Julian
For a second, the file names blur in front of me because I’m braced too hard. Then they settle into lines.
Screenshots. Chat exports. A list of folders labeled Parties, People, Proof… and EM.
My stomach drops.
EM.
Eli Matthews.
Killian swears once under his breath, low and vicious enough that Luca hears it from across the room.
I open the screenshots first.
The first few are group chats with names I recognize vaguely from Celeste’s circle, girls I’ve seen at parties, girls who laughed too brightly in hallways and moved around campus, untouchable in that way wealthy or well-connected students often do.
At first, the messages look like ordinary gossip, petty and cruel but not criminal.
Then the language changes. A list of guys.
Comments about who’s easy, who needs work, who’s religious, who needs “softening up,” who has parents worth leveraging, who’s too drunk to remember clearly, who can be made useful.
“What the fuck,” I whisper, my hands going cold on the keyboard.
I open the Lists folder next and in it are a few Google Sheet files.
There are names of pills organized enough to be horrifying.
Names and warnings. What to use, what not to mix, what makes someone sleepy versus sick.
Who asks too many questions afterward, who can be convinced they wanted it.
Some lines are written like party strategy, others read like a fucking manual.
I can’t hear anything except my own pulse.
Killian’s hand lands on the back of my chair. “Julian,” he says quietly.
“I’m okay,” I lie.
“You’re not.”
Eli’s voice cuts in, thin and terrified. “What is it?”
I close the document because I don’t want any accidental glimpse of it to reach him.
“It’s evidence,” I say carefully. “It looks like it’s not only about you. There are lists and chats. It looks organized.”
He stares at me like the words are entering his body one at a time and slicing on the way in. “Organized… how?”
I swallow. “They were tracking guys. Planning things that… Fuck. You weren’t—they’ve done this many times before.”
His face drains of color. Luca moves immediately, sitting beside him on the couch, not touching until Eli leans slightly toward the warmth without seeming to notice. “They’ve… done this before?”
“By the looks of things,” I say, “yes.”
Eli bends forward and presses the heels of both hands to his eyes.
I want to get up. I want to go to him, but I also need to know enough to stop him from imagining things worse or wrong.
So, I stay where I am and open the chat export next, because the only thing more dangerous than knowing is leaving the unknown to eat him alive.
It gets worse.
Not in one explosive revelation, but in details—that’s what makes it unbearable. The casualness. The laughing emojis. Celeste’s name appears again and again.
There are messages about Eli wanting to wait, about how annoying it is, about how his family money and name make him worth “locking down” if he won’t hurry up.
Another girl tells Celeste that if he’s too holy to fuck, she should make it his idea.
Someone else jokes about proof being insurance.
Celeste sends a voice note transcript that makes my jaw clench so hard my teeth ache.
He’s easy, babes. He’ll believe me if I cry hard enough.
I have to stop for a second as my vision narrows around those words.
Blakely made me feel like I was the one who kept choosing the harm because sometimes I walked through the door myself. Celeste did the same thing to Eli in a different way.
Make them doubt their own resistance. Make them feel responsible for someone else’s violation. Make the victim carry the blueprint afterward and call it consent because the alternative is too ugly for everyone around them.
I close the chat and breathe through my nose.
When I see the video folder, my body knows before I click, and my stomach drops when I see ten videos in there.
“Headphones,” I say.
Liam moves instantly, grabbing mine from the side pocket of my bag where he apparently knows I keep them. He hands them over without a word, and I plug them in.
Eli’s head snaps up when he sees what I’m doing. “No,” he says.
I take the headphones in one hand and look at him fully. “I’m going to watch enough to know what it is. Then I’m turning it off, that’s all. I promise I won’t watch if it gets even more violating than I think it’s going to be.”
His face crumples for one second before he gets control of it, and that tiny break almost ends me. “Okay,” he whispers.
I put on the headphones and click the first video under the EM folder.
It starts in a room I don’t recognize. A party room maybe, or a sorority bedroom. The camera angle is wrong in the way hidden recordings are wrong—slightly elevated and off to the side. Eli is there, and my whole fucking body goes cold.
He’s sitting on the edge of a bed, blinking too slowly, one hand dragging through his hair as Celeste stands in front of him smiling. Groggy. That’s the word his body gives me immediately. Not drunk in a loud, sloppy way. His eyes don’t focus properly when she touches his face.
I can’t hear myself breathing.
Celeste’s voice comes through the headphones, bright and coaxing and sickly sweet. “Baby, you said you wanted me.”
Eli frowns in the video, confused, mouth moving around words that come slowly. “I don’t… Celeste, I’m tired. S-something feelsss…wrong. Can you call… Julesss to pick… me up?”
She laughs softly like he’s adorable. “You always get so nervous after. It’s okay.”
After.
My hand clamps around the edge of the laptop. He wanted me because he wasn’t feeling well, and she laughed at him.
On screen, Eli tries to shake his head, but it’s weak and unfocused.
Celeste pushes him back and climbs onto the bed beside him, still smiling, one hand sliding over his chest while he stares at her.
She says something else about how he doesn’t have to pretend with her, how he wanted it earlier, how he told her he loved her and wanted to be close.
He looks miserable and confused and so fucking young in that moment that the room around me disappears.
This isn’t evidence in the abstract anymore. This is Eli drugged and saying no, and still being ignored.
This is my Eli.
The next few seconds tell me exactly where it’s going, and I refuse to watch the rest. I refuse to let that be something I carry visually any deeper than I already have to. I stop the video so hard my finger slips on the trackpad.
