Page 131 of You Were Always Mine
The first message glares up in neon blue. He reads it aloud, voice ragged:
“I bet he still thinks you’re pure. Should I tell him how easy you were for me in the cinema?”
My chest caves. I shake my head so hard it feels like it might snap. “Stop, Kai—please don’t?—”
But he’s scrolling, thumb flicking with savage precision. Each buzz is another dagger.
“Slut.”
“Bet you moan for him the way you did for me.”
“Maybe I’ll send your parents the truth.”
Kai’s hands are shaking, but his voice—steady, lethal. “How long has this been going on, Scarlett?” His head snaps up, eyes blazing. “How fucking long?”
I crumple, palms over my ears, but it doesn’t silence him reading the filth—the threats, the proof of my shame.
“It never stopped,” I whisper, words shredded from my throat. “It never stopped.”
He stills, air draining from the room. His stare pins me—wild, broken, chest heaving.
Kai’s face is unrecognisable: jaw locked, teeth bared, veins rising in his throat, the phone trembling in his fist as the screen glows with Tyler’s poison.
“I’ll fucking kill him.”
The words aren’t a threat. They’re a verdict.
“Kai—” My voice cracks, but he’s already pacing, reading another line aloud, spitting it like venom.
“You let him touch you? You let him put his filthy hands on you?—”
He slams the phone against the wall. Plastic splinters. His chest heaves.
“No. No, Scar. This doesn’t end with texts. This doesn’t end until he’s gone. Until I tear him apart with my bare hands.”
I stumble from the counter, dizzy with tears, knees hitting the floor, palms slapping the boards as I crawl to him. “No—Kai, please—” My fingers clutch at his jeans, at anything to hold him down, to tether him, but he rips free.
His eyes are black fire. Broken. Dangerous. The boy Iknow buried under something monstrous. He’s already at the door.
“Don’t you dare fucking leave me!” I scream, clawing at my throat, nails dragging red across skin. “Don’t leave me here!” My sobs choke, violent and ugly. “Kai—don’t do this, don’t go, you’ll never come back?—”
The door slams, rattling the frame, leaving me alone with the ringing in my ears and my own screams bouncing off the walls.
“Kai!” My voice fractures. “Please! Don’t leave me!”
The echo swallows me whole. He’s gone.
The slam of the front door still trembles through my bones when I sink to my knees. The echo won’t stop. It’s everywhere—the walls, the floor, the hollows inside my chest. He’s gone. And if he does what he said—if he puts his hands on Tyler, if he spills blood like I know he will—he’s never coming back. Not to me. Not to this house. Not to the boy he was before I ruined everything.
I clutch the floorboards like they might hold me together. My throat is raw from screaming his name, from begging him not to leave, and still I can hear him—his voice in the dark, the promise carved into his eyes.I’ll kill him.
A sob tears out of me, then another, until I’m folded in on myself, shaking so hard I can’t breathe. My fingers press against my lips—the taste of him still there—and I can’t make sense of anything but the certainty that this is the end. If Kai kills Tyler, he won’t just destroy him. He’ll destroy himself.
And I’ll lose him.
“No,” I whisper, the word breaking into a plea. “No, no, no, I can’t—I can’t let him?—”
I stagger to my feet, wiping at myface with trembling hands, but the tears won’t stop. My reflection in the hall mirror is unrecognisable: mascara streaks, lips trembling, eyes wide and bloodshot. I look like a ghost—like I’m already mourning him.
