I almost dropped the phone in my haste to get to the next text.
Dante: How could you? How could you kill her parents? They were all she had in this world. You’ve destroyed her. You’ve destroyed your daughter.
I could feel his anger and anguish in that message, and all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe; my chest tight, I attempted to suck air into my lungs. This was my irrefutable proof that it had been Catherine.
“Breathe, baby,” Beck said in his soothing voice. “In and out, count in your head, one, two, three, four, five. You’re having a panic attack, and you need to ground yourself.”
At first, I could barely hear him, but after some time, his words penetrated, and I started to count in my head, forcing the air in and out, forcing my body to stay alive because I needed it to finish this. To stop Catherine. Destroy her.
“My mom was alive when we crashed,” I said softly when I was able to breathe easily again. The memories were hitting me now, hard and fast. Flashes of that night. That chill in the air. The screech of our tires. My fear as we tumbled down the embankment.
“When our car stopped in the embankment, she was alive.” I was almost positive.
“You said her neck was broken on impact,” Dylan reminded me gently.
I shook my head. “That’s what they told me, but I was there. I might have blocked out what happened at first, but … I remember now. I heard her voice and her gasp. Someone got to her just after we crashed. Probably my dad too. They were murdered.”
And those fucking seatbelts. Definitely the work of Debitch.
Pain twisted inside me, and a small sob escaped my lips before I clapped a hand over them. Now wasn’t the time for weakness. There was a long, weighted silence while the guys clearly scrambled for the right thing to say. But there was no “right thing” in this situation. Catherine had orchestrated the murder of my parents—myrealparents—and this was proof.
“I’m going to make that bitch pay,” I whispered into the conversation void. “She’s not getting away with this. Not this time. She’s pushed her luck too fucking far.”
Beck made a small sound, smoothing his hand down my spine. “Don’t plan anything rash, Butterfly. We’re in this together, remember? We’ll take her downtogether.”
No doubt he was thinking about how I’d run off in the middle of the night with no plans past possibly putting a bullet in my bio-mom’s skull. Put like that, I guess he had a point.
Leveling a hard stare at Beck, I took a deep breath, considering our newfoundtogetherness.
“Promise me,” I ordered him. “Promise me we’ll make her pay for this, Sebastian.”
His huge palm cupped my cheek, his steady, unguarded gray eyes meeting mine for long enough that I couldn’t doubt his sincerity. “I swear to you, Butterfly,” he vowed, “Catherine’s going down.”
* * *
I’d thoughtit would be such a simple thing. We were all in agreement that Catherine—and the rest of the Delta council—had abused their power for way too long. They all needed to answer for their various crimes, and the successors would be the ones to see justice done.
But apparently, it wasn’t as easy as just marching up to a judge and presenting our evidence. For one thing, we still didn’t know who was on Delta’s payroll, and for another, how would we prove the legitimacy of our evidence?
“I knew this was too good to be true,” I groaned, tossing the stack of papers back on the coffee table some hours later. I collapsed back into the couch and scrubbed at my sleep deprived face with both hands. We needed ... more coffee. Yes, maybe more coffee would make more brain power.
“Hey, Jasper?” I called out, knowing he was rustling around in the kitchen a few moments ago. Hopefully he was still there and could sort out the caffeine situation. “Can you—”
“No!” he shouted back, then appeared in front of me with a slick smile and a handful of sandwich. “You’re cut off from the coffee pot, hot stuff. Orders of the big man himself.”
I shifted in my seat to glare at Beck who was engrossed in some financial document that had been in Dante’s folder of dirt. He didn’t even look up from his page, but I saw his lips twitch with a smile. “You’re exhausted, Butterfly. You need to sleep.” He looked up then, casting his tired eyes around the room. “We all do.”
Feeling stubborn, mostly at being told what to do, I shook my head. “No way. We have a board of megalomaniac assholes to take down and a murder charge to overthrow. Do you really think Dante is getting much sleep while being held for rape and murder?”
Beck arched a brow at me in challenge. “He betrayed you. Lied to you for your entire fake friendship. Why do you care if he goes to jail for killing Katelyn?” He paused, narrowing his eyes. “What makes you so sure he didn’t do it?”
I glowered back at him, my anger simmering beneath the surface. “He didn’t do it,” I snapped. “The betraying me was because of Catherine. Not a life he chose. Besides, I know him. It wasn’t all an act.”
Please don’t let it have all been an act.
Beck stared back at me for a long time then gave a cavalier shrug. “If you say so, sweetheart.”
The tone of his voice raised my hackles, and I pushed to my feet. My hands were propped on my hips and I glared down at Beck. Fucking Beck. “What the fuck doesthatmean?” I demanded.
