Chapter 47 Sutton
SUTTON
I’m pouting.
It’s probably incredibly unattractive, but I can’t seem to help it. Once we’ve snuck away from the Obeliskos to my office, where at least we’ll be able to explain away our sudden meeting late at night, I can’t stop thinking about Lexington Abbott and the fact that he’s always around my girlfriend.
Who looks angelic with some of her hair tied back loosely with a green satin ribbon, matching the tight little sweater she has on.
Her thigh-high boots land a couple of inches beneath her pleated, black skirt, and as she leans over my desk to flip through some old notebook for me, I can’t erase the image from Lexington’s point of view.
There’s this effortless charm that Elle possesses, where she captivates people without even speaking. It’s what makes her such a powerhouse performer; the audience feels her presence long before she even steps out onstage.
She’s intoxicating to watch do the most mundane things.
I can’t blame Lexington for being enthralled.
I’m not sure when I became such a jealous fucking caveman, but it’s as if Elle’s very existence has wiped me clean of everything. I know she wouldn’t cheat after we established boundaries—I know that.
Yet the fact that he might have entertained such a notion, even for a moment, is what pisses me off—more so the fact that I can’t do anything about it by claiming her publicly.
Elle glares at me over her shoulder. “Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“What was the last thing I just said?”
I stare into her eyes, scraping the recesses of my subconscious for something. Nothing comes up.
“Fuck,” I breathe, reaching and pulling her into my lap, rolling us closer to the desk. “Okay, I’m sorry. I just can’t stop thinking about your prick of a friend.”
“Pretty sure you were the prick out there tonight,” she mutters into my hair. “He helped me escape the library I was trapped in, you know.”
“Yeah.” I open my mouth on the side of her neck, tasting her with the tip of my tongue. “He just seems so perceptive. It makes me worry he’s paying too much attention to you.”
“So what if he is?” she asks, her fingers sliding beneath my jaw, pushing my face up. “The only man I’m paying attention to is you.”
Smothering a smirk, I give her ass a squeeze and nod at the journal on the desk. “Okay, tell me what this is.”
She hesitates, then flips it shut, moving to show me the cover.
I squint, the air in my lungs evaporating as I read the dates scribbled there.
My sophomore year at Avernia.
“How much do you remember from the night Death’s Teeth…marked you as Incarnate?” she asks softly.
“Nothing, really,” I say, although that’s not entirely true.
The bits and pieces I do recall are scattered though.
Just dangerous enough to keep me uncomfortable and haunted without showing me any full pictures.
“It’s fuzzy, and I’ve purposely blocked a lot of it out, I think.
Or at least… I haven’t tried to remember. ”
She remains quiet as I pull the journal forward, turning to the first page and skimming the neat, half-cursive writing. It’s mostly the ramblings of a past Pythia, nothing I haven’t seen or heard before.
Life and death are the ruling principles of Death’s Teeth, so it makes sense they’d have an obsession with cause and effect, karma, and symbiosis. Even their selection process is bound by that school of thought—which leads into the first real journal entry.
The day of that party.
The last time I ever saw Bellamy alive.
I speed-read through the next entries, horror mounting in my stomach like an abyss of darkness as I relive the events through someone else’s eyes.
Someone was watching the entire time and did nothing to stop it?
My fingers tremble as I get to the final page of that night’s entry—when one of the figures falls into the lake while someone else stands there, watching.
Doing nothing.
The words start to blur as tension threads through my forehead, a sudden agonizing sensation splitting my face in half. Nausea pulses at the base of my throat, and I lean over my chair, dragging the wastebasket close as bile rises, spewing from my lips before I have a chance to stop it.
There’s no doubt in my mind that this is detailing what occurred with me and Bellamy that night. Down to the description of how the other members shifted their attention to me, using my body—
More vomit pours out of me. Elle slides from my lap, retrieving a cold water bottle from the minifridge. When she presses it against the back of my neck, I suck in a sharp breath, something unsettling swimming through my veins.
I close my eyes, placing the wastebasket in its spot, and reach into my desk for a stick of spearmint gum. Without me asking, she walks to the door and uses the dimmer switch on the wall to lower the overhead lights.
Dropping my head into my hands, I take a sip of the water she offers, shaking my head. “Where did you find this journal?”
“A librarian brought it to me at my cousin’s request.”
“Your cousin specifically asked for this book? How did they even know it existed? This is the first I’ve seen or heard of anything like it, and it’s…” I trail off, at a loss for words.
What in the hell is this book, and why is it only just coming to light?
“It’s about you, right?” Elle asks, folding her arms over her chest. “The stuff they did to you…”
I don’t answer, staring at my hands. They tremble beneath the weight of the memories, disgust twining tight around them until it feels like I can’t move.
“The person who showed up. Do you remember anything about them?”
“No.” It’s barely a word, whispered through disbelief.
She pauses for a long time. “You opened your eyes at one point. You don’t remember what you saw?”
“It’s all so hazy that I—” Abruptly, I cut myself off, swinging my gaze to hers. She’s pressed against the bookcase across from me, wearing a hole in the corner of my desk with her laser focus. “That isn’t mentioned in the book.”
Confusion makes a volatile cocktail in my throat, choking off my air supply.
“Elle?”
Tears pool beneath her hazel irises. One spills down her cheek.
She won’t look at me.
The Andersons are cursed.
All they bring is bloodshed and violence in their wake.
They must not be allowed to thrive at Avernia, lest we lose the rest of our founding families at their expense.
Warnings I grew up hearing but paid no heed to, considering the Andersons weren’t even a part of Fury Hill.
