Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
LEO
I knew something was off the moment I walked in.
Dad was already home—which never happened before six—and Mom was seated at the head of the dining table, lips pressed so tightly together they looked surgically sealed. The lights were too bright. The air too still.
A folder sat between them. Thick. Labeled. My gut clenched before I even reached the chair across from them.
Dad gestured. “Sit.”
I didn’t.
“What’s this about?” I asked, keeping my tone even, calm. Like if I didn’t show fear, maybe it wasn’t as bad as it felt.
Mom tapped the file with one manicured nail. “Her.”
I didn’t have to ask who. My chest burned.
“She’s not who you think she is, Leo.”
“She’s exactly who I think she is,” I bit back, jaw clenched.
Mom nodded to the iPad next to the file. “Open it.”
I didn’t move.
“Do it,” Dad said, his voice sharp.
I grabbed it with a shaking hand and tapped the screen. The display lit up—and my breath stopped.
Photos. Screenshots. Of Jade.
Fake ones.
Obscene ones.
Her face edited onto bodies that weren’t hers, in videos she never filmed, in positions I know she’s never been in.
I knew.
Because I’d been the first.
I’d seen her—really seen her.
I also knew she had a star shaped freckle in the middle of her back. That she had a small scar on her left elbow from sixth grade soccer.
The bile climbed up my throat.
“These circulated at her old school,” Mom said, voice cold. “There’s a sealed file from the police department. Harassment. Cyberbullying. Someone even started an OnlyFans using her face. We had a PI pull everything.”
“She didn’t do this.” My voice cracked.
“No, she didn’t,” Dad said. “But the world doesn’t care.”
I flipped the folder open. More documents. Copies of reports. Her transfer application. Her scholarship forms. The alias she used. Everything.
Private.
Now laid bare.
“Why?” I whispered. “Why the hell would you go this far?”
Mom leaned forward, her eyes sharp like cut glass. “Because people are talking. Because I won’t have my son—my son—thrown into scandal his senior year. You think the schools you’re applying to won’t see this? That recruiters won’t whisper? That donors won’t pull support if this surfaces?”
“Nothing will surface. She didn’t do anything wrong.”
Mom narrowed her eyes. “And yet she’s a headline waiting to happen. This isn’t about right or wrong, Leo. It’s about optics.”
“She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I said, voice hoarse. “She didn’t ask for this.”
“She didn’t ask for you either,” she snapped. “But here we are. So now you get to make a choice.”
My chest felt like it was splitting open.
Mom slid the iPad across the table, flipping it to a paused video—someone had caught us on the cliffs last night. A blurry but damning photo of me holding her, kissing her.
“She’s all over your social media. Your friends’. Do you think that’s safe? For her? For us?”
Dad folded his hands. “End it, Leo. Or we make sure every school board, every recruiting coach, every admissions office knows the type of mess you’re bringing with you.”
“And her?” I asked, my voice barely audible.
Mom didn’t blink. “We’ll bury her. Quietly. She’ll lose the scholarship. The credits. Probably won’t finish the year at Royal Oaks.”
The words were knives.
“She was underage when they did this,” I said. “A victim.”
“And you’re not?” Dad asked, brows raised. “You didn’t ask for this either.”
I sat back. The air was thick. I couldn’t breathe.
They were going to destroy her.
The girl who trusted me. Who gave me every soft part of her. Who kissed me like I was worth something more than my last name.
And I couldn’t protect her.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I just nodded once, the way I’d been taught to when defeat was the only way forward.
Mom smiled.
Not kind. Triumphant.
“I knew you’d see reason.”
Dad closed the file.
I stood. Shoulders back. Eyes dry.
I left the room without a word.
Without a sound.
But inside, something cracked.
And I wasn’t sure it would ever be whole again.
I didn’t say anything when they laid out the final terms.
“If you walk away from her now, clean and sudden, we’ll make sure her file stays sealed. The college contacts never hear a thing. She gets to keep her little soccer dreams.”
“And if I don’t?” I’d asked.
Dad answered that one. Calm. Controlled.
“Then we burn her down before anyone ever bothers to remember her name.”
The words made my stomach twist, but I didn’t flinch.
It wasn’t a choice.
It was blackmail dressed in cashmere.
I walked out of the house without a jacket, my shoes sinking into the soft lawn of the east garden, the same one that used to host charity luncheons and Fourth of July galas. Now it just felt cold. Hollow.
Above me, the sky was bruised—charcoal clouds swallowing up the last blush of sunset, the air sharp with the bite of fall creeping in early.
I used to love this time of year. Fall in New England always smelled like woodsmoke and change. Now it smelled like grief.
Because I was about to lose her.
Not by accident. Not by drifting apart. But by force. My own hand.
I pressed my palms to the back of my neck, breathing hard, trying not to cave under it.
It wasn’t just that I was in love with her.
It was that for the first time in my whole damn life, someone looked at me and didn’t just see the trust fund. The Holt name. The Rothschild bloodline.
She saw me.
And now I had to lie straight to her face. Sell her a story so ugly it would hurt enough to push her away—but believable enough that she’d never come looking for the truth underneath.
The truth that my family was poison.
And I couldn’t warn her, couldn’t whisper it into her neck when she curled into me during stargazing drives or early morning cliffside makeouts. Couldn’t beg her to run before they turned her dreams into ash.
No.
I had to make her believe that I didn’t care.
That she was just a fun distraction. A phase. A novelty.
Like everyone else before her.
I buried my hands in my trouser pockets, rolling my tongue against the inside of my cheek, rehearsing it like a line from a script I hated.
“You’re great, Jade. But the whole scholarship-girl-turns-princess thing? It wore off.”
Classic.
Cruel.
Completely believable.
Because no one would question Leo Holt losing interest in a girl after a few months. Especially not one like her.
And when the gossip vultures started picking her apart, I’d have to stand there and pretend like I didn’t care. Like her tears weren’t my fault. Like I hadn’t loved the way she said my name like it was a secret.
Even X and Tristan couldn’t know. The second they found out the truth, they’d be at my parents’ doorstep with molotov cocktails.
I had to make it look real.
So real she’d never doubt it.
And maybe that was the worst part.
Not the heartbreak. Not the silence I’d be forced to keep.
But knowing I’d become exactly the kind of monster she thought she’d left behind in Ohio.
And this time, I wouldn’t get to be the boy who saved her.
I’d be the one who broke her.
On purpose.
And no amount of love would ever undo that.