by Bella King
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Book 1 Summary
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Also Read
Reckless Torment
A Dark High School Bully Romance (Crimson High Book 2)
Bella King
Copyright © 2019 by Bella King
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Introduction
Reckless Torment can be read as a standalone or sequel to Destroy Her.
Anthony
I won’t stop until I destroy her.
I won’t destroy her until she is beneath me, powerless to me.
My reckless torment will be the end of her ability to resist me.
Amy
I hate him.
His family is the reason why my life has come unhinged.
His intentions are nothing but cruel and destructive.
He will ruin me.
But the truth is…
I love him anyway.
This book contains dark themes and is intended for adult readers.
Book 1 Summary
If you haven’t read the first book and aren’t worried about spoilers, here is a summary:
The main character, Alice, starts at a new high school, Crimson High, for her senior year.
Alice meets Travis, who is suspected of murdering his friend Kimberly three years prior. The body was never found.
Travis is manipulative and eventually gets Alice to work with him to uncover the real murderer. Travis is a bully, but they fall in love anyway.
During their efforts to find Kimberly’s body, which they suspect is hidden somewhere in the school itself, they are almost killed in a fire at a party. Travis’s friend, Kain, perishes. Kain was dating Alice’s friend, Amy.
Travis and Alice finally find the body hidden in the walls of Crimson High, and the murder confronts them at the scene.
They discover that the murderer is a girl named Grace, who was in love with Travis and Killed Kimberly out of jealousy. She was also responsible for the fire.
Grace tries to kill them to keep her murders a secret but is knocked out but Alice and receives permanent brain damage. She makes a full confession.
The next book begins in the view of Alice’s friend, Amy, who recently lost her boyfriend, Kain, and is trying to get through the rest of her senior year.
Prologue
I always knew that Alice and Travis would end up together, but I didn’t think that the circumstances around their relationship would be so questionable. Alice had told me practically nothing about what was really going on at Crimson High during the height of the terror there, even though she had been my friend for as long as I can remember. I was kept in the dark as events unfolded, unable to understand what was happening around me. It was frightening.
The last two months of school had been a hellish nightmare for me and many other students, with my boyfriend, Kain, dying in a house fire, my best friend Alice running off with some asshole bully, and my friend Grace getting convicted of murder. All of this had happened when Alice had transferred to Crimson High, and I was beginning to resent her for it.
I had been left to suffer alone while Alice went on her crazy adventures with Travis, confused and hurt over why she would abandon me like that. I found it quite cruel, and I could tell that there was some distance between us when she got back to school. I had no intention of trying to mend the bond between us that had been broken by her senseless and selfish actions. The worst part was that she didn’t seem to mind.
She was always glued to Travis now. I had been rooting for those two in the beginning, defending Travis even though he was known to be a bully, and pushing Alice to open up a bit and stop being such a damn prude all the time. Once the two finally got together, things were good at first. I was happy that Alice finally had a special man in her life and that she had stopped playing the victim so much.
But then things went south quickly. Had it not been for those two, Kain would still be alive and Grace wouldn’t have been sent to prison for life. Perhaps their actions had been just, but it all left a bad taste in my mouth regardless. They ruined my senior year at Crimson High.
When I had found out about Kimberly’s body being stashed in the walls of the school, my first guess was that Travis had finally been caught and would be spending his life behind bars. I was surprised to discover that Grace had been the killer all along, and that Travis and Alice had worked together to uncover this.
I knew that Alice and Travis didn’t like Grace at all. She was hopelessly in love with Travis for as long as I could remember, but Travis had used her, just as he had used Alice to get Grace kicked out of school and convicted of murder. I’m sure Alice was jealous of Grace and that’s why she had helped Travis during this time.
Travis had been the one suspected of murdering Kimberly for years, and it was my own belief, as well as many others at the school, that Alice and Travis had conspired to frame Grace for the murder of Kimberly in order to take the pressure off him. The only reason that Grace had admitted to the murder was because her brain was a scrambled mess after the supposed standoff in the middle of the night at Crimson High. There was no evidence other than the testimonies of those three that pointed to Grace being the killer. What was a shut and closed case for the investigators involved, was still foggy in the minds of the students and staff at Crimson High.
The fact remained that nobody really knew the truth except for Alice and Travis. It was two against one, and because there had been no cameras in the particular hallway that the standoff had happened in, due to it conveniently being a closed down part of the school, the only evidence was the words of the people involved.
