Vindicate

Chapter 27 OLIVIA #4

He wants me to remember what? Remember more than I’ve already seemed to recover? Squinting my eyes and pushing past the barriers in my mind, I try to penetrate the locks. To access the memories I seemed to have archived. But then it hits me.

Realization causes me to look up at him, causes me to pinch my brows and succumb to the betrayal that seems to root and grow.

“You know, don’t you?” I whisper, my voice so quiet, it’s a wonder he can hear me even in the dead silence blanketing us. “You’ve known all along haven’t you? You know what I’m missing”

“I do.” His admission comes quickly and without doubt, causing my fucking heart to seize and my veins to shiver.

I can’t tell if it’s anger, frustration, elation, confusion, or what.

But everything feels too big to explain and I know that it’s starting to overwhelm me once more.

“You've known this whole time?” I start only for my tone of voice to rise in anger.

“How could you put me through all of this? Why the hell would you keep it from me?”

I’m still shadowed in darkness, but I take a chance. I take a gamble, rearing my hand back and estimating where his face will be before I swing my hand out to slap him.

And I fucking hit. The sound echoes as my palm strikes against his face and he hisses, reaching up to grab me by the wrist.

My voice shakes. “How can you fucking look me in my eyes and tell me you love me but keep this from me?”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” he warns me as he reaches in and grips my neck, yanking me closer into him as he structures the timbre of his voice to indicate eager aggression and dark passion.

“Don’t you dare question how much I love you, Olivia.

I love you so much that seeing you in his arms that night and watching him taking care of you, it fucking broke me.

I didn’t care that you were out of it. I didn’t fucking care.

And even when I found out you might have not even remembered it, I still didn’t fucking care.

I watched you. You looked into his eyes.

You said his fucking name. And then you kissed him.

You let me fuck you, let me claim your body.

I was supposed to be your first and last, Olivia, and then you kissed him. Not once, but twice.”

He lowers his lips to mine.

"I love you so much that I kept your secret for you, because you have no one else in your fucking corner. Because I swore to protect you, even if it fucking killed me. And let me tell you, Olivia. It killed me."

I feel the cracks in my heart start to quake, running deeper and deeper.

I swear I hear Trace’s voice crack too. I can hear his emotion drip from his voice, the way he feels wrecked from what I did to him.

From what he lost that weekend, too. I can feel it and I hate it.

I want to make it go away. I want to strip him of his pain and fix it. But it might be too late.

He loosens his grip on my neck and lets his touch turn tender as he softens the tone of his voice “It's because I love you, that I couldn't stay, Livie. You have to know that I was just trying to protect you."

Trace runs his finger along the edge of my jaw.

“I don’t understand,” I whisper.

“I just…” he leans down to press a kiss to my forehead. “I just need you to remember, baby. I can’t help you unless you save yourself.”

"I'm sorry, Trace. I never meant to break your heart. I never wanted anyone else but you, you have to believe me." He lowers his forehead to mine, and I notice the faint tear that trembles in his eye. "Whatever else I did, I'm sorry," I add, letting my voice fade.

I’m inundated with the havoc of his words and his actions.

The aggression in his words when he spoke to me before and the sincerity in his demeanor now.

Clearly, there’s more to this story. There’s obviously something else that he wants to tell me, but yet, he’s still refusing.

Every emotion shifts between us. We've been through it all.

And maybe we can come out stronger for it.

Maybe this is how we were always meant to be.

A brutal passion so intense that it bonds us together, stronger and tighter than ever.

Or maybe it'll be the very thing that causes us to implode.

I wrap my arms around him, needing this moment to last for as long as it can. This is all I've ever wanted. For him to come back and claim me. No matter how he did, it's what I craved more than I needed my own air.

And then a reminder invades my mind.

YOU MUST SAVE YOURSELF

His tattoo.

I press my palm against his chest, touching his bare skin.

He’s so fucking smooth and I tremble as I slide my way down slowly.

