Page 164 of Unorthodox
“He was your friend.” Her words are fast, as if she’s scared to get them out but she doesn’t stop. “He was your friend, and you shot him because—”
“Addison.”
“Because h-he touched me. You shot him because you thought he’d taken something thatyou wanted, and you—”
I move fast, my body in motion before my mind can catch up. My fingers are in her hair, my hand around her throat before I can think.
I push her to the floor, her head colliding with the hardwood.
“Stop.”
Her hands go to my wrist as I pin her down by her throat. “You killed him because of me and you—”
“I didn’t,” I tell her, pressing harder against her neck, her nails digging into my wrist, the blanket between us. “I did it because hebetrayed me.”I feel my throat grow tight, and it’s hard to get the words out.
Addison stops digging her nails into me and stares up at me with wide, fearful eyes.
“He betrayed me,” I tell her again, “and he knew.” I move my fingers from her hair, slam my fist on the floor beside her head. “He fucking knew what they did to me. What I had to lose.He knew.”I don’t think she’s breathing underneath me, but even though I’m staring at her, I’m not really seeing her.
Dante was the only person I ever told.
He’s the only person who didn’t try to steal my secrets, like fucking Mamie did.
I told him, because he used to have nightmares too. For what they did to him, he’d wake up screaming too.
How was it, he once asked me, that I could do the same thing to other people that had been done to us?How could I live with myself?
I’d told him that it was easy for someone like me.
What I didn’t tell him was that I’d been forced to, since I was child. That my father once took a knife to my groin for not kicking a sex slave in the head, then for not putting my fingers inside of her. That he held a knife over my dick until I forced my entire fist into the girl, the both of us sobbing as he watched.
I told Dante I had no problems with what I did.
I told myself that I didn’t fuck around with kids, and I never again personally hurt people who didn’t deserve it.
Not until Addison. Not until I knew I had a chance to make right with the one person I’d betrayed. The one person who deserves my love.
And Dante knew.
He knew what I could’ve lost.
He knew about Ollie, and hestill fucking betrayed me.
“Tell him it gets better.”
Fuck him.
Fuck Addison.
She’s why Dante is dead. Evora.
She did that.
“Max,” she whispers, and I feel her throat move beneath my hand as she speaks.
I realize my eyes are closed and I snap them open.
“How can you live with yourself?”Dante had asked me.
