Chapter 116 CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN

Chapter 116 CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN

 ASHER

I was fuming.

No… I was past that.

Anger had settled into something colder and more useful by the time I checked my watch again.

4:37 p.m.

Erica was thirty-seven minutes late.

The auditorium briefing had already eaten through more of my afternoon than I wanted to give it. Retreat schedules. Cabin rules. Liability language. All of it noise compared to what I actually needed to handle today. If I was right… if this lead opened the way I thought it would  then by the end of it I would at least have somewhere to put the violence currently sitting under my skin.

I had agreed to meet Erica at four.

She had agreed.

And every minute past that made it more likely she had changed her mind, turned around, decided silence was still safer than truth.

I waited anyway.

Five more minutes.

Then another three, fingers tapping once against the steering wheel before I forced them still. I was already reaching for the ignition when movement at the edge of the lot caught my eye.

Erica appeared between two parked cars like she had spent the last forty minutes arguing herself into each step.

She looked exactly as described.

Junior. Maybe seventeen. Dark hair pulled into a low ponytail. A gray hoodie a size too big. Jeans with a small rip at the knee that didn’t look styled so much as lived-in. 

The main thing was…

She was Jordan’s ex.

She hesitated when she saw me fully, then squared her shoulders and came the rest of the way.

I got out of the car but didn’t move toward her. 

After Avery left my place Saturday morning, I had gone back through her journal.

I told myself it was because I wanted to understand her better. Because some pathetic part of me wanted to feel close to her in the only way she had ever been unguarded on the page. I had already read enough to hold power over her. That should have been sufficient.

Then I found the page I had never noticed before.

Tucked toward the back. Written harder than the others, like the pen had been pressed down out of necessity rather than reflection. Hidden in the way people hide things they cannot stand to reread and cannot bear to throw away.

That evening.

The rain.

The call.

The version of her I had found on the side of the road, dizzy and half-gone and clinging to consciousness like it hurt.

I had known something was wrong that night.

I had not known the whole of it.

Jordan had drugged her.

Jordan had put his hands on her.

Jordan had almost forced himself on her in that car before she fought her way out and ran until her body gave out.

That sick son of a bitch.

I had sat there with the journal open in my hands long enough for the words to stop looking like ink and start looking like failure. Mine. Because I hadn’t pushed her to tell me. Because I had accepted the silence. Because some part of me had been so caught in wanting her that I hadn’t made enough room to fully see what had been done to her.

I hated him for it.

I hated myself for how long it had taken.

Which was why I was handling it myself.

Erica stopped a few feet away, arms crossed tightly over her chest.

“Asher Whitlock?” she asked, though she already knew.

“Yes.”

She swallowed. “You said you had something important to tell me.”

“I do.”

Her gaze flicked past me, then back, wary “If this is some team thing, or some popularity stunt, I’m leaving.”

“It’s not.”

“Then what is it?”

I held her eyes and kept my voice even. 

“You were Jordan’s ex, right?”

She hesitated, then nodded once.

“What happened?” I asked. “Why did you two break up?”

A dry scoff left her. “Did you seriously ask me to come here just so you could ask why we broke out?”

“Yes.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Well. Why else? We fell out of love.”

Of course.

She wasn’t going to hand me anything easily, and part of me respected that.

I stepped closer… then immediately registered the way her shoulders tensed and stopped short, leaving clear space between us.

“You both broke up mutually?” I asked, quieter now.

She swallowed hard. Something in her expression flinched, not at me exactly, but at the question itself. I shifted back another half step without making a show of it. I was angry. I was desperate. Neither of those things gave me the right to make her feel cornered.

“Was that why you left the school after the breakup?”

Her face changed.

Not into full shock but into the particular stillness of someone hearing a locked door rattle from the outside.

“I left because I wanted to,” she said. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to leave now.”

She turned.

“Please.”

She stopped.

“I need the full truth,” I continued. “Someone else’s life is already tangled in this. I’m not here to drag you into gossip or make a spectacle out of you. I just need to know what he is.”

For a long second, I thought she would keep walking.

Then she turned back around, arms still locked across her chest, and took a breath that looked like it hurt.

“I don’t ever want to talk about this,” she said. “And after today, I don’t want anything to do with you or him. Are we clear?”

“Clear.”

Another pause. 

When she finally spoke again, her voice was flatter, as if sanding the emotion out of it was the only way to get the words out at all.

“Jordan was controlling from the beginning. I just didn’t call it that at first. It looked like attention. Like care. He wanted to know where I was, who I was with, why I took too long to answer a text. He hated when I went out without him. Hated when other guys spoke to me. At first I told myself it was intense because he liked me that much.”

Her jaw tightened.

“Then it got worse. He started showing up places I hadn’t told him I’d be. He went through my phone once and called it ‘proof I couldn’t be trusted.’ Everything became a test I was already failing. If I was quiet, I was hiding something. If I was upset, I was overreacting. If I pulled away, I was ungrateful.”

She looked past me, toward the far end of the lot.

“The night everything broke, we were alone. He wanted more than I was willing to give. I said no. Clearly. More than once. He didn’t listen. He got angry…just this cold, insulted kind of angry, like I had no right to refuse him. He pushed. He grabbed me hard enough to leave marks. For a second I genuinely didn’t think I was getting out of that room.”

Her throat moved.

“I fought. I got free. I ran. And after that, school didn’t feel survivable anymore. He was everywhere. I’m not wealthy. My family isn’t influential. If I reported him, it would’ve become my word against his, and I already knew who people would rather believe.”

She finally looked at me again.

“So I left. That was the only version of safety I could afford.”

Silence stretched between us.

For a moment all I could feel was heat behind my ribs… thick, violent, useless in the immediate sense and clarifying in every other one. I had hated Jordan when I thought he’d crossed a line.  Listening to Erica made that hatred denser. Older. Structural. This wasn’t one night of rot. It was a pattern. A method. A boy who kept surviving the damage he caused because the world around him made survival easy.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

It wasn’t enough. I said it anyway.

Erica gave a short, humorless breath. “Don’t be sorry. Just tell me why I’m really here.”

“Because I need you to come forward.”

Her eyes flashed. “No.”

“I can back you.”

“That’s what people say before they disappear and leave you holding the consequences.”

“I won’t disappear,” I said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll help put pressure where it actually moves. With enough noise that the school won’t be able to bury it. He doesn’t get protected this time.”

She shook her head, but weaker than before. “You don’t understand what it’s like when nobody important has your back.”

“Then use the fact that I do. I’m not asking you to do this to make me feel better. I’m asking because he is still the same person he was with you. And if no one stands in front of him, he keeps going.”

Erica stared at me for a long time.

Then she said, hoarsely, “Why now?”

Because he touched Avery.

Because the journal page was still burned into the back of my mind.

Because men like Jordan didn’t stop until someone made stopping them more expensive than continuing.

I didn’t give her all of that.

Just the part that mattered to the girl standing in front of me.

“Because he doesn’t get to keep getting away with it,” I said.

Finally, she whispered, “If I do this… you don’t get to control my story.”

“I don’t want to.”

“And if I walk away at any point, you don’t force me back.”

“I won’t.”

Another beat.

“I mean it, Whitlock.”

“I know.”

Erica closed her eyes briefly, then opened them with a kind of brittle resolve.

“Fine,” she said. “So…what do you want me to do?”