I trace every hard ridge of his body before gliding over to his rib cage where I know that tattoo is located.

His breathing deepens and chills ignite across my body.

He likes my hands on him; that’s one thing I’ve noticed.

It drives him wild and it fills me with pride.

I might now know the true meaning of his words.

Both spoken between us and written on his skin.

Maybe he’s known that it would come to this, me wanting to remember what happened that night.

But if he knows what I’m missing, that means he must have seen what had happened.

That thought alone scares the hell out of me.

What does he know that I don’t, and then I’m reminded…

“The notes,” I whisper, leaning down to remove them from my boots.

“What?” he asks, as I unravel the pieces of paper.

“Do you know where my phone is?” I ask, looking around as if I can even see in the dark to begin with. But I know I had to have lost it here somewhere, sometime between getting pulled in from the mirror maze and fucked into a frenzy.

Trace turns around and picks it up off the floor, finding it without issue before handing it to me. I turn on the flashlight and hold the light over the notes.

“Someone left these for me.” I say, holding them out for him to see. He leans in close. “This one,” I point to the most recent one, "Alli left for me right before leaving the cabin. That's when I found Broden and you,” I say, looking up at him to see his reaction. But he has none.

“This one," I move the other note in front, "I found in my bedside drawer yesterday before we went out to the bonfire.” Trace grabs both notes from me and holds them side by side, looking between them.

“They’re the same exact handwriting,” he says, noticing what I had.

I let the silence fall between us for a moment as he analyzes them further. But really, there’s not much to see other than the obvious.

“Does Alli spell her name with an E?” he asks and I look at him, puzzled. I shine the light over the note once more as he holds it out for me, and sure enough . . . Alli is spelled with an E at the end. Something I must have missed the first time reading it.

“No, she doesn’t,” I say. “How the hell did you even know that?”

“You forget that I’ve been stalking you for years, little reckless. I notice a lot of things,” he states and I can’t do anything more than shrug my shoulders, not really sure what to do with that information.

“Well, I don’t know what she claims to know or why she would even write that note to begin with.

But before I found the second note, I remembered something.

A memory from that night. It was Seren and Alli arguing outside, but Trace…

” I pause for a beat to make sure he’s looking at me.

“Alli told me she didn’t go to the Pines that weekend, so either my mind is playing tricks on me or she’s lying. ”

That thought sends a nasty chill down my spine, knowing that something doesn't feel right. And when I put all of the missing pieces together, I realize that more and more, Alli seems guilty of something. More than I even had evidence of on Broden. But what?

Trace remains silent, and I can’t tell if he’s even thinking anything at all, but I don’t want to lose him again. I don’t want to lose this momentum we’ve gained, so I keep talking, hoping he’ll give me more than what he already has.

“I think she might have been the one to send me the invitation I received. I thought it was a joke or-”

“I sent the invite," he says and it causes the hairs on my body to stand; an icy shiver invading me.

“What?” My head snaps up to him as he crumples up the notes in his palm before littering them on the ground.

I don’t even care, because what he just told me creates a demolition of shock and apprehension to ensue inside of me.

“I sent you the invitation,” he repeats and I want to slap him again, but I refrain, instead manifesting my anger through words.

“Why would you do that?” I ask, feeling a slight bout of betrayal sink into my veins. I recall reading the invite, the twisted feeling I got in my gut just by thinking that someone was out to mess with me, to target me. All for it to be him.

“I wanted to see if it would trigger anything,” he admits and I don’t know how to take that information in. I don’t know how to react to his response. “And I didn’t want you to try and run again.”

“But you didn’t come up here for just me, did you?” I ask, my chest tightening when I collect everything I’ve learned within the last forty-eight hours alone and try to put it all together.

The notes, the memories, Declan and Seren, Broden and…

“Tyre and Jett,” I whisper and I feel Trace shift next to me.

“What?”

“Those are the names Broden said you had asked for. He told me to tell you Tyre and Jett.” I look up at Trace, the glow of my flashlight shines across his face and I can see fury caressing his molten honey eyes.

