Page 40 of Beautiful Villain
She shook so badly I thought she might be sick.Tears soaked through her clothes, her hands, my shirt when she collapsed forward without asking permission.Her grief was messy and consuming, hiccupped and gasped and dragged from her in pieces.There was no dignity in it.No restraint.
Just devastation.
I’d expected anger.Maybe numbness.Even guilt.
I hadn’t expected this kind of horror—this certainty that she believed she had caused it.That she was responsible for a death that had been written long before she ever ran.
I just held her while she broke apart, feeling each sob slam into my chest like a blow I couldn’t block.Watching her unravel did something to me I didn’t have a name for.It wasn’t pity.It was fury.
At Archie.At George.At every man who had brought her to the here and now of where she was in her life.
Her tears soaked into me, hot and relentless, until they slowed, until her body sagged with exhaustion.She cried until there was nothing left to give, until grief wrung her empty and left her trembling in my arms.
Only then did sleep take her.
She curled into herself on the couch like the world had finally won.Smaller than she ever had a right to be.Worn down.Spent.
I didn’t move away.
I told myself it was because she’d wake if I did.Because she needed someone to watch over her, tonight of all nights.
All of that was true.But it wasn’t the whole truth.
I stayed because something in me didn’t want the space between us.Because the room felt unbalanced without me there.And because when she finally slept, the house itself seemed to settle, like it was holding its breath until she was safe.
Her breathing evened out sometime after midnight.The sharp hitching sound gave way to something slower, deeper.She had tear tracks on her cheeks, brow still faintly creased like grief hadn’t fully let go.
I leaned back against the cushions, head tipped against the wall, eyes closed.I must have slept, because the next thing I knew she stirred—and I stirred with her, instinctively, like my body was somehow synced to hers.
“Mmm,” she murmured, shifting.Her knee brushed my thigh.
I opened my eyes.
She blinked up at the ceiling, confused, like she wasn’t sure where she was.Then she turned her head toward me.Surprise crossed her face, followed quickly by understanding.
She remembered.Last night.The truth.
I watched it hit her all over again—the guilt, the sadness—rolling in fresh and heavy, like she hadn’t been crying in her sleep all night.
“He’s really dead,” she said quietly.
“Yes.”
Her face crumpled.Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes and traced slowly down her temples into her hair.
“How did my life get so messed up?”she whispered, like she was asking the room instead of me.
“It didn’t get messed up,” I said.“It got hard.There’s a difference.”
She was silent for a moment, then asked the question I’d known was coming.
“What happens now?”
There it was.She didn’t spiral into a panic or get hysterical.She just needed to understand the shape of the ground beneath her feet.
I straightened a little, careful not to jostle her.“What are you most worried about?”
She swallowed.“Is there… anything tying me to Archie anymore?The debt.My stepfather.Do I still owe him something?”
