Page 34 of Accept Me (Fate’s Choice #4)

"Well, well. You have a few more brain cells than Dino had. Congrats."

With a firm, deliberate motion, I pulled his phone out of my pocket.

He flinched, just a fraction, but I saw it.

I had already removed the SIM card earlier, so when I powered it on, I knew it wouldn’t reach a tower, betraying our location.

The screen was fingerprint-locked. Brutally, I grabbed his finger and pressed it against the glass. I felt the sharp tremor ripple through his body, saw his clenched jaw, his teeth grinding, the tiny shake of his jaw muscles, and I knew, in that moment, that this might have been the right decision.

There was something on this phone that incriminated him.

I watched him swallow hard, his skin turning chalk white, and that only confirmed it.

I began scrolling.

Call history first. Dates and names, nothing I recognized, some family, one name stood out more; it was his nephew, Rob Nash, from what I googled before. Some unknown numbers.

And then I saw them: a cluster of calls exactly at the hour of the mechanical cat explosion.

Twenty missed calls, all from a blocked number! Twenty… Now, that was interesting.

I was certain Dino hadn’t called him from his normal phone.

As far as I knew, he didn’t have a burner on him, so those calls could just be random.

Or maybe Dino had carried one, then ditched it before he went after Star?

After all, hours had passed while I’d been stuck with Detective Arnold and his team.

I stared at the screen, lost in thought. Twenty missed calls, right after the explosion? Whoever that was, they’d been furious , desperate to reach Nash.

All the while, Nash was watching me with the focus of a hawk.

Finally, I glanced through the emails, and at last I opened the photo gallery.

And that was when it happened, his reaction, sharp, explosive, utterly unexpected.

With a sudden lunge he slipped past me, crashing through the low brush at the cliff’s edge, making a wild attempt to throw himself over.

Oh, wow.

I caught him at the last instant, yanked him sideways with a violent twist of my body, slammed him to the ground, and pinned him under my weight.

He panted with fury, cursed and howled, bucking beneath me, trying to shake me off, but his hands were tied. I dragged them above his head and caught the cord around the thick roots of a bush growing near the flat edge of the cliff, binding him down.

He growled under his breath, muttering the same words over and over: "freak, fucking freak…"

"I see I jumped the gun with that compliment about brain cells, at least Dino had a clean phone. What am I going to find in that gallery, Doug?"

I saw it before he did, the slight hollowing of his cheeks, the twitch that meant he was about to spit in my face. I clamped my palm over his mouth just in time.

"I’ll go through it all," I hissed. "And you’re an idiot if you keep things like that on a phone. Arrogance is always the downfall of the mighty. You really think you’re above the law? Just because you wriggled out of a few cases?"

I stood, leaving him there on the ground, because I didn’t want his body against mine, he disgusted me.

I picked up the phone, which had slipped from my hand in the struggle.

"This must be serious, if you’d rather kill yourself than let me see it. If you were truly innocent, you’d have no reason for something that drastic, like suicide. But you know what I’ll find there, and that’ll tank your claim of innocence."

Still silence.

I scrolled through the photos. The recent months showed nothing in particular. A few games, some faces, men who might have been his brothers, snapshots from a party, other random people I didn’t know, sitting at desks, sitting at coffee tables, nothing I could place.

Then… a shocker.

Suddenly, I noticed a familiar face.

Star.

Fuck!

On a campus.

Walking among students, dressed in gray, baggy clothes, his back hunched.

Staring blankly into space. Walking with some group of omegas.

Standing in a cafeteria line. In lecture halls.

Rarely depicted talking to the people around him.

Among them, but lonely. Often head lowered, over the table, the desk, over the coffee cup…

The fucker… So he never really stopped.

Was he doing it with Dino, or on his own? The dates caught my attention. Even though Star was in different clothes and locations, some batches of photos had the same date. Did someone send them to him like that, and Nash uploaded them to the gallery, which erased the original date?

It didn’t matter now.

Furrowing my brows, anger gripping me, I scrolled down to reach the pics from six years ago with a few decisive flicks of my finger.

And I froze, a sharp wave of pain hitting my gut.

The photos snapped, maybe secretly, inside a courtroom.

They showed him too.

