Chapter 19 Julian #3
Kai doesn’t blink. He just moves to the head of the table, fingers brushing the leather strap over my sternum, soothing in the cruelest fucking way. “Why are you here?” he asks.
I snarl, the sound ripping out of me like something feral as my shoulders strain against the straps and my back arches off the table.
The restraints dig into my skin while my jaw clamps so tight my teeth might crack.
“No.” It comes out half growl, half plea, half warning, my entire body trembling with the effort it takes to keep the words inside.
Kai lowers his voice, soft and dangerous, like a surgeon asking a patient if they’re ready to feel pain. “Why are you here, Julian?” His tone shifts—quieter, deeper, more command than question.
And the truth rips through me like a blade. “Because I was blackmailed!” I scream, the words tearing out of me at full volume, my voice breaking as my body bucks violently against the leather straps.
Kai doesn’t move. He just listens. His expression stays completely unreadable, like he’s cataloguing every fracture line in my soul.
“They— they blackmailed me to throw the game!” I choke out, my body contorting against the restraints as my wrists burn and my chest heaves for air.
“I didn’t— I didn’t fucking want to! I didn’t bet, I didn’t— I wasn’t— I didn’t do that!
” My vision blurs as tears slide down my temples and my throat aches from the force of it.
“Who’s ‘they?’” Kai asks calmly.
“I don’t know!” I sob, my voice cracking open with desperation. “I don’t fucking know! They— they said I— they said if I didn’t—” I’m panting now, shaking so hard the table rattles, the truth clawing its way up through my ribs until it finally rips free. “But he knew,” I sob. “He knew!”
Kai steps closer, slow and deliberate, his eyes fixed on me with the precision of a scalpel. “Who knew, pretty boy?”
I break. “Nathan!” I scream. “Nathan— he looked at the camera and smiled— I didn’t know— I didn’t know we were filmed— I didn’t know— I didn’t—!”
The words dissolve into choking breaths as tears pour out of me, thick and humiliating, every muscle in my body seizing while I thrash helplessly against restraints that don’t give an inch.
“And after…” I choke, my voice shredded raw, “after the game they banned me— they banned me! They said I bet— they said I bet against my team—but I didn’t! I fucking didn’t!”
My chest caves in on itself and my voice splinters into something fragile and wrecked. “I was clean,” I whisper. “I was clean before all of it… and I only— I only started using after… after I lost everything.”
Kai’s face doesn’t change, but something in the room does as the air tightens, darkens, and sharpens like a blade has just been drawn somewhere between us. He places a hand on my heaving chest—not to soothe and not to hurt, but simply to hold me there—and murmurs, “Good boy.”
And it’s the worst, most merciful thing anyone has said to me in years.
Of course he doesn’t stop. Kai stands over me like a surgeon with a fresh incision, clinical and calm while the entire world narrows to the tremor of my breath and the way my body jerks helplessly against the leather straps.
I’m sweating through the sheet beneath me, my throat raw, my wrists burning, my mind peeling open under whatever truth-serum hell he stabbed into my neck.
He watches me break like it’s just another stage of the experiment.
Then, in that soft, almost gentle voice—the one that somehow hits harder than any slap—he asks, “Who’s in your nightmares?”
My jaw locks as I try, God I try, because saying his name again feels like stepping barefoot onto broken glass, like letting him win again, like letting the past bite me in the throat all over.
My whole body pitches upward as my back bows off the table and my breath catches like a scream trapped inside my ribs.
But the drug doesn’t care, and nothing stops the truth from tearing its way out.
“Nathan.” It comes out a sob. A wounded sound.
Not angry—broken. The kind of sound I haven’t made since the night everything went to hell.
Since the night the league tossed me into the street like trash.
Since the night I watched my whole life drop into a fucking sinkhole built by one man with a ring on his finger and a smile he didn’t deserve.
