I inhale a deep breath through my nose. The hand holding the gun wants to shake, but I fight against the urge, steeling every muscle until my entire right arm is an exercise in pain.
His eyes. Even through the fear, they shine. Bright amber like a traffic light. Slow down. Prepare to stop.
In my quest to get justice, I’ve pushed the thought of what he’ll look like dead from my mind. I want to paint over the gouging wound where Tessa’s opaque, unseeing eyes cut a hole into my heart.
Blood I can handle. Fear I welcome. But will his dead eyes wipe hers from my memory as I hope or add another layer, ingrain the despair?
“Tessa Armitage.”
A tic hits the corner of his left eye, there and gone in an instant. “What about her?”
“You raped her.”
The door behind me blows open in a gust of wind and I fight the compulsion to turn, to check it, to make sure we’re still alone.
A voice inside my head screams, do it, do it now, and I’m not sure if it’s mine or Tessa’s or a new monster crawling out of my psyche, baying for blood.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, sweetheart.”
“You went to a party.”
His hands curl at his sides. “Go to a lot of them.”
I inhale another slow, deep breath. My heart rate pauses, thumps twice as hard when it resumes, then falls into a steady rhythm.You-can. Do-this. You-can. Do-this.
“You put something in her drink, then raped her.”
Robbie’s eyes flick towards the door and widen. I step to the side, turning just a quarter, the gun still pointing straight towards him. Aimed at his face.
“I hope you’re not accusing one of my guys without proof?”
The drawl belongs to Zachariah Cameron. I draw back a few steps. In my head, a YouTube woman says to point the gun equidistant between them because then they’ll each think it’s aimed at them.
Except they’re standing opposite each other. That won’t work.
My hand drops, then jerks upright, finding its true target and ignoring Zach as irrelevant.
“I have proof. The dumb shit uploaded the whole video.”
That’s the bit that tore Tessa’s mental health to shreds. Not the attack, though that was bad enough, but knowing every spotty teen in a ten-k radius could ogle her violated image on their phone. Our takedown request came too late. By then, it had been downloaded and shared so many places that as soon as the original disappeared, another popped up under a different title.
She couldn’t walk past a group of girls without an invective being hurled her way. Slag. Whore. Slut. Singly they were better, but sharing a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god smile doesn’t substitute for friendship.
Boys who weren’t fit to kiss the ground she walked on sneered at her on the street. All of them thinking they were better and for what? For the grand achievement of knowing how to bypass a parental filter?
My hand trembles and I force it into compliance, my arm now so tired the response is sluggish. Zach has moved closer without me noticing. My one chance is busting apart. I need to get my shit together and now.
“Show me.”
He hands me his phone and I navigate it one-handed. The porn site pops up after typing in two letters and from there, I enter the search terms from memory, then click the link.
When I jerk my hand for Zach to take the phone back, Robbie’s mask slips, showing a fury barely held in check.
Not at me. He barely seems to notice I hold a gun.
His anger is at Zach. For what? Entertaining my claim?
“Skip the ad and you’ll see,” I tell him.
