Page 103 of The Cruelest Chaos

“I hate you,” I say again, a whisper. “I hate you.”

“Why?” he taunts me, lifting up his hands in question. “You thought I’d save you from that fucking trailer and your fucking mom and her shitty boyfriends that wanna fuck you?”

“I thought you were better.” I hate the taste of those words on my tongue, but I say them again. “I thought you were better.”

He drops his hands and I see him swallow, watching me as blood drips down onto the floor.

“I thought you were better. I thought you were god. I adored you.”

His hands clench into fists.

“I thought you were like me. I thought you were searching for someone to…love you. To hurt you.Heal you.”

He swallows again, his jaw clenched as he watches me in silence for a moment. “What happened to you, Ella? Tell me everything.”

“My mother used to…tie me up, did you know?” I close my eyes, feel the tears run down my neck, beneath the collar of my sweatshirt. “When she went out, she used to cuff me as a kid. She’d put a movie on, but they weren’t long enough so I’d close my eyes and make my own. She’d cuff me and when she stumbled home and my stomach growled, she’d scream at me.”

I hear him move toward me.

“Don’t touch me,” I whisper, keeping my eyes closed.

He stops moving.

“Then she met…Shane.” I can see his big brown eyes. The way he was so clean. So unlike the rest of my mother’s hookups. He was clean and had a job and he bought us food and he bought her flowers and he’d tap on my door to tell me to turn my lights off at night because I had school the next morning. And I’d roll my eyes and grumble about it but inside…I loved it. I loved that someone wanted to tell me what to do.

Someone cared.

“Mom didn’t know a good thing when it was trying to get her into rehab. Trying to feed her. Trying to keep her…home. She didn’t care, and she still went out, and she still disappeared. But I was older. She couldn’t restrain me. And Shane wouldn’t have let her.”

I don’t even hear Maverick breathing.

“But he had to travel for work, and one weekend he was gone, and I was starving and Mom was out. I hadn’t been able to find a job from our last move, and there was nothing but beer in the fridge.” I wipe the back of my hand over my closed eyelids. “I drank it.All of it.”

“Ella—”

“And when Shane came home I was feeling sick and he was feeling…angry. Because the police had told him my mother was found in a car with three men. She was…” I take a shaky breath. “She was fucking them.”

“Ella, you don’t have to—”

“So he fucked me. It wasn’t my first time.” I laugh out loud at that, blink my eyes open, my vision blurred with tears as Maverick stares at me, one hand reached out toward me like he wants to touch me but he knows I won’t let him. “But that wasn’t enough, because he got drunk, too. And when he fucked methere, itwasmy first time. And it was…” I swallow, my face warming at the memory. At the confession.

But Maverick doesn’t deserve it.

He drops his hand, his eyes hard.

“Maybe I did think you’d save me. Maybe I did think you’d take me out of that life. But you’re not who I thought you were.”

“And who did you think I was, Ella?” His tone isn’t full of spite and it stabs me deep in the chest.

“Better. I thought you were better than what I knew. But you’re just scared. You’re scared to open up. Scared to own what you want. Scared of whatever secrets you’re keeping because you think they’ll make me run. So, what do you do?”

I take a step toward him and his eyes don’t leave mine even as I hold the knife up. “You do something you know I’ll hate. Something you know will hurt me. So I’ll walk out and leave and you’ll never have to open up.” I drop the knife to the floor, watch as he flinches with the sound. “Well guess what, Maverick? You got just what you wanted. I am walking out.”

I step around him and he grabs my arm, pulling me toward him. “No, you’re not, Ella.”

“Get your hand off of me.”

“Ella.”