Kai’s jaw flickers—sharp, irritated, almost disgusted—but he just nods like he’s marking another box on a chart.
My chest heaves, my throat tightens around another sob I can’t swallow, and then his shadow leans closer.
“What are you trying to quiet,” he asks, “when you beg for drugs?”
I choke. The straps creak under me as I jerk, trying to curl in on myself, to hide anything he might see, anything he might pry out of me. But there’s no hiding. Not tied like this. Not under this chemical truth dragging the inside out. “Nathan.” It’s a gasp. “Nathan—Nathan—NATHAN—”
Tears spill out again, hot and relentless. Down my temples, into my hair, over the tape residue still clinging faintly to my throat. My voice shreds itself raw with every syllable. My lungs can’t keep up. I’m shaking so violently the table vibrates.
Kai moves slowly to my side without any rush or panic, his fingers brushing lightly over my bicep—not soothing and not cruel, just enough to make sure I feel him there as his voice stays calm.
“What’s in the video?”
My face collapses instantly and I buck so hard against the restraints that the leather bites into my skin.
“Fuck—Kai—stop—don’t—” I choke out, because I can’t say it and I can’t hear it, but the serum doesn’t care.
It digs deeper, claws through every defense I have left, and forces the words out dripping humiliation.
“Nathan and me,” I sob, my voice splintering. “Fucking.”
A violent shudder tears through my entire body as my hands clench into fists above my head, bound tight in the straps while my hips twist and my back arches, every piece of me writhing with disgust and shame and rage.
Kai’s expression shifts—only slightly—but it’s there, a cold spark lighting behind his eyes like a surgeon discovering the rot in a wound is deeper than he expected.
I’m panting now, choking on tears and memories and the filthy stain that tape carved into my life when Kai asks the final question, the one that slices clean through the noise.
“Who do you want now?”
The words hit like lightning, like a blade sliding free of its sheath and driving straight through my ribs, and before I can stop it—before I can breathe, before I can even think—the truth explodes out of me.
“RAFE.”
My whole body goes still as the air in the room shifts, heavy and electric and dangerous, tears sliding down my temples while the restraints hold me in place like I might float away if they loosened.
And in that moment I realize something brutal and absolute: I don’t want drugs, I don’t want pain, I don’t want Nathan, and I don’t want silence.
I want Rafe.
Kai smiles, and it isn’t the cold clinical twitch he usually wears; this one is different—still sharp and unreadable, but quieter, almost satisfied, like the experiment ended exactly the way he predicted and now all that remains is the cleanup.
He steps to my side and begins undoing the restraints without any rush or commentary, the only sounds in the room the quiet click of buckles unlatching and the soft slide of leather slipping free while my arms drop limply to my sides like I’ve been crucified for days and only now remembered I still have a body.
My legs barely respond when he unfastens them, and my torso aches when the strap across my chest lifts away, every breath dragging painfully through my ribs.
I don’t try to sit up.
Instead I slide sideways off the table and collapse onto the floor like my bones finally gave out.
And that’s when I break.
Not the way I broke before, not the way I screamed his name or confessed what happened, but something deeper and far more violent, like a dam finally rupturing.
I curl on the cold metal floor as if I’m trying to fold inside myself, shoulders heaving, chest convulsing while tears pour so hard I can barely breathe around them.
I’m crying so violently that I can’t control the sounds coming out of me, my body jerking through hiccupping sobs while I choke on my own breath and grief.
My ribs feel like they’re collapsing inward, my stomach spasming while my hands claw uselessly against the floor in search of something—anything—to hold on to.
It’s louder than anything I’ve ever allowed myself to feel.
Through it all, I hear Kai crouch beside me and feel his presence settle close, steady and quiet and cold in a way that almost feels kind. “Do you still want someone to punch you, pretty boy?”
I can’t even pretend anymore. “No,” I wail, my voice cracking apart as tears blur my vision and my mouth hangs open around a sob I can’t finish.