Until Quincy enrolled at Avernia.
Changing the course of history again, the same way her ancestor did.
“How?” I ask. It’s all I can manage. “How were you there that night?”
“We came to visit Q for family weekend,” she says, the tears pouring now.
My forehead pulses, stirring the nausea again.
“Something happened with Asher, so my parents ended up leaving early with him. I convinced them to let me stay behind because I knew Q was going to some party, but that was the night I got lost in the forest.”
“And you just…happened upon me?”
“I made it to the lake before anyone else was there,” she replies.
“It was dark, I was scared, and I saw you… I’d heard rumors from our tour guide about the caves being off-limits because of nefarious gang activities or something, but I figured it was mostly bullshit.
I didn’t think I’d actually stumble upon any of it. ”
Running my hands over my face, I try to place a teenage Elle there in my mind. She says I opened my eyes, indicating I was conscious at some point outside, but the memory of it past what they did to me inside is fuzzy at best, pitch-black at worst.
“You were tied up,” she continues, her voice growing softer.
“Soaked to the bone. I didn’t know if you were even alive.
You stirred, I think, and I hid, terrified that you’d be angry or draw attention, and I’d be next.
A half hour passed, so when I finally got phone signal, I called my dad, since he was coming to pick me up anyway, and he’s… familiar with that sort of thing.”
“The messes left by cults?”
“Cleaning up unsavory acts,” she says, shaking her head.
When she meets my gaze, hers is glassy. “My dad never talked much about his past—well, neither of my parents did—because they wanted to focus on the future instead, but everyone growing up knew what he’d made his money doing in his early adulthood.
Everyone was scared of him, and I knew that if I asked, he’d help me. ”
“So you were just going to have him clean me up and be done?”
She nods. “I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t move you myself, so I resigned to wait while we were rescued. That’s all I’ve ever done really: let my parents step in and fix my messes. It’s why when I left Hollywood—”
“You kept the whole scandal a secret,” I finish, closing my eyes. “Yeah, I get it. Constantly needing help feels infantile after a certain point.”
“I just got tired of being a disappointment,” she adds.
“Everyone else in my family holds their own no problem, but it’s like there’s something missing in me.
Like whatever desperation I have for attention and the spotlight pushed out my independence.
So when I made some mistakes in LA, I thought, okay, now’s my time to fix them.
To get my shit together. But the thing about mistakes is that if you’re navigating them without any sense of direction, they’ll just snowball out of control. ”
My mind is still looping on that night eight years ago and the fact that she was there all along.
She maybe even saved me. Or tried to at least.
But…
“Bellamy,” I say, lifting my chin. “Did you see what happened to her? The journal said she fell into the lake.”
“No.” Her voice hardens. “She was pushed.”
I pull my hands into my lap, digesting that. And the implication.
“Elle.” Emotion burns in my chest, a thousand different revelations vying for prominence, but the only thing I can really focus on right now is her. She’s still crying silently, as if afraid of what the noise might do to the stagnant air around us.
With her in the room, I can’t fucking breathe. Can’t think about anything except comforting her, making the tears stop, kissing her happy again.
The truth about my sister’s death is staring me in the fucking face, and it’s not even her eyes I’m thinking about.
Christ. I’m pathetic.
Standing on wobbly legs, I clear my throat and round my desk, grabbing Elle’s face in my hands. I brush the tears away, unable to just let them stain her skin.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, leaning into my touch. “It was an accident, I swear. A knee-jerk reaction that—”
“It’s okay,” I mutter, pressing my thumb to her lips. It’s not okay, not even a little, but God, I can’t stand her crying. My heart feels like it’s being shredded into a million little pieces, and I can’t tell which woman I’m dying inside for.
“No, it isn’t,” she insists, her voice catching on a sob. “You can’t just say that and ignore this. You have to feel, Sutton. Or else it’s going to eat you alive even more, and then what happens five, ten, fifteen years from now, when your heart is just dust because you refused to ever nurture it?”
Despair enlarges her pupils, and she begins shaking her head, losing focus. I squeeze her face and press my lips to her forehead.
“Lecturing me when you’ve just changed my entire life feels a little hypocritical, don’t you think?”
A wheeze escapes her. “But you—”
“Need time to process.” Lifting her face, I force her to meet my eyes, swallowing over the hard knot in my throat. The pulsing behind my brow intensifies, making me lightheaded, but I ignore it.
“Time?”
“Yes.” A long, painful pause. “And some space.”
She lets out a watery exhale, removing my hands from her cheeks. “You’re breaking up with me.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
When she closes her eyes, it takes every ounce of willpower I have not to wrap her in my arms again. I resist, stuffing my hands into my pants pockets.
My soul aches with the distance already.
Finally, she nods, sniffling into her sleeve, and opens her eyes once more. Turning on her heels, she heads for the door, shoulders slumped and head down. With her hand on the doorknob, she pauses, looking to the side.
Waiting for me to come after her.
My feet twitch. I almost do.
Almost.
“Should I not have told you?”
I shake my head. “I think it’s important you did.”
“Time and space, huh?” She scoffs, wiping two fingertips across her cheekbones. They come away wet, and I feel like I’m being swallowed by the earth.
She opens the door and takes a step out, slicing my heart into a thousand little bite-size pieces.
“Did she say anything?” I ask quickly, before she’s over the threshold. “Before…”
Elle pauses again. Shakes her head sadly.
The bite-size pieces are diced even smaller. There’re millions of them now, and I’m bleeding out on the floor, staining the rug.
“No. She didn’t get the chance.”