach turns, my lungs fight for air, but my body stays locked in place, knees hugged to my chest as though I can physically hold myself together.
Another message lights up the screen.
You think you can ignore me?
I’ll tell them everything. Him. You. What you’ve been doing.
My breath catches, a thin, broken sob ripping from my throat before I can choke it back. The words burn into me like fire—ugly, poisonous, undeniable. My shaking hand slams the phone face down on the tiles, as if hiding the glow will erase the threat. It doesn’t. The buzzing keeps coming, each vibration louder than the last, until it feels like my secrets are screaming through the walls.
I stumble to my feet, grab the phone and shove it deep behind the stack of towels in the cabinet, burying it where I don’t have to see it, where maybe it can’t hurt me if I pretend hard enough. My reflection in the mirror is ruined: mascara has streaked, I bit down too hard, leaving my mouth red, and shame has blotched my skin. I grip the sink, splash cold water over my face, smear at the stains, trying to erase myself. Nobody can know.
But the sobs keep breaking through. They echo, muffled against the tiles, ugly and raw. My parents, asleep down the hall. Kai, somewhere in this house, with his rage and his guilt and his dark eyes that see too much. If he finds out?—
A sharp knock rattles the door. Myheart stops.
“Scar?” Kai’s voice. Low. Rough. Dangerous with something I can’t name. “Open the door.”
Another knock, harder this time. “Scarlett. Don’t make me ask again.”
The bathroom feels smaller than ever. My wet hands slip on the counter. I stare at my ruined reflection, chest heaving, torn between locking myself tighter inside and ripping the door open before he tears it off the hinges.
Kai
The house is too quiet.
Too fucking still.
Scar’s upstairs. I can hear her footsteps—light, uneven—pacing maybe. Or maybe I’m imagining it, because every sound is her. Everything is her.
I should be in there with her. I should be holding her, kissing her, keeping her safe.
Instead, I’m down here with blood in my mouth that isn’t blood, rage I can’t spit out, smoke that won’t burn enough.
I knew it.
I fucking knew it.
She lied. She broke—but she lied first. I heard it in her voice, in the way she shook when I pressed her. And tonight—Tyler’s laugh in that bar, the way his eyes slid over her like he owned even a piece of her?—
No.
No, he never owned her. He never will.
Buthe touched her.
Scar begged me to erase it. Begged me to put my hands where his had been, begged me to drown it out with my skin and my mouth and every part of me that knows her better than she knows herself?—
And I did. God, I did. And I’d do it again until her voice is only my name, until the memory of him is a corpse rotting in the dirt.
The cigarette trembles between my fingers. I crush it out half-finished and drive my fists into the wall until plaster dust drifts down like snow. It doesn’t stop the rage. It doesn’t stop the vision of him at the cinema, grinning with his filthy hands on her thigh while she smiled back like she didn’t know she was mine.
She was mine even then.
She was mine before she ever understood it.
And he dared—he fucking dared?—
