Food forgotten, she follows me up the stairs, screeching at me about what a vile, disgusting human I am while attempting to yank me down the stairs. She almost gets me a few times, but I catch myself on the rail, barely keeping me upright.
Once in the room, I do the same thing I did in the kitchen, tear it apart. I find this camera much quicker. It’s pretty hard to miss once you see it. This one was in the clock, directly facing the bed.
The sudden knowledge that my privacy was breached ignites my fury. With Beth still hanging off my back, I flip around and hurl the clock at the wall. The crashing impact startles her away from me, but it’s too late now. I’m fucking furious, and for once in our fucked-up relationship, she’s going to hear me.
“You fuck men and constantly flaunt them in my face! You play these fucking mind games until I’m nothing but bits of a man! And now,” I shout, swiping my fingers along my bleeding face, “you beat until you draw fucking blood! You don’t love me, but you’ll go down to my work and harass and threaten my fucking student! What the fuck is wrong with you, Elizabeth!?”
“Me?! You’re such a fucking idiotic son of a bitch. You don’t even realize what you’ve done is fucking disgusting! She’s a teenager, Theodore! Young enough to be your fucking daughter, and you’re railing her!On our bed!Is she even fucking legal, or are you a pedophile now too?!”
“Of course, she’s legal! Who the fuck do you think I am?!”
“Not my husband!” she retorts, shrieking at the top of her lungs. “There’s no way the man I married would cheat on me! Especially with a teenage slut!”
“Don’t!”I roar, storming over to the side of the bed.
Laughing in my face, she shoves me into the wall, pointing her sharpened nail inches away from my eye. “Awww, look at you, defending your prepubescent girlfriend. What are you going to do? Spank me, like a bad little student? Is that what she asks for? She must be used to it since she’s barely out of fucking diapers!”
“Why the fuck do you even care?! For years, I let you spread your legs and fuck anything that moved! Do you think that was easy for me?! I fucking loved you, Elizabeth! I fucking tried to fix us while you were blowing your dad’s partner!” I can’t stop the emotion from breaking my voice in half. It hurts to admit all my pain out loud. I would hope she would understand, but that’d be too big of her.
“If you were a man, I wouldn’t have needed to fuck other men! But news-fucking-flash, Theodore, you aren’t a man! Instead, you’re the biggest fucking little bitch I’ve ever met! Always complaining and crying about howmeanI am, how callous and cruel!” Pretending to mimic me, Beth raises the pitch of her tone, making it squeak and squeal like a toddler throwing a tantrum. It’s what she does when she doesn’t want to hear me, one of the many ways she likes to take control.
I don’t let it happen this time. Raising my voice, I shout over her, momentarily stunning her quiet once again.
“And you’re a miserable fucking throwaway! Always to be used and tossed aside! How does it feel, Beth? To be second to every man in your life and now your husband? Maybe if you weren’t such a fucking sleazy cunt, we’d actually want to keep you!”
Her punches come then, knuckles slamming all across my face and neck while she screams and rages. Beth calls me every name under the sun, ranging from worthless to a mistake my mom made after fucking my dad. None of it's new, but when she brings Scarlett into it, this argument becomes a whole different ball game.
“That little slut of yours is a fucking chew toy. I can’t wait to rip her life to shreds, and when she’s alone, crying because no university wants a deceitful fucking whore tainting their campus, she’ll know it’s all because of you. I’ll make her fucking despise you more than she could ever hate me.”
Her taunts continue as she begins to walk away. “You’ll be the same nobody I found you as. A forty-year-old history teacher with no one to love and no one to love you. You’ll be the same failure you always were. The only good thing about you is your money, but I could get that anywhere.”
Stopping in the doorway, she twists around, a vindictive smirk lighting up her face. “And just wait until you see what I do to you. Not only will my family hate you, but I’ll make sure this entire town lights you in flames. Your life will be over, and then you’ll die,just like your mother.A pathetic embarrassment.”
Beth’s wicked laughter is the only sound in my ears. It becomes my universe, vibrating my muscles, which causes my cells to explode in my veins.
I don’t realize I’m behind her until her hair is knotted in my hand.
I feel the strands snapping and tearing apart in my clasp, her skull beginning to sweat with my frenzied tugging. Her panicked yelp pierces through the house, that is, until she flies forward.
A wet, sickening crunch is the last thing I hear before my world fades to nothing.
ACT II
Detective Noah Dane
CHAPTER XXXI
Present
The whirring elevator is too loud on this Monday morning. I barely got any sleep last night, which shouldn’t be the case because me and my partner, Adam Rubio, closed an investigation yesterday. Instead, what should have been a moment of celebration was a grievance for the girl we found dead in a ditch on the side of the road. The cause is still unknown, which made it that much harder to break the news to her parents. It’s one of the hardest parts of the job, right behind finding the bodies.
A cool blast of air hits me as I emerge from the elevator, but it doesn’t chill off my sweltering temperature. I think I’m coming down with something, a flu or overabundance of stress. One of them is making me feverish.
Setting my work bag on my desk chair, I look over the office dividers, noticing the cubicle to my left is empty.
“Hey, Michelle, where’s Rubio at? Not here yet?” Our front desk clerk twists around, eyeing the office with confusion before saying, “No, he’s here. I saw him a minute ago.”
“He’s in conference room B. Told me to tell you to meet him in there when you got here,” Officer Rachel Hark says, logging in to her computer beside me.
