Beautiful Brute (Court University 3)

The tick of the word flicked a switch on in my brain, my mouth drying. “What happened to him?”

But it was like I knew. Before he even said, I knew. I saw that all over his face.

He didn’t have to say a word.

“Drowned,” he said, drowned. He pocketed his hands. “The boy was a toddler. Happened in their family pool when Maggie was still married to Cleo’s father.”

My head lifted, but for some reason, the story didn’t stop there. I saw that too all over his face, pain like he’d experienced it himself. Maybe he had in a way, being in their lives and all that. “Cleo wasn’t even ten and she was watching him. She tried to save him,” he paused, his words sobering. “Nearly drowned herself.”

Nearly drowned herself…

I needed to talk to her. Explain or… I don’t know. I just had to do something, but again, he wouldn’t let me past. Again, he stood in my way. I pushed my father, but he shouldered me back. “Let me in there now.”

“Why, Jax?” he asked, shocking me. “So you can hurt her more? Hurt this family more?”

This family…

The words actually had me smirking. I shouldn’t be surprised hearing them, and truly, I wasn’t.

After all, he’d chosen them before.

Lifting my hands, I backed off, and when Rick started to come my way, I shook my head.

“Go back to your family, Rick,” I said, making his face fall. “That’s what you want, right? What you always wanted?”

The words hurt to say, and I wanted to knock a hole literally into my chest with my fist. Somehow, I felt the cavity would hurt less.

It had to. Impossible any other way.

Rick’s throat shifted, what appeared to be sting and anguish twisting his face, but he wasn’t fooling me. He didn’t care, never had.

I left before he could say anything, but as I hit the elevators, I still heard his voice down the hallway.

“I’ve always wanted you,” he said. “Always.”

I didn’t turn after I heard them; even with the words ricocheting down the hallway, I didn’t. I physically couldn’t look that way until the elevator doors pinged open and the door to his room clicked closed. He’d gone back inside. Gone back to his family, and I escaped onto the elevator for part of mine. My friends were somewhere in this resort. My brothers.

I held my shit together and got into the elevator, letting the door close. I hit no buttons, just standing there. I needed a goddamn second before I did anything, and I was wrong about that earlier hurt. Something did hurt worse in the end, and I let myself feel it. For two seconds, I let that man hurt me again. I absorbed his words.

But then, I let them go like the horseshit they were.

Chapter Seventeen

Cleo

Jax didn’t come back to school. At least, not back to the dorm anyway. He kept his door locked, but neither Kit nor I had seen him return to the dormitory after the three-day weekend. We hadn’t seen him the rest of the trip either. Like he was gone without a trace.

Not like I cared.

He could jump off a cliff as far as I was concerned and maybe he had. I didn’t know. He very well still could be attending classes. After all, Bay Cove was huge. Odds were my stepbrother was meddling in with the many undergrads and trying to dodge me just as much as I had him. I hadn’t heard that conversation he had outside the suite with my adoptive father, but I had heard both my dad’s voice and Jaxen’s. Dad was angry, something he never got, and he didn’t tend to lose his patience.

He’d said nothing after he got back inside the suite, his expression considerably sad. He’d tried to hide it, of course, but couldn’t mask the disappointment. These antics with Jax had done that to him. That was something I knew and felt incredibly guilty about.

I’d only told Dad and Mom about Jax pretending to drown and hadn’t even wanted to spill that. I’d been crying when I came in, a mess, and they’d tugged it out of me. I wasn’t trying to protect my stepbrother by concealing everything else he’d done. Honestly, I hadn’t cared anymore, but what I didn’t want was for him to win. He’d done enough damage in my life. I knew Jax pulling that last little stunt he had wasn’t my fault. My stepbrother was a jerk, point-blank, but I couldn’t help thinking had I not inserted myself amongst his friend circle, he wouldn’t have gone off the way he had. He literally jumped off the deep end.

I supposed that was neither here nor there now.

I’d also become the sudden recipient of frequent check-ins with both Mom and Dad. No sooner had I stepped foot in the dorm had they been calling me, texting me. The next couple days, I’d heard from them no less than a half a dozen times, and just like that, it was like that time after it all happened.