Page 118 of Beautiful When He Breaks

Make them doubt their own resistance. Make them feel responsible for someone else’s violation. Make the victim carry the blueprint afterward and call it consent because the alternative is too ugly for everyone around them.

I close the chat and breathe through my nose.

When I see the video folder, my body knows before I click, and my stomach drops when I see ten videos in there.

“Headphones,” I say.

Liam moves instantly, grabbing mine from the side pocket of my bag where he apparently knows I keep them. He hands them over without a word, and I plug them in.

Eli’s head snaps up when he sees what I’m doing. “No,” he says.

I take the headphones in one hand and look at him fully. “I’m going to watch enough to know what it is. Then I’m turning it off, that’s all. I promise I won’t watch if it gets even more violating than I think it’s going to be.”

His face crumples for one second before he gets control of it, and that tiny break almost ends me. “Okay,” he whispers.

I put on the headphones and click the first video under the EM folder.

It starts in a room I don’t recognize. A party room maybe, or a sorority bedroom. The camera angle is wrong in the way hidden recordings are wrong—slightly elevated and off to the side. Eli is there, and my whole fucking body goes cold.

He’s sitting on the edge of a bed, blinking too slowly, one hand dragging through his hair as Celeste stands in front of him smiling. Groggy. That’s the word his body gives me immediately. Not drunk in a loud, sloppy way. His eyes don’t focus properly when she touches his face.

I can’t hear myself breathing.

Celeste’s voice comes through the headphones, bright and coaxing and sickly sweet. “Baby, you said you wanted me.”

Eli frowns in the video, confused, mouth moving around words that come slowly. “I don’t… Celeste, I’m tired. S-something feelsss…wrong. Can you call… Julesss to pick… me up?”

She laughs softly like he’s adorable. “You always get so nervous after. It’s okay.”

After.

My hand clamps around the edge of the laptop. He wanted me because he wasn’t feeling well, and she laughed at him.

On screen, Eli tries to shake his head, but it’s weak and unfocused. Celeste pushes him back and climbs onto the bed beside him, still smiling, one hand sliding over his chest while he stares at her. She says something else about how he doesn’t have to pretend with her, how he wanted it earlier, how he told her he loved her and wanted to be close. He looks miserable and confused and so fucking young in that moment that the room around me disappears.

This isn’t evidence in the abstract anymore. This is Eli drugged and saying no, and still being ignored.

This is my Eli.

The next few seconds tell me exactly where it’s going, and I refuse to watch the rest. I refuse to let that be something I carry visually any deeper than I already have to. I stop the video so hard my finger slips on the trackpad.

I sit there with the paused screen hidden beneath my hand, headphones still on, the blood roaring in my ears louder than anything the video could’ve played.

Then I close the laptop hard enough that everyone in the room flinches and Eli jumps to his feet. Luca’s hand is out as if he tried to stop him from coming closer and then decided not to trap him. Eli’s face is pale, glassy blue eyes fixed on me, and I know he can read enough from my expression that I won’t be able to protect him from it completely.

“What was it?” he asks.

I don’t answer him right away—I can’t. The words are there, somewhere, but they’re buried under the sound the laptop made when I snapped it shut, and the image still burned behind my eyes no matter how fast I stopped it.

I pull the headphones off and set them on the coffee table, then I put the laptop down beside them. The flash drive is still plugged into the side. I hate that little black thing with a violence that feels physical, but I don’t touch it again because Mara will need it clean. Mara will need all the pieces that prove what the rest of us already know in our bones.

I get to my feet slowly and Eli doesn’t move when I walk toward him. I stop in front of him and lift my hands, taking his face between my palms. The second my skin touches his, my control nearly goes. He’s breathing too fast and too shallow, eyes huge and fixed on mine, and I can feel the smallest tremor working through his jaw.

I want to be steady for him—I need to be steady for him. But my throat burns so badly I have to swallow hard before I can speak, and even then, my voice comes out shaky.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” I say.

His expression drops—one brutal slackening of his mouth and a sudden wet shine in his eyes as the truth hits him all at once. “No…”