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Everything points at him, but it’s a little too neat.
I feel him tense underneath me. “Talk about what?”
“Everything. But how about we start with why Nathan is convinced you’re the killer?”
He lets out a deep breath. “The one thing all the victims have in common is that they were at one point either patients of or working at Briarwood House.”
“Briarwood House.” I say the name gently. There is a prettiness to it, but for some reason, I feel suddenly very cold.
“What is Briarwood House?”
“It’s a place where rich, troubled teens are sent to have their behavior corrected so they don’t embarrass their parents. I was a resident there for a year before I went back home and turned my life around.” He lifts his arms and gestures to the opulence of the room.
“I bet not everyone has a success story like yours, though.”
“No, and with good reason. The suicide rate at Briarwood was unbelievable, but nobody seemed to care.”
“Why were you there? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“My mother died when I was two. A drunk driver sideswiped her and pushed her into oncoming traffic. She died before they could get her to the hospital. My father went through a long line of women after that. It was like an audition forGirls Gone Wild. There were so many faceless women in and out of my life that I stopped caring about them. Getting attached meant getting hurt, and it just didn’t seem worth it.
“When I was fifteen, my father got remarried to a woman named Hailey Bale. She refused to let me ignore her. She dragged me into every conversation, made me take part in any and all family holidays, and refused to let me duck out. After a while, I started to give in. It was kinda nice to have a real family.”
“Why do I feel like this doesn’t have a happy ending?”
He offers me a grim smile. “She started coming on to me. Telling me what she wanted to do to me, what she wanted me to do to her. She compared me to my father. She had this whole weird fantasy in her head about having us both. I started pulling away again, but she turned on the waterworks, which pissed my dad off. He told me to get over myself and get rid of the chip on my shoulder.
“I still avoided her. Spent as much time as I could at a friend’s house where we hacked anything we could.” His lips twitch before he smiles. “Everything was so exciting in those early days,” he reminisces before looking away. “I was good, really good and I knew then that I was never going to be happy cutting it out of my life to appease my father. He built his company from the ground up. How could he not expect me to want to do the same?”
He focuses back on me. “Things were quiet for a while. I was distracted with the online world and I let my guard down in the real one.”
“What did she do?”
“I woke up on one of the rare days I stayed home and found her riding my cock. I was so fucking shocked, but I was a teenager, for fuck’s sake. My body had a mind of its own. I came before I even had a chance to throw her off me.”
He looks at me, waiting for me to pass judgment. “I told my dad, but he didn’t believe me and sent me to Briarwood.”
“She raped you, and he did nothing?”
“It wasn’t?—”
I place my fingers over his lips and shake my head. “What we have is different. We are adults. I can say no and walk away at any time. If I woke up to a father figure on top of me, inside me, without my consent, would that have been rape?”
“Of course it would, but?—"
“No buts, Valen. You did not consent to having sex with her. She was a parental figure and you told her a million times that you weren’t interested. Rape is rarely just about sex, it’s about power, and that’s what she did. She took all your power and turned your father against you. You having a hard-on and coming is irrelevant. Do you have any idea how many times women have been forced to orgasm while being raped just so therapist can turn around and say it’s not rape if they liked it?It’s not rape if they come.That’s fucking bullshit!”
My chest is heaving by the end of my speech, and I’m not sure where the words came from or why I feel so much anger.
“What happened next?”
“I did my time at Briarwood. Swore that since she fucked with my life, I was going to ruin hers. When I got out, I started my company,GhostInc.,and became successful almost overnight.”
“And you followed through with your promise to ruin her?” I guess,but he shakes his head.
“I didn’t get a chance to. Hailey wound up pregnant. Tried to tell my father it was his, not knowing he’d had a vasectomy when she started mentioning she wanted children. He didn’t want any more and obviously didn’t trust her not to become pregnant accidentally on purpose.”
“And he never told her? Jesus.”
