Ruined
Chapter 16
The morning crept in gray and cold, the kind of gray that seeps into your bones and makes you feel hollow. I had not slept. I had spent the night curled on the edge of the couch, staring at the ceiling, Cole’s words looping in my head until they tangled into something sharp and suffocating.
When my phone rang, the sound sliced through the stillness like a knife. The glass of water on the table tipped, spilling across the wood as I jolted upright.
Cynthia.
Her name glowed on the screen, sharp and bright, and for a split second I considered letting it ring. Pretending I didn’t see it. Pretending I didn’t already know that nothing good could come from her voice this early.
But my thumb moved anyway.
“Hello?” My voice was rough, tight, like I’d swallowed glass.
Her voice hit me like a slap. “What the hell, Tess?”
I blinked hard, my throat locking. “Cyn?”
“Don’t you dare act like you don’t know.” There was anger there, sharp and biting, but underneath it something worse. Disappointment. A deep, jagged kind of disappointment that made my chest ache. “Do you even realize what’s out there? Do you understand what this is doing?”
My stomach knotted. “What’s out there?”
A sharp, humorless laugh cracked through the line. “Oh, God. You haven’t seen it, have you? Tess… they leaked it. The video.”
Everything inside me stopped. The air. The blood in my veins. The sound of the city outside.
“What video?” The words scraped out, thin and broken.
“The one of you,” Cynthia said, her voice flat now, drained. “The kitchen counter. With Kyle.”
The room tilted. My breath caught, trapped somewhere in my chest, and for a moment I couldn’t move.
“No,” I whispered. My body rejected it even as the words reached my ears. “No. That’s not… no.”
My hands moved on their own, grabbing my phone, pulling up my messages, my feeds. My vision blurred, but I didn’t need it to be clear. It was everywhere.
The grainy footage. My hair spilling down my back. My body bare, bent across the counter. My face clear. Too clear.
Kyle’s wasn’t. His face was turned away, out of frame, like the universe had decided to protect him in the only way it could.
But mine. God, my face.
My phone slipped through my fingers and cracked against the floor. My knees gave out, and I dropped to the carpet, numb, the world roaring in my ears.
“Cynthia,” I breathed, my voice small and broken, like a child’s.
She sighed, sharp but heavy. “I told you, Tess. I told you to come to me if something was wrong. But you didn’t. And now this. God, this is everywhere. We can’t control it. We can’t bury it. The board is panicking. Sponsors are already pulling their funding.”
Tears stung my eyes but refused to fall. “I didn’t… I didn’t know what to do,” I whispered.
“I know,” Cynthia said, and for the briefest moment her voice softened, but it wasn’t enough to dull the knife twisting in her words. “But you should have told me. You should have trusted me to help you before it got this far.”
Silence stretched between us, heavy and final, like a door closing.
Then she spoke again, quieter this time. “I can’t keep you here, Tess. Not with this. Not with a tape like that floating around. The ethics board will tear me apart if I try. And you… you’ll never get a story printed again with this hanging over you.”
The words landed like a punch.
“So that’s it?” My voice trembled, raw. “I’m done?”
A pause. Then, softly, like she hated saying it, “I wish I could help. I really do. But right now… you need to figure out how to survive this. Let me know when you’re ready to talk again.”
The line went dead.
I sat there on the floor, the city humming faintly beyond the walls, my phone cracked and useless beside me.
Everything was gone.
My job.
My name.
Kyle.
The grief didn’t come in waves. It was a tidal surge, drowning me all at once, filling every space in my chest until there was no room left for air.
I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, rocking without meaning to, trying to keep the walls from collapsing in. But they did anyway. The silence pressed in, heavy and suffocating, every corner of the room whispering the same truth:
I was ruined.
When Cole came out of his room, the soft sound of his footsteps made my stomach tighten. The look on his face told me he already knew. Maybe they had sent it to him too. Maybe he had seen what the rest of the world was seeing.
“They released it,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper.
His jaw tightened, sharp and dangerous, but his eyes stayed steady, unreadable. He didn’t speak. Didn’t move.
“I’m finished,” I said, the words hollow and shaking. “Cynthia… she fired me. She said she wished she could help, but… I can’t be a journalist with a sex tape online.”
For a moment, something dark flickered across his face. Anger, sharp and deep, but not at me. At them.
“They’re tightening the noose,” he said finally, his voice low, dangerous in its calm. “They want you isolated. Broken. Easier to control.”
The truth of it cut deeper than anything Cynthia had said.
I wanted to scream. To break something. To tear the walls down with my bare hands until there was nothing left but rubble and air.
But all I could do was sit there, numb and shaking, while the weight of it all settled over me like ash.
Kyle was still out there. Somewhere.
And now, I was truly alone.