CHAPTER 413: THE TRUTH PT 2

The words on the screen seemed to pulse, each one a separate, venomous bite.

Cain: so I’m making progress with Sarah Kyle: the weird quiet chick? Cain: yeah. she’s friends with Aria. super close. Kyle: ohhhhh I see what you’re doing Cain: yeah she’s like the key. Aria won’t give me the time of day directly but if I’m dating her best friend...

A cold void opened in the pit of my stomach, a sudden drop into nothing.

I kept reading, my eyes dragging across each line like they were being pulled through broken glass.

Cain: took her virginity too Kyle: was it weird? Cain: little bit. she just kinda laid there. but whatever, I’m playing the long game

The letters on the screen began to swim, distorting into grotesque shapes that mocked the innocence I thought I remembered.

Cain: honestly sometimes when I’m fucking Sarah I just think about Aria. like I’ll close my eyes and pretend Marcus: LMAOOO Cain: I’m serious.

A hot, acidic wave surged into the back of my throat. My hands shook so violently the paper rattled.

"I never knew," I whispered, the sound fraying at the edges. "She never... she never said a word."

"There’s more," Ash said, her voice a low, somber thread. She slid her phone across the table.

A recording began to play.

A voice I knew. A voice from a life I had tried to bury.

Eric.

"It started small. She’d text me. Ask to meet up for coffee. Said she was worried about Aria and wanted to make sure I was treating her right. I thought she was just being a good friend."

The air vanished from my lungs.

"But then one night, Aria was working late, and Sarah showed up at my place. She was... different. Flirty. Touchy. And I let it happen."

No.

"And then she started blackmailing me. She had photos. Videos. Threatened to send them to Aria if I didn’t do what she wanted. She told me to break up with Aria."

The walls of the room seemed to bend inward, the world narrowing to the sound of his voice confessing a truth that was dismantling my past.

"Then Aria lost her job. She made some mistake at work. A big one. Got fired over it. I’m sure Sarah orchestrated it. Aria was too careful to make that kind of error on her own."

The memory surfaced, sharp and clear. The spreadsheet error. The cold dread. The humiliation. The bewildering relief when I was rehired. The tiny, nagging voice I’d silenced, the one that whispered the mistake wasn’t like me.

"Aria found out about the cheating on her own. She didn’t know it was Sarah I was sleeping with. She just knew I’d betrayed her, and she ended things. I tried to tell her the truth, tried to explain, but she wouldn’t listen."

All those desperate calls I’d ignored. All his texts, pleading for five minutes, which I’d deleted unread. I had built a wall of righteous anger, and she had been the one handing me the bricks.

"She’d call me anytime she felt like it. And I’d go. I don’t know why. I was pathetic. Desperate. She had this hold over me. We’d meet at my place. Sometimes hers. And one of the last times we had sex... the condom broke."

My heart seized, a hard, painful jolt in my chest.

"I think the baby Sarah’s carrying might be mine. But I don’t know how to prove it. Not unless she agrees to a DNA test. And she never would. Not willingly."

The recording droned on, but the words dissolved into a meaningless hum, a static buzz drowning out everything but the screaming in my head.

Sarah. The familiar voice from that day.The woman I had been ready to destroy for hurting me. It had beenher all along.

The nausea erupted, a brutal, unstoppable force. My stomach convulsed.

I catapulted from the chair, my knee catching the edge of the table, sending the white plastic bag tumbling. I staggered toward the bathroom, a hand clamped over my mouth.

I didn’t make it. I fell to my knees on the cold linoleum, my body wrenching itself inside out. Ash was there in an instant, her hand a firm, warm pressure between my shoulder blades, her presence a silent anchor as I heaved until my muscles screamed and my vision spotted with black.

When the violent spasms finally subsided, I was hollow. I slumped against the bathtub, gasping, my entire body trembling with the effort to simply draw breath.

Ash helped me up, her movements steady and sure. She guided me to the sink. I splashed water on my face, the cold a shock. I brushed my teeth, the minty paste a stark, clean lie over the corrosive truth. I was moving on a string, a puppet whose puppeteer had fled.

Finally, I turned, wiping my mouth with a towel.

Ash stood in the doorway, her expression a complicated map of worry, apprehension, and a deep, unsettling pity.

My eyes followed her gaze to the floor.

The plastic bag had spilled its contents. They lay there, three small white boxes, stark against the worn floorboards. An accusation. A question.

Ash’s eyes widened. A tremor went through her, a quick, sharp inhalation. I saw the calculation in her gaze, the pieces clicking into a terrifying new picture.

"It’s nothing," I said, my voice too high, too tight. "An old woman at church... she said something vague. It doesn’t mean anything."

"Aria," Ash said, her tone careful, layered with a new, urgent concern. "We should go to the hospital. Just to be sure. To get you checked out."

"There’s no need." The denial was automatic, a reflex.

"What if you are..." she paused, the words heavy, "carrying his child?"

The question landed not as words, but as a physical blow. It stole the air from the room, from my lungs.

The file. The mutilated body. The vile messages. Eric’s broken confession. Sarah’s monstrous face. Kael’s wounded eyes. And now this... this silent,growing possibility... twining around the wreckage, a vine choking the last life from me.

It was an avalanche. I was buried beneath it.

"Don’t we have bigger things to worry about?" I gestured weakly toward the living room, where the file lay open, a crime scene of my own history. "This... all of this about Sarah—"

"It doesn’t matter," Ash cut in, her voice suddenly iron-clad, absolute. "None of it matters right now. You come first."

"No." I pushed past her, back into the bleakness of my bedroom, collapsing onto the thin mattress. The springs groaned in protest. "We need to focus on Sarah. Eric’s story... he could be lying. To save face, to—"

"It’s not just Eric," Ash said from the doorway.

I looked up, the finality in her tone a fresh chill.

"After I heard his confession, I started digging deeper," she said, each word measured and precise. "Your past relationships. Ryan. Damon. Kyle. Those names mean anything to you?"

A cold dread trickled down my spine. Of course they did.

"They all had the same story," she continued, her voice barely a whisper. "Sarah. She seduced them. Blackmailed them. Manipulated them into leaving you. Every single one."

The truth was no longer a sharp stab; it was a slow, spreading stain, soaking through the fabric of my entire life, turning every cherished memory into something ugly and defiled.

I wanted to look away. I wanted to claw the knowledge from my mind. But the tears came then, not as a storm, but as a silent, relentless flood. They streamed down my face, hot and salt-bitter, a confession of a grief too profound for sound.

"So then what?" I whispered, my voice shattered, shaking with a rage that had no outlet. "Sarah... she successfully seduced Kael, too? Is that the final truth you brought here to destroy me with?"

"No," Ash murmured.

The word hung in the thick, tear-soaked air between us, a single, stark note of something that wasn’t relief, but a deeper, more terrifying unknown.

"Then what happened between them?" I begged, the sobs breaking through, my body trembling. "What did she do to him?"

Ash’s own composure fractured, her voice thickening with a sorrow that was almost tangible. "I can’t say," she admitted, the words clearly costing her. "It’s not my story to tell. It’s better... if you hear it from Kael himself."

The room plunged into a heavy, suffocating silence. The only sounds were my ragged, hitching breaths and the distant, indifferent hum of the city.

Then, her phone rang.

Ash pulled it from her pocket, glanced at the screen, and answered. Her entire body went still. Something shifted in her face... a flicker of shock, a dart of her eyes toward me, a silent communication of news I was not yet meant to hear.

My stomach, already empty, dropped into a bottomless void.