Curiosity blooms in my chest, eager to understand why he wanted those names. So badly that he nearly had to beat the guy to the end of his life to get them.

“Tell me what you needed them for, Trace. Tell me what else you came up here for.”

I wait. Hoping that maybe he’ll tell me he’s been tracking down the murderer of the so-called Final Four. That would make a little bit of sense I guess. That would put me at ease slightly. What if he’s already figured out something? What if he knows more than he’s letting on?

But he doesn’t answer me, and as I let the light from my phone illuminate his face, I can see that his eyes are starting to get watery.

“Trace,” I breathe, reaching out to him and lifting my hand to his face but he removes my hand, not rough or demanding, but gently. And then I watch as he reaches into his back pocket before handing me something.

“What’s this?” I ask as I take it, my eyes still on his.

“Look at it. The last page.”

I look down in my hand and realize that I’m holding a journal . . . a journal that I’ve seen before.

“It’s Seren’s,” I say as I look down at the little black journal and then back up at him. I see pain coat his eyes, more pain that I can't fucking stand to see him in.

I needed him to be there for me through those deaths. But I also wanted to be there for him. He stole that from us when he left. When he ran. But I have to push down that heartbreak.

Grief strikes at me, an eerie feeling accompanying it when I realize that I have something of my dead best friend's in my possession.

“What are you doing with this?” I ask, looking up at him with something akin to foreboding licking my gut. He watches me, stoic and calm.

“I said read the last page, Olivia.”

The vexed tone of his voice is what has me flipping to the last page without another question. Dread fills me, not sure of what to expect but I know it can’t be good. And when I read it, when I take in every word written down on the worn out page, my heart sinks.

My heart sinks and my whole world shatters, tears start streaming down my face.

“No,” I gasp as my heartbeat thunders in my chest. “No, no, no. This isn’t right…"

I let my words trail off as I take a step back, disbelief and anger and panic swarm me as I read the words.

About her. About my brother. About the party.

What she went through. Every vein in my body feels like it’s about to burst. It hits me like a freight train, literally knocking the air out of me, causing me to stumble backward.

My feet knock into something. Something drops, causing a loud thud to resound as something crashes down onto the floor, unable to see what I knocked over.

Trace attempts to balance me but I trip, dropping the journal and letting it fall to the floor so I can twist around, reaching my hands out to catch myself before I fall on my ass.

I groan, scorching hot embarrassment bubbles in my chest; my palms and knees on the ground. I lift myself up, needing to wipe my wet eyes with my wrist and that’s when I realize that my hands are covered in some kind of sticky residue.

“Shit, are you okay?” Trace asks as he drops the phone to help me. He wraps his arm around me and pulls me up before leaning down to grab the journal.

“Do you see my sweater down there?” I ask, hoping to find something to wipe my hands off with.

Trace stands up to face me and the beam of the light from the phone on the floor shines under his chin and over his face, making him look haunted and threatening, almost like one would while holding a flashlight to their face while telling a scary story.

He stares at me and my blood turns to ice.

“Olivia,” he whispers. And I see it in his eyes before he says it. I know what he’s going to say.

“No,” I say, my voice cracks and my heart seizes, still affected by what I’d just read in Seren’s journal. By what Trace unveiled to me from that night.

He looks at me, worry laces his eyes. I wouldn’t be able to see it if it weren’t for the help of the light glow illuminating them, but it’s there.

I shake my head, slowly creeping my hands out in front of us. He reaches for them, tugging me closer into the beam of light and that’s when I see it.

Red.

Staining my skin. My heart sinks to my stomach, my head starts to feel dizzy and as I look up into Trace’s eyes, I take a step back and that’s when I feel it; the light thud against my boot. Something stopping me in my tracks.

“Don’t do it, Livie,” Trace warns me, probably wanting to protect me, but I’m too stubborn and I have to look. I have to know.

And when I do, when I see the dead body laying at my feet—the blood of whom is on my hands—I scream.