41. Chapter Forty-One - The Truth
“Oh my God,” I gasped, the breath knocked straight out of my lungs as Sienna slammed into me hard enough to nearly send me stumbling backward. “Sienna, what’s wrong?”
She didn’t answer. She only clutched me tighter, her fingers digging desperately into the fabric of my jacket like I might disappear if she let go.
Her whole body trembled against mine in sharp, uneven waves that made my chest ache instinctively in response.
Behind her, Oliver hovered close with one hand pressed gently to her back, anchoring her while his own face looked frighteningly pale, stripped completely of its usual warmth and humor.
The playful boy I knew wasn’t standing in front of me anymore.
Someone quieter had taken his place.
My gaze moved uneasily between them as dread began tightening around my ribs.
“Seriously,” I said again, my voice thinner now, stretched taut with anxiety. “What happened?”
Sienna finally pulled back just enough for me to properly see her face, and the sight nearly made my stomach drop out beneath me.
Her cheeks were soaked with tears, her nose raw and red, her eyes swollen and rimmed with misery.
She tried to speak, tried to gather the words together, but they broke apart somewhere deep in her throat before they could fully form.
“Carter was murdered,” she whispered at last.
My body went completely still, my breath snagging painfully between my ribs like I’d forgotten how to use my lungs. For one suspended second, I genuinely wondered if I’d misunderstood her somehow, if my brain had twisted her words into something impossible because the truth felt too tangled.
“A lot of uni students were,” she rushed to add, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks as her voice cracked apart. “A whole lot. They were found... The photos…” She squeezed her eyes shut hard, like she could force the images back into darkness. “The photos were sick.”
Something heavy sank slowly inside me, like a stone disappearing beneath dark water. My pulse turned strange and uneven.
And then I turned.
I didn’t think about it. My body simply moved, sluggish and dreamlike, until my eyes landed on Culver standing a few feet away.
Still. Silent. Untouched by the grief suffocating everyone else around him.
His gaze was already fixed on mine. And he was smiling.
Not openly. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Just the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth, something subtle and sharp and deeply wrong. Something controlled enough to become terrifying.
And instantly, I knew. God, I knew.
The second I saw that expression, cold certainty settled deep into my bones. That look wasn’t horror.
It was satisfaction. No… worse than satisfaction. Possession.
Like he’d torn the world apart with his bare hands and laid the wreckage at my feet.
He’d done it.
My throat tightened painfully as I swallowed, the motion scraping like sandpaper.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, and the uncertainty hollowed me out from the inside.
Relief hovered somewhere at the edges. So did revulsion.
Numbness sat trapped between them, cold and distant, like frost wrapped around a burn.
I should’ve been furious. I should’ve looked at him with horror twisting through me and demanded to know how he could do something so monstrous. I should’ve screamed or cried or shattered apart beneath the weight of it.
But I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even upset.
What I felt instead was something dangerously close to understanding. Like justice had been carried out with blood-soaked hands. Like some awful pressure buried deep inside my chest had finally loosened.
Across the room, Culver’s gaze never left me.
There was something deeply dangerous in the way he looked at me then, something ancient and starving barely contained beneath the surface of his calm expression.
It felt like violence itself stood obediently at his back, waiting for the slightest excuse to tear the world apart again if it meant keeping me untouched.
Some broken part of me felt safer because of it.
I wrapped my arms around Sienna again, pulling her close as her sobs softened into something quieter and shakier. I let her grief bleed into me even though it wasn’t mine to carry, even though my own emotions had become such a tangled mess I could barely stand to examine them.
“I’m so sorry, Sie,” I murmured into her hair, my hand moving slowly up and down her spine. “How close were you two?”
“Not very,” she sniffled, struggling to steady herself. “But he’d been in my brother’s life for so long. I don’t know… I think I considered him more of a friend than just some bloke I knew.”
I nodded slowly, my thumb brushing gently over her tear-streaked cheek, careful not to rush her through the grief clawing its way out of her.