Kai nods, calm as ever. “Good.” He doesn’t touch me, doesn’t soothe or cradle or murmur reassurances, and he doesn’t brush a hand over my hair or my shoulder.
He simply stays there, silent and present, letting the dam explode and letting me drown in the release of every buried truth, every secret I never wanted to speak, every horror I tried to bury under moans and muscle memory.
And for the first time since everything was taken from me, I let myself fall apart completely.
The sobs taper, but they don’t stop—not fully.
They just wear themselves down into wrecked little gasps, like my lungs are still catching up with everything my body confessed.
I’m slumped sideways on the floor, legs folded under me, arms limp at my sides, tears slick across my cheeks and mouth and throat.
I feel… empty. Hollowed out and stretched thin, like Kai opened my chest cavity and scraped me clean with gloved hands and soft, cutting questions.
My vision swims, everything hazy and salt-blurred, but I can still see Kai. Or the outline of him, anyway. Sitting down next to me without ceremony, back against the wall, one knee up, expression unreadable. Just… there. Not fixing. Not coddling. Just being.
I swallow hard before the question slips out, my voice barely more than a whisper as I ask, “Is Rafe coming back?”
The words sound small and frightened, like a child asking about a parent who promised they’d be home before dark, the kind of voice I haven’t heard from myself in years and thought I buried along with the cleaner version of me—the one who believed in locker room loyalty and forever.
Kai turns his head toward me, calm and unhurried, like he has known the answer since the moment I staggered into his container begging for ruin. He leans back against the wall and lets his head rest there while his voice drops low and certain.
“Of course he is. He’s just erasing your past.”
My body jolts at the words as my mouth falls open and I blink through the blur of tears, forcing my eyes to focus on him.
“What the fuck does that mean?” I wail, my voice rising again into something frantic and cracked as panic claws its way back up my throat. “What does that mean?”
Kai looks at me then—really looks at me—and for the first time since he strapped me to the table and bled the truth out of me like venom, he smiles.
He shifts forward slowly, almost predatory, his thumb brushing under my lip where my tears have pooled before dragging gently along the corner of my mouth with a strange, quiet reverence.
Then he lifts that same thumb and slips it into his own mouth, tasting the salt of my tears like it’s nothing, his eyes never leaving mine while the silence in the room tightens around us like a noose.
Kai leans closer, slow as smoke, that thumb still glistening from my tears while his lips part like he’s about to taste another secret, and when he speaks his voice drops even lower—dangerous and reverent—as he brings his mouth close to my ear.
“Think, pretty boy,” he whispers, and my skin prickles from the inside out. “What does Rafe do to people who hurt what’s his?”
The words detonate inside my skull like a buried landmine.
I flinch as my breath catches and my heart stops for one raw, ringing second before everything slams together in my mind at once—the puzzle clicking into place, the thread pulling tight, the answer roaring through my skull like fire.
Nathan.
Rafe is out there erasing him.
Erasing the ghost, the tape, the smirk, the filthy fingerprints Nathan left carved into my life.
My eyes go wide and my pupils blow open as a gasp locks in my throat so sharply it feels like a blade, and Kai watches me with that same calm, glass-sharp gaze, seeing the exact moment I understand.
The moment I realize where Rafe went—why he left, what he’s doing, and who he’s doing it to—I lurch upright, panic and shock and something dangerously close to awe colliding in my chest like a storm breaking loose.
“Wait—wait—you knew about Nathan?” I shriek, my voice going shrill and frayed as the realization tears through me.
Kai’s smirk widens slowly, like he has been waiting for that exact moment to land, and he leans back against the wall again, lazy and smug and utterly infuriating. “I knew where Rafe was going,” he says, his eyes glittering with quiet satisfaction. “I didn’t know why.”
He tilts his head slightly, watching the panic unravel across my face. “Now I do.”
The motherfucker smirks.