Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 116597 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 583(@200wpm)___ 466(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116597 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 583(@200wpm)___ 466(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
I’ll kill him.
Whoever he is, wherever he is, no matter what it takes or what I lose in the process, I will fucking end his life.
“Whatever you’re thinking, I need you to not,” she said, like she could read my mind. Maybe she felt it in the coiled muscles of my body. “This is not some knight in shining armor moment for you, okay? This is me, a survivor, choosing to share what happened to me. I just need you to listen. That’s all. Okay?”
It was the hardest thing I ever did, to nod my head and mean it. Because it felt impossible not to act on what she’d told me, and I didn’t even have the whole story yet.
But she was right. This wasn’t about me.
And whatever she needed from me in this moment, in this lifetime — it was hers.
I softened my grip on her a bit, and when she seemed to believe my conviction, she continued.
“It was a family friend.” Her voice was rough, but mechanical — like she refused to let herself feel any emotion. “Someone who’d been around my whole life. He did business with my dad. Golfed with him. Came to every party we had. Every summer barbecue in Long Beach. I never… I never thought to not feel safe around him.”
Her tone didn’t change, but her nails dug into my side, clutching like she needed me to hold her tighter. I answered her wordless plea with my arms pulling her in more, surrounding her.
“I told my parents right after it happened,” she went on. “At first, they didn’t believe me. Then they… started making it sound like maybe it wasn’t what I said it was. Like I was being dramatic. They told me to keep it between us. That they’d handle it. That they understood, but that matters like this needed to be handled with discretion.”
Now I was adding the very humans who made this woman I cherished to my list of people I wanted to end.
Livia’s breath hitched, the first crack in her evenness. “I can still feel it, the way my dad squeezed my hand in his and told me he’d never let anyone hurt me.”
My gut twisted. I held her with everything I had.
It took a moment for her to regain her composure, but then she continued.
“I believed him. I did. I thought he and my mom would handle it. I didn’t need it to go to court or anything. I mean, I didn’t want to be the girl who was raped, either. I didn’t want the attention. But I did need justice. I did need to know I was safe.”
She shook her head, pressing back against my chest just enough that I could see her eyes. They were fixed on my chest where her fingers curled.
“Days passed. Then weeks. Months. And nothing happened. He was still around. My mother told me whatever happened wouldn’t happen again. That they had his word.” Her voice hardened like steel. “And that it would be best for business—and for our reputation—if I just… dropped it and moved on.”
I had to grind my teeth together to keep from screaming that that was bullshit, to stop myself from calling into light how badly I wanted to hunt them all down and make them pay. Who the fuck even was I? Like the dog I owned, I was usually of the non-threatening variety.
But the knowledge of someone hurting Liv like this, of her own family turning their backs on her…
It unleashed a rabid beast inside me that was out for blood.
I held him at bay, forcing a deep inhale and exhale and reminding myself that she was a survivor, that she didn’t need me to do anything other than listen.
“And you know what? At first, I tried,” she continued, her voice quiet now. “I tried to play their game, to move on and pretend like everything was fine. But I was… different. I was fundamentally changed. I couldn’t go back to who I was before. And I had no idea how to be whoever came next.
“It got to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore. He was always around, just laughing and kissing his wife’s cheek like he wasn’t a monster. At a gala my mom was hosting, I—” She sucked in a sharp breath, like the memory itself was a blow. “I told everyone. I outed him in front of the entire room. It was chaos. People gasped and looked from me to him in horror, and then to my parents.” She paused. “I’ll never forget my mother’s face…” She shook her head, eyes squeezing shut. “But it proved useless in the end, because somehow, for reasons I’ll never understand… no one believed me. He denied it. My parents denied it. And then they cut me off. They told me — without actually saying it — that if I cared so little about this family, I wasn’t part of it anymore.”