“What actually happened?” I asked quietly, even though every instinct inside me recoiled from whatever answer was coming next.
Sienna’s gaze dropped to the ground, like the words themselves were too heavy to speak while looking another person in the eye.
“They found the bodies at the front steps of the nick,” she whispered. “Just… strewn across them like a message. Like they were meant to be seen.” Her breathing hitched sharply. “And there were words carved into all of their skin.”
“What words?” I asked, though something deep inside me already knew the answer before she even opened her mouth.
“‘Filthy rapists,’” she said, her voice splintering apart around the words. “That’s what it said. But Carter wasn’t a rapist. He wasn’t, Ira. I know he wasn’t.”
The guilt hadn’t fully reached me yet.
Maybe it would later; maybe it would hit me all at once in some quieter moment. But right then, standing there with the scent of her tears lingering in the air and a thick horror pressing down over all of us, what I felt instead was something quieter and far more dangerous settling inside my chest.
Acceptance.
The awful understanding that some things demanded a reckoning so violent it stained everyone around it, even if admitting that terrified me.
My heart stuttered painfully inside my ribs, a slow aching pause that echoed far too loudly in my ears.
There was no way I could tell her. No way I could look Sienna in the eye and place the truth into her trembling hands.
I couldn’t destroy her like that. Couldn’t peel back the surface of the nightmare and expose the thing lurking beneath it.
But the guilt was already there anyway.
Quiet. Patient. Coiled deep inside me like something alive.
It would come for me eventually. I could already feel it waiting with slow, careful teeth.
“So who were the others?” I asked, even though part of me didn’t want to know. Didn’t want their names tied forever to the knowledge that they were dead because of me.
“I don’t know,” Sienna whispered, shaking her head while wiping at her face with the sleeve of her hoodie. Her voice sounded hollow now, drained clean of anything sharp. “It was Carter, three boys… and one girl. I think I met her once. She came to our house with Carter awhile back.”
Breeanna. Of course it was her.
The realization didn’t explode through me with rage or shock.
It slipped quietly into place with a horrible sense of inevitability, like something that had been waiting patiently for me to notice it all along.
And as it settled there, I could suddenly see the entire thing so clearly: the manipulation, the jealousy, the poison she’d layered beneath fake smiles and casual comments until everything looked harmless on the surface.
All of it built around dragging me down and making me feel small because of Carter’s bruised ego and her need to play puppet master from the sidelines.
I wanted to feel nothing.
I wanted to shut the door on her existence entirely and pretend she had never mattered.
But the truth was uglier than that.
Breeanna had been cruel, yes. Twisted and wrong in ways that poisoned everyone around her. But she had also loved in the only warped way she knew how.
And now she was gone. Gone alongside all the rest of them.
The realization didn’t strike like some dramatic revelation. It tolled slowly through my mind like a distant bell, echoing over and over with the terrible feeling that I would hear it forever.
But I couldn’t drown in it.
I couldn’t let myself collapse beneath the full weight of everything all at once.
So I stayed with Sienna as long as I could.
I held her hand. Brushed her hair back from her damp face. Murmured soft comforts that felt painfully thin even while I said them. I stayed until the trembling in her body eased into something steadier, until Oliver finally stepped forward fully and wrapped her against him with quiet desperation.
Then I left.
Because I couldn’t stand there drowning in their grief while mine remained tangled around something I could never explain to them.
And because what I needed most in that moment was him.
The monster standing quietly across the way with blood hidden beneath his fingernails and violence still breathing beneath his skin.
The only person who could hold me together even as everything else threatened to split me apart.
I skipped my last lecture without hesitation. I could talk to Kiera later. I could explain things to her later. Right then, all I knew was that I needed Culver the same way lungs needed air, even when the air itself burned going down.
When I turned toward him, I didn’t speak. I didn’t need to.
I stepped directly into his arms and let him catch me, my body folding into his like it had finally been given permission to give out completely. He held me instantly, as though he’d already known the moment was coming.