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I keep going through the folder clicking through a series of Bianca’s selfies, and then a video pops up.
“Kodiak.” Ace tries to warn me as I hit play, but I can’t stop. I have to fucking know.
“Tell me who you were with,” Adam barks.
She dips her head and shrinks in on herself like she’s expecting the worst. “I’m sorry. How many times do I need to say it?”
“You call that an apology?” Adam sneers. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Please, just punish me. I don’t care. This has nothing to do with anyone else.”
“It was him, wasn’t it?” Adam paces beside her, his pupils fucking huge. “It had to be Madden. Who the fuck else would it be? Or are you just a goddamn whore?”
When Bianca doesn’t answer, he whips out his hand and latches it around her throat, squeezing until the light begins to dim from her eyes. She claws at him, but he doesn’t stop. He keeps going, getting off on the violence as she passes out from lack of oxygen.
My breathing accelerates, and I want to reach through the screen and fucking murder him myself as he spits in her face and tells her to get up. But she can’t get up because he choked her out. And when she doesn’t move, it sends him into another spiral of rage. I watch in horror as he kneels on her chest and covers her face with his palm until she turns blue.
“You want to keep secrets from me, bitch? Maybe you should keep them permanently.”
It’s obvious she can’t even hear him, but it makes no difference to Adam. He slams her head down against the tile, demanding that she answer him. When that doesn’t work, he slaps her with an increasing level of brutality. My blood pressure rises to the point where I feel like I’m going to explode. But it only gets worse when he grabs her by the hair and drags her around on the floor, screaming at her like a goddamn psychopath.
“I give you everything and look what you make me do!”
Her eyes flutter open, and she coughs, and then she cries out in pain. “Adam, please.”
“Please, what? You fucking cunt. You think I don’t know you have a thing for him? You think I don’t see it? I’ll murder you both before I ever let that happen. I’ll rip out his goddamn throat in front of you. I’ll gut him like a fish and drown you in his blood.”
“Kodiak.” Ace tries to turn it off, but I shove his arm away.
“No,” I snarl. “I have to know what he did to her. This is because of me. Why the fuck didn’t she tell me?”
“It’s not an easy thing to admit,” he answers quietly, and I know he’s speaking from his own experiences. “She was probably terrified. He was clearly unhinged, and it’s impossible to know what other threats he made to keep her quiet.”
I can’t find it in me to respond as the beating continues on screen, and Adam tortures Bianca until she can’t even move. At one point, after I stop the video to vomit, Ace tries to keep me from going back, but I ignore him.
“I didn’t fucking know,” I tell him. “I wish I had killed him. I would have slaughtered him. I would have made him pay. Fucking Christ, I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”
“You can’t put this on yourself,” Ace says. “He didn’t show you who he was, and she didn’t tell you.”
“He tortured her because of me.” I force the words up my raw throat.
Ace doesn’t have an argument for that because there isn’t one to give. It’s obvious to both of us that’s what’s happening here, and I know this is after she left me in Bethesda. He brutalized and tormented her for hours, yet she never admitted it was me. She sacrificed herself, and I was too fucking blind to see it.
I’m shaking with rage by the time the video ends, but that isn’t the last of it. There are thousands more photos and videos of his interactions with Bianca. Clips of him hurting her. Dehumanizing her. Emotionally destroying her. Every goddamn day of her life. And then there are photos of the aftermath he kept like trophies. Every bruise, every cut, every tear. Text records of conversations that go on for days and sometimes weeks arguing over the same accusations he hurls at her. There are files of location data from her cell phone, keystroke logs, and video footage from hidden cameras he must have installed in the house and her car. There are audio files and images of her when she’s out with her friends or even my mom. Every second of her life was being recorded and scrutinized by the end, and I don’t even know if she realized the full extent of it.
