“Not once?” I demand.
There’s a hollow ache in his eyes when he looks at me. “No.”
My temper ignites, sudden and sharp. “You just believed him?”
“I did.”
I scoff. “But now you believe me?”
“Yes.” His face is a map of suffering, every line showing it.
Air saws in and out of me. The truth I’ve begged for all these years is finally here, but it’s ash in my mouth.
“If you’d helped me,” I tell him, my voice deadly as I hold his gaze, “if you’d believed me, there wouldn’t be a string of women after me.”
The words hit him like bullets. He sways like he’s going to fall. “What?”
“There are others.” I take satisfaction in seeing all the color leave his face. “I was the first, but there are others.”
“How…how do you know?”
I let out a harsh laugh. “Because, unlike me, there are others who are not cowards, who didn’t just run away with their tail between their legs because their father and boyfriend branded them a whore. They came forward. They told their truth.”
He frowns, blinks, like he’s processing what I said, and the words don’t make sense.
“I am, too.Now.”
His legs go slack, and he sinks down onto his haunches.
I stare at him, my body vibrating, my throat raw. I feel a truth settle cold and hard in me:I am strong enough to stand. He is not.
“He rapes women?” He’s staring at the ground like it’s going to have the answers.
“Yes.”
“How many?”
I suck in a breath. “I’ve been told there are at least eight—but he’s paid some off, silenced them with NDAs. And they suspect there are more.”
“They?”
“Journalists. Law enforcement.”
He drops his face into his hands.
That’s when I push the knife deeper. “But those are the ones who are alive, Cade.”
He lifts his eyes to meet mine. They’re drenched in loss and grief. “No,” he whimpers.
“Yes,” I goad him. “There’s one who died by suicide.”
“Like you almost did,” he says more to himself than to me.
“I’m going to tell the world, Cade. I’m going to destroy your brother, your family name, and you can’t stop me.”
“Dove…not gonna stop you. Not gonna?—”
“You can’t,” I scream at him, cutting him off. “You can’t stop me this time. No one can. Iwillspeak my truth.”