There was one person in particular who was convinced that Alice and Travis had framed Grace and that she was the victim in this cruel game. That was Anthony, Grace’s older brother. He was also a senior at Crimson high, but had started school a year late, so he was already 19 years old.
I wasn’t particularly fond of Anthony for various reasons, including the fact that he was the type of guy that thought he was hot shit, even if he wasn’t. I mean, he had tattoos all over his body already, throwing out the possibility of ever working a corporate job, smoked cigarettes openly in the hallways at school, and had been to detention more times than anyone could count. I doubt he even kept track at this point.
I wasn’t the best student in the world myself, but hanging out with guys like him would do nothing good for my grades or my mental health. I didn’t like him, I didn’t want to be like him, and even if he wanted to talk to me about what ha
d happened to his sister, I didn’t want to hear it.
I had been friends with Grace before Alice had forced me to stop talking to her. Alice had claimed that Grace was Travis’s spy, but had no problem hooking up with him once Grace was out of the picture. It all seemed rather shady to me, but that was in the past. Grace wasn’t even at Crimson High anymore, and I could tell that Anthony was bothered by this. Why wouldn’t he be? His sister was in prison now.
Once Grace had gone away, I found that Anthony gravitated toward the people that she had been friends with, perhaps in an attempt to keep her spirit alive at the school. There are little bits of the people you know inside of you, and maybe he savored those bits when he talked to Grace’s old friends.
I was obviously one of them, and it annoyed me that he was always in my business at school. Sure, I had come to resent Alice just like he had, but that wasn’t reason enough to think nicely of him. Some say that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, but to me, he was nothing but trouble.
I hoped that the last few months of my senior year would be easier than the first months, but that proved not to be the case with Anthony worming his way into my life without my permission.
Chapter 1
“Amy, what’s up?” Anthony asked coolly, flicking a lit cigarette across the hallway at school and striding up to me.
His shirt was unbuttoned way to low on his chest for him to be following dress code, revealing the black ink that covered his torso. It was a wonder how he had all those grotesque tattoos at only 19 years old, but I suspected most of it was done during his time at some scummy juvenile detention center on the west coast.
His sleeves were rolled up halfway, and his pants sagged a little even though he had a belt on. He was the school’s nightmare student, but his dad was too rich for him to get kicked out of school without him doing something drastic, which he hadn’t managed to do yet. The worse the school could do was send him to detention every other day, which did little to convince him to behave normally.
I looked over at the cigarette that he had flicked carelessly across the hall, which was leaving a black mark on the tile as it burned slowly. “Are you going to put that out?” I asked.
Anthony rolled his eyes and walked over to it, stamping it out with more force than was needed. The sound of his foot hitting the tile echoed down the hallway. “There,” he said, crossing his arms and walking back to me. “Happy?”
I loathed men like Anthony. They acted like it was an enormous chore to show common courtesy. We were indoors, for god’s sake.
“Just don’t burn the damn school down. I think we’ve had enough of that shit already.” I thought back to the fire that took the lives of my ex-boyfriend Kain and several other students at Crimson High. I was still recovering from that and Anthony wasn’t exactly making it easy by tossing burning objects down the hall.
Anthony chuckled, but he didn’t sound happy. “Yeah, Travis has already done enough of that, right?”
Anthony wanted to pin everything awful that had occurred at Crimson High on Travis. He was the one that got Anthony’s sister chucked into prison on murder charges, after all.
I shrugged, closing my locker. “I guess so. I mean, we don’t really know who was responsible for the fires.”
“I know that it was Travis. Either him or Alice.” Anthony snapped at me. “You were friends with them, weren’t you?” He asked, squinting his ice-blue eyes at me.
Those eyes could rip you apart from across the room. I felt a chill when he looked at me like that. It was a dangerous and unfortunately arousing glare.
I shook my head. “ I was friends with Alice until she got wrapped up in Travis. After that, I don’t really know. I don’t want to be around them anymore.”
That was the truth. Alice had been my best friend for years until she got involved with one of the school bullies, Travis. He was a man not so much unlike Anthony, but I wouldn’t dare say it. They were sworn enemies now after what had happened to Anthony’s sister, Grace.
“Good move. Travis is a murderer and that would make Alice his accomplice,” Anthony stated smugly. “You would do well to stay away from those two. Let me take care of them.”
I wasn’t as certain as he was that they were the ones behind everything, but I still believe Anthony’s story more than Alice’s. He had an obvious bias, but he still made more sense and I resented Alice. I wasn’t sure what he meant by taking care of them, but I didn’t like the sound of that. Anthony was known to get violent with people he didn’t like.