I sit there with the paused screen hidden beneath my hand, headphones still on, the blood roaring in my ears louder than anything the video could’ve played.
Then I close the laptop hard enough that everyone in the room flinches and Eli jumps to his feet.
Luca’s hand is out as if he tried to stop him from coming closer and then decided not to trap him.
Eli’s face is pale, glassy blue eyes fixed on me, and I know he can read enough from my expression that I won’t be able to protect him from it completely.
“What was it?” he asks.
I don’t answer him right away—I can’t. The words are there, somewhere, but they’re buried under the sound the laptop made when I snapped it shut, and the image still burned behind my eyes no matter how fast I stopped it.
I pull the headphones off and set them on the coffee table, then I put the laptop down beside them.
The flash drive is still plugged into the side.
I hate that little black thing with a violence that feels physical, but I don’t touch it again because Mara will need it clean.
Mara will need all the pieces that prove what the rest of us already know in our bones.
I get to my feet slowly and Eli doesn’t move when I walk toward him.
I stop in front of him and lift my hands, taking his face between my palms. The second my skin touches his, my control nearly goes.
He’s breathing too fast and too shallow, eyes huge and fixed on mine, and I can feel the smallest tremor working through his jaw.
I want to be steady for him—I need to be steady for him. But my throat burns so badly I have to swallow hard before I can speak, and even then, my voice comes out shaky.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I say.
His expression drops—one brutal slackening of his mouth and a sudden wet shine in his eyes as the truth hits him all at once. “No…”
“I’m sorry,” I say again, and the words break this time because there is no version of sorry big enough for what I mean. “Liefling, I’m so sorry.”
That is when he breaks.
His knees almost go first. Luca moves, but I’m already there, one arm wrapping around Eli’s waist while my other hand cradles the back of his head and pulls him into me.
He folds forward with a sound I have never heard from him before.
It’s torn out of the deepest part of him, and it goes through the room like a blade.
His hands grab at my hoodie, fingers twisting in the fabric so hard I feel the pull against my shoulders.
I hold him up. That’s all I can do for the first few seconds.
Hold him up while his whole body realizes what his mind just confirmed.
He doesn’t sob in a clean rhythm. It comes out broken and uneven, breath punching out of him, then catching, then tearing loose again against my chest. His face is buried in my hoodie, and I can feel the wet heat of his tears through the fabric.
I press my mouth to his hair because if I don’t put the grief somewhere, I’m going to start shaking too hard to be useful.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I say, low and fierce, right against him. “You hear me? You didn’t do anything wrong.”
He shakes his head again. “There’s a video,” he says, voice muffled against me. “She filmed it. She… fuck!”
“I stopped it,” I say immediately; I need him to know that much. “I stopped before anything more happened. I saw enough to know what it was, and I stopped. I swear to you, I stopped.”
He pulls back to look at me, and the broken expression on his face almost puts me on my knees. “Was I awake?”
There are questions that should not exist. This is one of them.
“You were conscious,” I choke out, “but you weren’t clear. You weren’t… You looked drugged, Eli. You asked her to get me because you weren’t feeling well, and you looked like you were trying to understand what she was saying but couldn’t.”
“I knew,” he says, and it comes out with a kind of horror that makes my stomach turn. “I fucking knew something was wrong. I knew it. I knew I didn’t—” He stops, chokes, tries again. “I knew I didn’t choose that.”
“You didn’t,” I say immediately. “You said no, and she ignored you.”
“She told me I did.” His voice is getting smaller, and that scares me too.
A tear slips down my face before I can stop it. I don’t wipe it away. “She lied, baby,” I whisper. “She lied because she needed you to doubt yourself. That’s what people like her do. They put their shame in your hands and tell you it’s yours to carry.”
His breath catches at that, and I know he hears more than Celeste in those words. Blakely is there too. The echo of my own stupid, brutal months. The way shame is never content with one victim if it can teach people to pass it around.
“Listen to me, that video does not change who you are. It gives you proof that you were violated.”
He flinches at the word because I found the place shame is trying to move in, and I hate that shame so much I could tear the world apart with my hands.
“She did this,” I tell him, holding his gaze. “Celeste did this. The girls who helped did this. Everyone who knew and laughed or hid it or used it did this. You did not.”
His breathing stutters, and I keep my hands on his face, thumbs steady against his skin. “You hear me?”
He nods once, but it isn’t enough.
“Say it,” I tell him.
His mouth trembles. “I didn’t choose it.”
“Again.”
His eyes close. “I didn’t choose it. I was… I was raped.”
I press my forehead to his, and for one second, I forget there are other people in the room. “I wish I could take your pain away, Liefling.”
He breaks quieter than anyone should have to break, and I hold him through it because I came when he called and I will keep coming every time after this.
I pull him in and hold him against my chest, one hand spread between his shoulder blades, the other cupping the back of his head. “You called for me. You called for me because you were scared and she…” I can’t even finish those words.
Killian’s voice cuts through the background, already setting the machinery of justice in motion. But for this moment, the whole world narrows to Eli’s shaking body and the single truth I keep saying into his hair because he needs to hear it until he can believe it.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I tell him again.
His breath shudders.
“You didn’t choose it.”
His fingers tighten.
“I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”
The laptop sits closed on the coffee table.
The flash drive is still plugged in.
And Eli stays in my arms while the truth tears through him, not alone this time, never alone again if I have any say in it.