Page 213 of Boys Who Taint

It can’t be because that means all those filthy fingers, all that kinky fuckery, all those orgasms and all those kisses … were his.

Oh God.

I drop the knife in my hand. “No.”

“Fine, you don’t believe me? Then watch what he did to your half sister,” Grey growls, pulling out his phone.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Levi hisses, but Apollo keeps him locked in place.

“Let’s see what he’s got then,” Apollo says.

Grey opens a file and plays a video, and I stare in abject horror at the footage taken on the night of Mavis’s death. Right there during the scene of the crime, when Levi and Mavis were near the rim where we used to jump.

But the video is shot from the woods where I could’ve sworn I saw those two eyes flashing that night.

“You were there,” I murmur as I glance at Grey.

“Keep watching,” he replies. “Look at what he did.”

“Turn. That. Off,” Levi says through gritted teeth.

“Or what?” Grey taunts. “You’ve already made her hate us all. I warned you what would happen. Might as well give her the full fucking truth of what transpired.”

But all I can focus on is the video on his screen, replaying that night from an angle I’d never seen during a moment I was still fast asleep.

Levi grabs Mavis’s hand and dashes toward the rim with her. She beats him to the ledge, but when the moment comes when they jump, he abruptly stops, releasing her hand in the midst of her jump, and it causes her to lose her footing.

I slam my hand in front of my mouth, seeing my own half sister fall to her death from a distance.

A deafening silence follows the thud, while Levi hovers over the ledge like a ghost, haunted by the memory of a jump he never made.

He didn’t push her.

She fell because he let go.

And when I look up and look into the eyes of the boy who’s been haunting my soul instead, something in his eyes breaks.

Ghost

I was never supposedto exist.

All those years of pining for a girl who barely acknowledged my existence chipped away at my sanity. I never understood why she pulled away. Why our friendship eroded to merely small talk. The older we grew, the more withdrawn she became, as if something intangible drove a wedge between us.

But when Mavis Rivera died … a piece of me died with her, and along with it my will to exist. Mavis was Aspen’s heart, and I destroyed it.

Guilt ate me up alive.

There was nothing left except the widening chasm between us. A chasm I’d created by accident.

It was all an accident.

“I never wanted her to die,” I mutter.

I’ve lost.

I’ve lost it all.

This was my legacy. My only chance to do all the things I wanted to do before it all fell apart. Every demented, fucked-up fantasy I’d kept buried deep inside, every inch of my depravity, my unending lust for her, I let it all out through this mask.