My heartbeat stuttered, then slammed in my chest, so hard Nash must have heard it. His own was already pounding, but now it raced even faster.

I stared at the screen, a stabbing tightness gripping my chest.

My poor Star…

Hunched over, bent in on himself, his skin a ghastly pale, his greasy hair falling in limp messy strands across his face, shrinking beside what had to be a court-appointed defender. Shackled in orange, so small, so thin, so fragile, and his face, oh Fate.

I had to tear my eyes from the screen. Unfortunately, they landed on Nash.

With a low growl, I clenched my jaw and kicked him. He was lying a bit spread, so the tip of my boot landed right in his balls…

He wailed and scowled, curling up almost like Star, wrongly accused in the courtroom.

There were so many pictures of Star… They showed him near a police car, on the courthouse steps, being led out of the courtroom with his hands behind his back, his head down, listening to the verdict, tears running down his face.

He looked so heartbreakingly young and desperately alone: a sixteen-year-old kid, an orphan, hurt so cruelly by his fucking stepfather, a monster… I felt sick to my stomach. That beast had destroyed Star’s life in the worst way.

I scrolled further back in the gallery, before the courtroom shots. The last three photos before those included a single picture showing… someone lying on the ground, from behind, but it wasn’t Star. The time this photo was taken was 11:33.

The next showed a filled condom on the surface of which streaks of blood were visible. This one was taken at 10:40.

And then, one more previous photo… showed the inside of a kitchen, sleek and elegant, with Star sitting all alone at the table, hunched over his phone, the remains of breakfast still in front of him.

And this one was taken at 7:50.

It wasn’t a place I recognized, but I was almost certain it had to be the apartment Nash had taken over.

Three hours separated the shot of Star at the table and the shot of… a bloody condom. Was that the moment the rape happened?

My stomach lurched, and I knew I couldn’t hold it in. I turned away and vomited.

When I finally wiped my mouth and looked back at Nash, he was staring at me with narrowed eyes, his whole body coiled with tension. He had drawn his knees tight to his chest, instinctively shielding his groin as if bracing for another kick.

I said nothing. I had no desire to exchange words with this trash. Instead, I kept scrolling.

The sick gallery was filled almost entirely with pictures of Star, in different clothes, different settings, different moments of his life. The bastard was obsessed.

Occasionally, another omega appeared in the background, older than Star, maybe his dad, but he was never the focus, never the point of the frame. It was obvious Nash had deleted plenty of other photos, leaving only the ones he found most ‘juicy’.

The further back I went, the more shocked I became. A whole series of shots showed Star at school. Judging by the dates, he must have been fifteen, wearing a junior high uniform, skinny, still a kid.

And it didn’t stop there.

Scrolling further, I saw him outside the school building, climbing into a car with an older omega, and I felt certain it was his granddad, the same face I’d seen in the framed photo on the nightstand in Star’s room.

One shot, taken with a flash, showed the same man looking directly into the camera, as if he had realized someone was watching.

Another photo right after that was of a syringe.

I had no idea what the connection could be.

In any case, how the hell did Nash have photos of Star when he was fifteen?

I kept scrolling, faster, dates flipping back in time, and there they were, pictures of Star on a school trip, Star in some restaurant, always shot from a distance, always from a stalker’s angle. Some of them showed him at fourteen.

And then I froze.

My finger stopped mid-swipe as my eyes locked on an image of an alpha man: astonishingly handsome, strikingly so, with pale blond hair, piercing dark blue eyes, maybe thirty-five but looking younger.

I slowed down, no longer skimming, examining each frame with great attention. I was trying to piece together what story these pictures were telling.

One photo showed him inside a car, glancing up toward whoever had taken the picture, flash reflecting in his eyes.

The next one captured him against the hood of the car, hands cuffed behind his back, his head tilted just enough for his face to remain visible.

And then another shot further ahead, my blood ran cold: it was a used condom, filled, lying on the car hood.

I had to know, had to be certain. I pulled out my burner phone, and connected to the internet, painfully slow in the forest. I typed his name into the search bar.

Cole Daniels.

A moment later, dozens of modeling shots appeared: high-fashion spreads, magazine covers, the exact same face I had just seen in Nash’s phone.

Cole Daniels was Star’s father.

My head spun.

What the hell was going on here?