"How far exactly did you think he’d go?" I tightened my hands around the straps of my backpack and made my way down the bleachers until we were eye level. I wanted to see her face when she told me the truth about what Beck had done to me.
"I knew that he wanted his revenge. Beck hasn’t been the same since that day. He’s been so damn angry, and even though the thought of him getting close to you killed me, I knew that he needed this. I thought he was just going to make you fall for him then make you look like a fool. I didn’t know—I didn’t think—"
"So, you were okay with him using me, just not to the point that it also made you look bad."
She bristled, and I knew that I had hit my mark with her. Cami cared what people thought of her. I feared she cared about that more than she cared about anything else.
"I don’t care how it makes me look." She stood. "I just wanted to say that I’m sorry I let him take it this far. I should have stepped in. I should have stopped him before you got so hurt."
I hated Cami. When I had first met her, I was so envious of how she looked and acted and how everyone looked at her, but now I wasn’t envious of one single part of her. I didn’t covet the lies she told or the secrets she kept to keep her perfect little sham of a life going.
I didn’t want any part of it.
"I don’t get it." I walked past her with my pulse racing like a beating drum.
"Get what?"
"This whole thing." I turned back to her and waved my hand in her
direction. She still looked so beautiful, so well put together, even though she might as well have been falling apart. "Why do you think this is okay? Your relationship with Beck. The lies the two of you tell. Your affair with a married man."
Her eyes sparked with anger, or maybe even fear, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to tiptoe around her when she hadn’t given a shit about me at all. She had just admitted to knowing what Beck was going to do to me. She knew, and she hadn’t cared.
"That’s just another one of his lies." Her gaze shifted away from me as she spoke, and I knew that she was full of shit. She just didn’t want the girl who had nothing left to lose to know her dirty little secrets.
Her secrets were in danger in my hands.
We both knew that to be true.
"We both know it isn’t." I shook my head and took a step back from her. I was tired of playing games with her. With all of these damn people who I shouldn’t have cared anything about.
I was thankful that she told me the truth about what happened between Beck and Lucas. About Frankie.
And even though I wished it wasn’t, I knew that what she said was true.
Lucas was responsible for the terrors that she claimed, and deep down inside of me, I had known that to be true since Beck had told me.
And I wanted to kill him.
I had always hated my last name simply because I hated my father. It was a wound that festered and festered with every single moment that he wasn’t the father I needed him to be, but now it was different.
I was really and truly ashamed to be a Vos at that moment.
I had never been more ashamed of anything in my life.
My father was an ass and a terrible dad, but even I didn’t think he was capable of this. I hadn’t thought he was capable of letting Lucas get away with something so terrible.
"So, what? Beck hurt you, so now you’re going to use what you know against me?" She was so smug as she said it even though I knew that idea scared her, and every part of me wanted to tell her yes. I wanted to throw it in her face that Beck had betrayed her too. Even if it wasn’t in the same way he had betrayed me. Even if it didn’t even register on the same scale.
She had trusted him, and he had taken that trust and smashed it.
And I wanted her to taste that betrayal over and over again like I did
every day. I wanted her to see it when she looked at him. I wanted her to feel it whenever she and Beck did whatever fucked-up things the two of them called a relationship.
But I wasn’t like her.
I was nothing like these fucking people, and I wouldn’t allow them to make me into the horrible people they were.
"I won’t." I shook my head. "I’m not you. I’m not Beck. I don’t give a shit who you’re fucking, Cami. Just stay the hell away from me."
I turned my back to her, and I headed straight in the direction of the locker room. I knew that Lucas would more than likely be there, and I couldn’t go another moment without talking to him. I had to look him in the eye and find out the truth from his lips.
I needed to hear him say it. I needed him to stop lying to me for one damn second.
Because that was all he and my dad had done since I had been here. It was no wonder his mother was nowhere to be seen. I would be ashamed to show my face too if I were her.
If I knew what my horrible son had done, and still looked people in the eye and pretended that he was something he wasn’t.
He had already taken my father’s last name when my father and his mother married. He wanted to erase everything he could from his former life, from whoever he was before he became a Vos, and now I truly wondered why.
I thought that he had wanted it simply because of the power it evoked.
My last name was short and simple and so damn powerful in a town like this.
And Lucas had reaped the benefits of it. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a Vos by blood. He was much more my father’s son than I had ever been his daughter.
A decision my father had made on his own.
A decision he would have to live with for the rest of his life.
"For what it’s worth." I hesitated as she spoke from behind me. "I am sorry for what he did to you. I wish I could go back and stop him."
"But you can’t." I swallowed all of the other things I wanted to say to her.
I swallowed down the urge to tell her to go straight to hell and take her fake-ass apology with her.
I didn’t need or want an apology from her. It would do nothing to change
what happened. I wouldn’t forgive her for the role she played, and if I was being honest, some part of me hated her for what happened far worse than I hated Beck.
With him, I at least had some small insignificant understanding for why he needed to get revenge. It didn’t mean that I would forgive him. I knew that I wouldn’t. But I could still understand it.
Even if he did go about it in the most fucked up way possible. I knew that what he did to me didn’t even compare to what Lucas had done, but for someone who was so angry over those acts, he sure did come close to replicating them.
He didn’t force anything on me. Every moment I had with Beck was one hundred percent willing on my part. Some of those moments I even begged him for.
But he still betrayed me. He broke my trust in the most intimate moment of my life. He took that trust that I had handed him, and he smashed it right in front of my face for the rest of the world to see.
He betrayed me and humiliated me, and I couldn’t imagine how he thought any of that was right.
He had apologized since it happened. He had even said that the video being posted wasn’t him, but I couldn’t trust simple words from him anymore. I may have before.
I had hung on to every single word that he fed me. Even when he admitted to hating me, and I was starving for anything he would give me.
But this was different.