Chapter 16 Lilian
LILIAN
PLAYLIST: CARRY MY STONE – brAD URBA
“She fucking took it!” I roar. “I know she did. That’s why she was here.”
“Lil,” Doug says, and I am close to ripping his head off. “You need to calm down. Otherwise, you’ll jeopardize the wound and healing process.”
“I don’t fucking care!” I shout. I hardly recognize myself at this moment. This isn’t who I am; I know better. But everything that’s happened has finally got me, and right now, this is the outlet.
I rest against my desk in the company, panting in murderous anger and a stabbing pain in my chest. Each breath pinches my chest, but I ignore it.
After I received the security alert that the closed system was operated outside the company, I ordered Doug to take me in. He pulled every card in the book to have me rest, but I am his boss—end of story.
I never leave that laptop unguarded, except for this one time when Ella, or whatever her real name is, was here and we had the issue with the employee. Maybe they were even working together.
I trusted her. I let her in. And she used me. It was all a game to her to get to the company data. She is a spy who played me to get the data.
“I am going to murder her!” I shout and clean off my desk. The monitor, my Tech Innovator Award, and my Forbes 30 Under 30 trophy fly to the ground and shatter into a million pieces.
How could I be so stupid?
“You'd better do so now,” I hear a voice say, and my eyes fly up. There she stands, leaning against my door. Horribly beaten up, blue undereye, swollen cheek, bloody, and a cut lip.
I didn’t even hear her coming in over the shattering glass. Doug has his gun drawn immediately.
I'm at a loss for what to do right now. All the anger in me vanishes like someone opened a drain. I want to ask her who did this to her, to know if she's okay, and what happened. In this moment, I despise myself more than ever before. A feeling I will not allow.
She has to pay, I tell myself. She has to. She betrayed you. Used you. Make her pay.
I open the drawer to my desk and pull out a gun, pointing it at her. It’s been a long time since I held a gun.
She smiles weakly as she walks up to me around the desk.
“Freeze!” shouts Doug, but she ignores him. She walks straight into my gun over the glass pieces on the floor, the crushing noise trails into my ears. She’s pressing herself into the gun on her chest.
She is so close, I can smell the iron scent of the blood on her.
My body longs for her, and I condemn it for it. It cannot be. I need to slip my mask on.
Remember what she did!
My hand shakes from the struggle within me.
“You can kill me now,” she says. “I will die anyway, but then you’ll never find out who’s after you.”
I can’t grasp her words. My mind is occupied with flatlining as I stare into these mesmerizing green eyes.
“What?” I ask stupidly.
She smiles.
“I am going to get something out of my backpack,” she says, not breaking the gaze into my eyes. Those eyes. “I’ll do so very slowly.”
She slips off her backpack and gasps in pain.
“Who did this to you?” slips from my lips, and I instantly regret it.
“I’ll be okay,” she says and puts the backpack on the desk so I can see what she’s doing.
“First,” she says, pulling out the laptop with the closed system, “It was me, and I used it to find the Lords. Nothing else.”
She puts it on the desk, and my anger resurfaces. I glance at Doug briefly. His face is unreadable and focused.
“Secondly,” she continues, “These are the three guns I took from three Lords' members who came after me.” She pulls out a box and opens it for me to see.
“Did they do that to you?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says and glances up at me. I want to lose myself in her eyes.
She betrayed you! shouts the voice in me.
Doug takes the guns out of her grasping range.
“Why are you here?” I ask her, and I somehow lower my gun. My words come out more like a whisper than confident words.
She stares at me, and I see her struggle.
“Because of you,” she says finally, every word carefully chosen. “Because I have to kill you.”
My eyes widen, and I push my gun back into her chest.
“Thirdly,” she says and carefully pulls another laptop from the backpack, “This is my laptop. What’s on there will tell you who I am.
You will find a copy of what Sutton had on you, and that it wasn’t I who killed him,” she says silently, her hand on it, as if it is a treasure she protects with her life—probably because it is.
She doesn’t look at me, and a shudder runs down my spine, because I know there is more to come. The tension in the room is at a breaking point.
“You will also find the reason on there, why I have to kill you.”
My breath flattens.
