Page 117 of Beautiful When He Breaks

For a second, the file names blur in front of me because I’m braced too hard. Then they settle into lines.

Screenshots. Chat exports. A list of folders labeled Parties, People, Proof… and EM.

My stomach drops.

EM.

Eli Matthews.

Killian swears once under his breath, low and vicious enough that Luca hears it from across the room.

I open the screenshots first.

The first few are group chats with names I recognize vaguely from Celeste’s circle, girls I’ve seen at parties, girls who laughed too brightly in hallways and moved around campus, untouchable in that way wealthy or well-connected students often do.

At first, the messages look like ordinary gossip, petty and cruel but not criminal. Then the language changes. A list of guys. Comments about who’s easy, who needs work, who’s religious, who needs “softening up,” who has parents worth leveraging, who’s too drunk to remember clearly, who can be made useful.

“What the fuck,” I whisper, my hands going cold on the keyboard.

I open the Lists folder next and in it are a few Google Sheet files.

There are names of pills organized enough to be horrifying. Names and warnings. What to use, what not to mix, what makes someone sleepy versus sick. Who asks too many questions afterward, who can be convinced they wanted it. Some lines are written like party strategy, others read like a fucking manual.

I can’t hear anything except my own pulse.

Killian’s hand lands on the back of my chair. “Julian,” he says quietly.

“I’m okay,” I lie.

“You’re not.”

Eli’s voice cuts in, thin and terrified. “What is it?”

I close the document because I don’t want any accidental glimpse of it to reach him.

“It’s evidence,” I say carefully. “It looks like it’s not only about you. There are lists and chats. It looks organized.”

He stares at me like the words are entering his body one at a time and slicing on the way in. “Organized… how?”

I swallow. “They were tracking guys. Planning things that… Fuck. You weren’t—they’ve done this many times before.”

His face drains of color. Luca moves immediately, sitting beside him on the couch, not touching until Eli leans slightly toward the warmth without seeming to notice. “They’ve… done this before?”

“By the looks of things,” I say, “yes.”

Eli bends forward and presses the heels of both hands to his eyes. I want to get up. I want to go to him, but I also need to know enough to stop him from imagining things worse or wrong. So, I stay where I am and open the chat export next, because the only thing more dangerous than knowing is leaving the unknown to eat him alive.

It gets worse.

Not in one explosive revelation, but in details—that’s what makes it unbearable. The casualness. The laughing emojis. Celeste’s name appears again and again.

There are messages about Eli wanting to wait, about how annoying it is, about how his family money and name make him worth “locking down” if he won’t hurry up. Another girl tells Celeste that if he’s too holy to fuck, she should make it his idea. Someone else jokes about proof being insurance. Celeste sends a voice note transcript that makes my jaw clench so hard my teeth ache.

He’s easy, babes. He’ll believe me if I cry hard enough.

I have to stop for a second as my vision narrows around those words.

Blakely made me feel like I was the one who kept choosing the harm because sometimes I walked through the door myself. Celeste did the same thing to Eli in a different way.