I personally wouldn’t go that far against Alice and Travis. They were none of my business now, but Anthony had a huge grudge against them because of his sister. Not that I blamed him, but sometimes it’s best to let the past go. Clearly, Anthony didn’t think the same way I did.
Anthony stood in front of me with his arms crossed, not saying anything, like a videogame character before a brawl.
“Do you need something?” I asked, gathering my books for the next class and looking up at his stubbly face.
“Did you do the homework for math class?” He asked after a few seconds of staring at me.
“So, you came here to ask me if you could copy my homework?” I asked, growing irritated. I could see now that his sad attempt at a pleasant demeanor was a guise to get answers to the homework that he should have done the night before.
“Perhaps,” Anthony replied.
“Well, you’re out of luck,” I said sharply. I stacked the books from my locker into my hands, the hard corners pressing into my arms. They always made us use hardcovers at school, which I found quite inconvenient for carrying, but rather good if I ever needed a weapon to stab someone with.
“You didn’t do the homework?” Anthony asked, acting like that would be the only reason why I wouldn’t give him the information he wanted.
I didn’t want to leave him with that impression. “No,” I responded, “I’m not giving them to you because you don’t come to class.”
Anthony shrugged. “Fine, be a bitch. I don’t care about math anyway,” he said, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
I let that comment slide because I knew it was no use arguing with Anthony. He would amp up his rudeness in response to being challenged. Aggravating behavior, but predictable.
“Could you smoke those somewhere else?” I asked, not wanting to smell like an ashtray for the rest of the day.
Anthony eased a slim white stick with a silver band near the tip out of the packet. “These are menthols. It’s basically the same as gum,” he lied, sticking the cigarette between his lips and lifting a flame to it.
I jerked my head back and waved a hand through the smoke as Anthony puffed a few thin clouds into the hallway. “I’m going to tell the principal if you keep doing that,” I threatened, knowing that he wouldn’t care.
Sure enough, Anthony shrugged. “I already have detention this evening, so it doesn’t matter. Who gives a fuck anyway?”
“I’d rather not smell like it,” I replied.
“Too late,” Anthony said, blowing smoke into my face.
I coughed. “Jesus Christ,” I exclaimed, walking away from him and waving my hand in front of my face to push the smoke away. I didn’t understand why he was so much of a dick all the time. I’m sure he was bitter about his sister but that hadn’t been my fault.
I looked back at Anthony, who had propped himself up against my locker, eyes half-closed while he took a slow drag of his cigarette. I sighed and hurried to class. I would need to buy some air freshener to put in my locker tomorrow.
Chapter 2
I was going to get away from everything soon. It was winter break at Crimson High and the past was behind me now. My family had planned a ski trip up in the mountains again this year, but the difference was this time I was actually looking forward to it.
I never liked wintertime. The frost seeps into my core and I never feel warm again until summer. A lot of people really look forward to the holidays, but again,
they weren’t so cheery to me. It all seemed rather fake.
I remember my mother telling me about how people used the holidays to fight off the seasonal depression that set in when the weather grew colder. It was a way of staying warm and happy throughout desperate times. Fuck, why did things still have to be that way? This wasn’t the 1800s, this was the modern age, and yet it didn’t change. I may not have been hoarding food and gathering firewood in the house for winter, but that didn’t change how it made me feel.
Crimson High was even worse. There was a deadness in the air there since Kimberly’s body had been found. I hadn’t known her, and it had been years since she actually had died, but the fact that she had been there the whole time gave me the creeps. I didn’t want to be in that school anymore.
If I could have transferred out, I would have, but we lived in a relatively small town, and there weren’t any other prestigious private schools that my parents could send me to. I would have asked them in an instant if there were.
I was stuck there, with friends that were no longer friends and guys like Anthony smoking in my face. You would have thought the place was a reform school for convicts with how much shit went on there. I didn’t fit in at all.
I had tried to be happy and bubbly during the first half of my senior year, but I couldn’t keep up the ruse until graduation. Too many bad things had happened in my life for me to look forward to school anymore. I took solace in the time I spent away from it.
And Anthony. That guy wouldn’t get out of my space. He was buzzing around everyone who had known his sister, picking up little bits of her off people and driving me insane in the process. Grace was a fine enough friend, but she hadn’t been my best friend. I had talked to her on occasion, but Anthony acted like I knew everything about her.
Maybe he just missed his sister, which I could have understood, but I think there was more to it than that. I think he genuinely liked me, but I didn’t like him at all.