So, she came to kill me.
Words aren’t coming out of my mouth, and my heart jumps over itself when she draws herself up. Her eyes soften the moment she meets mine.
“I said I have to,” she says silently, and her hand wanders over mine that presses the gun in her chest, “But I won’t. I can’t.”
“Why?” I breathe out.
“Because I fell for you,” she says, and a jittery feeling rushes through me, goosebumps spreading over my arms. “I fell for you, not as Ella, but as the person I am. I did the one thing that could never happen, and that is falling for a target.”
“But why am I a target?” I get over my lips.
A weak, almost pitiful smile on her face. It enrages me.
She opens her laptop, enters a password, and presses play on a video. I hold my breath because I immediately know what it is. A video of me pushing a young girl by the hair onto Jared’s cock for a mouth fuck.
I am falling. Back to when it happened. Back to when—
“He made me,” I say in a detached voice. It is something I tried to bury.
“And with what did he make you do it?” she asks. “Last time I looked, you were a very powerful and influential person.”
I close my eyes as my throat closes. But there is no way around it. There is no keeping it hidden anyway.
“He made me do it because he had photos, screenshots of a video, of how I performed…um…oral sex on a professor at university to get through his classes. I was about to fail my degree, and my father would have murdered me, so I did the desperate act.”
“Why hasn’t it been in the files?” she asks.
“Because I made a deal with him. I was supposed to join him and her for a bit of indulgence, and he’d get me the government contacts I needed…” my voice trails off, and I have to avert my eyes. I can’t look at it any longer.
“These are minors!” she suddenly shouts.
“Minors! Young girls who were raped by him and his powerful friends. Tortured and used and…” Tears flood down her cheeks, and horror surges through me as I finally understand.
What has happened with me and the girl hasn’t been an isolated incident. It was Jared’s business.
“You were one of them,” I say as a shudder of horror runs over my back. I lower the gun.
“Yes,” she says in a bitter voice. “I was one of the girls he took with the promise of papers. When I was fourteen. He drugged me and kept me for a year. Made gangrape parties with me. Impregnated me. He dumped me to die on the streets with a bullet in my chest, where I almost died from it.”
My free hand shoots in front of my mouth.
I am not an emotional person. I couldn’t care less about anything that happens to anyone. But I care about her.
I care about her.
And it goes directly into my chest.
I can’t care about her.
I shouldn’t.
“The bullet they put in my chest didn’t kill me,” she says, “I had no insurance, no papers, no nothing, so I couldn’t go anywhere to get help.
I had to give birth to a child, and he took it.
I was shot and left in the streets in a muddy corner behind a dumpster.
I almost died twice. That’s what Sutton did,” she says, and with every word she speaks, my throat closes further.
I am spiralling.
“That’s why I went after him, to have proof it was him and make him pay.
I know so many girls who died at his hands and in the aftermath of his actions.
Do you know they had breeding parties? Rape parties to impregnate minors.
For fun. And you…you empowered him. You kept his business going.
You were part of it. You made it possible. ”
“I didn’t know,” I whisper, and tears fill my eyes. “I—” whatever it is, I can’t find the words.
I have never cried in my life. Never. And now, I do.
Her disgust radiates over me before she looks away and wipes away angry tears. Seeing her, hearing all this—I can’t breathe.
“I always thought what Jared did with me was an isolated incident. I thought she was his girlfriend. He told me she was eighteen. We have been drinking, he promised the connections and deleting everything he had—” I say with my chest heaving up and down.
“I never knew there was an entire network behind it.”
I am disgusted by the images I see of Jared keeping her in his mansion. Her. Being used, taken, raped by Jared, by his friends. I want to murder them all.
I look at her, and we’re both in tears now.
“Why are you giving me all of this?” I whisper, my voice thick with emotion.
She hesitates a moment before she looks me straight in the eyes. She smiles thinly at me. Rose cheeks in tears with her war-ridden face.
Her hand wanders to my cheek, with her thumb wiping away my tears. Calmness spreads through me at the moment of her touch.
“Because I need you to understand that when I leave here today, I let the Lords kill me so you can live. Because my love for you is stronger than all the hate I will ever feel for you.”