No.
He couldn’t have.
He couldn’t.
His whole body shook. A shiver crawled through him, not from cold but from the terror swallowing him whole.
His stomach twisted painfully. He looked at his reflection. The man in the mirror wasn’t him.
It was a monster who hadn’t spared an innocent girl.
And the only thing he felt was an icy, corrosive disgust directed entirely at himself.
CHAPTER 25
From that day on, Jasper felt as if he’d landed in hell.
He lived but didn’t feel alive. He breathed, but the air only tightened in his chest. Something kept tearing him apart from the inside. He wanted to apologize. He wanted to tell her that…
What?
That he hadn’t understood what he was doing? That he’d been drunk? That he’d lost control?
Ridiculous. Words like that would’ve sounded like spit in her face. There was no excuse he could offer. At best, he wanted to ask for forgiveness—but the girl refused to even see him. And she was right.
His father smothered the whole situation instantly. No questions, no public mess. If not for his intervention, Jasper would’ve ended up with an actual conviction. Sometimes Jasper wondered if that wouldn’t have been fairer. Wouldn’t that have been the only real way to atone?
After that, he became disgustingly proper. Obedient. He pulled himself together: stopped fighting, quit drinking, buried himself in schoolwork. Tried to become the kind of son his father might respect.
But did he respect himself?
Every time he looked in the mirror, he saw a stranger. He lived by a rigid set of rules he’d built himself. And he never again looked at women the way he used to. Because who was he now? A slippery bastard who’d crossed a line. A predator. A disgrace.
The girl’s name wasNina—he found that out later. She’d been a year below him. Quiet, calm, top of her class. Not a party girl, not someone chasing trouble. And after that night, she vanished from campus without a trace.
He’d asked her classmates about her a few times.
“Nina?” they’d shrugged.“She transferred. We’re not sure. Didn’t even say goodbye. Doesn’t pick up her phone. Maybe she got full of herself? I heard her dad opened a pharmaceutical company. Their new drug’s supposed to be a breakthrough.”
But Jasper knew it wasn’t the drug. It washim.
He couldn’t imagine her walking away from everything: school, friends, her old life. He expected her to make noise, demand justice, drag every detail into the light. He expected whispers in the halls, judgmental stares.
But nothing happened.
She simply disappeared.
As if someone had erased her.
Then a rumor swept through campus. A couple months after that night, someone in the smoking area mentioned that Nina—the same girl Jasper had been asking about—had gotten married.
At first, he didn’t believe it. He’d prepared himself for the worst, and instead she’d left college because she was heading down the aisle?
That thought drilled into him all day until he finally opened his laptop and started digging through Friendster.
He found her picture.
Nina wore a simple white dress, her hair styled neatly, holding a small bridal bouquet. But her face…
