Vicious: A Dark Bully Reverse Harem Romance (Beautiful Tyrants Book 3)

by Vanessa Winters

  When I walked out into the living room, I saw Michael standing in front of one of the windows just staring out at the night. He was shirtless and had a pair of soft gray joggers on. Those were my favorite pants on him. The drawstring waistband hung just below his hips which gave a teasing taste of what was underneath and showed his muscular and svelte physique. I couldn’t see the front of them from here since his back was facing me, but I knew exactly how it looked when the cozy cotton fabric clung against the bulge that hung between his legs. Just thinking about it made me want to touch him in a way that was hard for me to push from my thoughts. I walked up behind him and gently put my hand on the back of his shoulder.

  “Hey,” I said softly.

  He didn’t flinch at all, so my presence there must not have surprised him. I guessed that he probably saw my reflection walking toward him in the glass window.

  “Hey,” he said as he turned his head toward me and gave me a tired and gentle smile.

  He wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me carefully next to him as we stared out the window together.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For doubting you, even for a second.”

  “You never said that you believed Sarah and her lies,” he said.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then you have nothing to be sorry about.”

  “I should have immediately stood by you more strongly,” I said, feeling bad.

  “No,” Michael said as he pulled me even closer to his hip. “You weren’t the one lying here. It’s okay; you and I are okay.”

  “Why did he do it?” I asked with tears in my eyes.

  It hurt to think that Adam would lie to me and try to hurt us. I never thought in a million years that he would ever lie to my face. I felt so hurt and so stupid.

  “He’s hurt,” Michael said.

  “You don’t sound as angry at him as you were before,” I said.

  “I’m not. How can I be? Adam knows that he’s lost you, at least in terms of being able to have you all to himself and to make love to you. I don’t blame him for trying everything he could to try and get you back. I would have done the same thing.”

  “Even if it meant betraying your friend?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Even if it meant lying to me?”

  “No,” Michael said as he looked right into my eyes. “That is something that I would never do.”

  18

  Michael and I ended up staying together in the living room all night and eventually falling asleep on the couch. It was cozy being wrapped in his arms with my legs curled up against him. We talked for a while about things and then let our eyes close and waited to deal with all of the issues that would face us in the morning after getting some rest.

  When we woke up in the morning, I wanted to go and confront Adam even before making a cup of coffee. In hindsight, I should have known that was a bad idea. I’m never a morning person, no matter how much sleep I have gotten the night before. I really shouldn’t attempt to talk to anyone or solve any problems before at least one cup of caffeine in the morning. But I couldn’t help wanting to get the matter resolved.

  Michael had softened my attitude about it a little bit when he had told me how to look at things from Adam’s perspective and been honest about the fact that he would have been tempted to do something similar before just letting me go. It was too difficult for me to stay mad at Adam, so even though I still felt hurt that I had been lied to; I wanted to quickly resolve it and have a heart-to-heart with him so that we could move on. I needed to hear from him why he had lied to me and then I knew that we could find a way to repair the trust that had been broken. Adam and I had been through too much together to let that go.

  I could see out the window that Rob was already up and had gotten an early morning start at working on his bike. I was glad that he had a project he was so interested in to keep his focus off all of this other craziness. He seemed to be the most level-headed thinker of us all right now.

  “I’m going to go talk to Adam,” I said as I slowly let go of Michael’s hand and got ready to walk back down the hall toward the bedroom.

  “Before coffee?” he teased. “I don’t envy Adam this morning.”

  I let out a small laugh as I walked away. Michael had a way of making things feel like they were going to be okay no matter what. Even in some of the most ridiculous situations, he was somehow able to make me laugh, and I was grateful for it. I gave myself a little pep talk on the way to the bedroom. I would be patient, and calm, and I would try not to get angry or cry; at least not until I heard what Adam had to say. The only thing that I knew that would definitely set me off right from the start, was if Adam still tried to deny that he had lied, because it was very clear that he had. When I walked into the bedroom, I had expected to see him getting up since he normally didn’t sleep in late. But instead of finding him awake, I found him in trouble.

  “Adam!” I screamed as I ran over to the bed and put both my hands on the sides of his face.

  He was feverish, and convulsing, and foaming at the mouth.

  “Michael!” I screamed at the top of my lungs until he came running into the room to see what was wrong.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” I cried.

  Michael quickly called the paramedics as I tried to wake Adam and make sure that he was still breathing. It looked like he was choking on something but there wasn’t anything in his mouth. He was burning up and his skin was so hot that it looked as if someone had applied a thick layer of blush to his cheeks. I listened to his heartbeat, which was racing out of control, and heard his labored breaths. As soon as Michael had hung up the phone, he pulled open Adam’s eyelids with his fingertips and saw the whites of his eyes only. I cried until the tears were dripping onto Adam’s face.

  “The ambulance is on its way,” Michael said in as reassuring a voice as he could manage.

  “What happened to him?” I asked. “Last night he was having nightmares, but I thought he was okay when I got out of bed.”

  “I don’t know,” Michael said somberly as he watched Adam shaking on the top of the bed.

  Rob showed up in the doorway just a few moments later with the paramedics. He had no idea what was happening until the paramedics had pulled up in front of the house.

  “What happened?” he asked us.

  Michael and I both looked at him with blank faces. Neither of us knew what was wrong with Adam. We backed up and let the paramedics do their job. They talked quickly among themselves and one of them went back out to the ambulance and returned a minute later with a syringe that they injected into Adams’s arm. I heard them mutter the words “toxin” and “system flush”. I held onto Michael’s chest, with a wad of his shirt fabric clenched in my fist as we waited and tried not to hysterically interrupt the emergency workers. When they loaded Adam onto a stretcher and got ready to carry him out to the truck, one of the paramedics came over to talk to us.

  “Your friend was poisoned,” he said. “Any idea how that could have happened?”

  “Poisoned?” I asked in shock.

  I started to cry again.

  “It’s okay ma’am,” the paramedic said. “He’s going to be fine. Looks like it was either a low-dose or a weak toxin that he ingested.”

  “How can you tell?” Michael asked.

  “Because based on his symptoms, if it wasn’t, he’d be dead already.”

  “What’s going to happen to him now?” I asked.

  “We’re going to get him to the hospital where he’ll receive some more meds and fluids to purge his body of the toxin. He’ll feel like crap for a couple of days but then should make a full recovery. We already gave him a shot of something that will calm his heart down and steady his breathing. It’s good that you called when you did. Any longer could have cost him his life.”

  “But you said it was a weak toxin,” I said.

  “Any toxin is still poison,�
� the paramedic answered. “Some are just easier to treat than others as long as we get to them in time. You’re welcome to ride in the truck to the hospital with your friend if you’d like.”

  “Yes please,” I said as I wiped my eyes and nodded my head.

  “Rob and I will follow behind the ambulance,” Michael said as he kissed me on the forehead. “We’ll see you at the hospital.”

  “Okay,” I nodded. I felt like I was dreaming. Who would want to poison Adam? And how could they have even gotten inside the house?

  Unless, they were already here.

  “Hey,” I smiled when Adam opened his eyes in the hospital bed. “We really all need to stop spending nights in hospitals together.”

  Adam chuckled but then coughed, which looked like it hurt.

  “What happened?” he said. “All I can remember is having some wicked nightmares and then waking up here.”

  “Well, according to the doctors, you ingested some poison,” I said. “Do you have any idea how that happened?”

  Adam furrowed his brow.

  “Yeah, actually; I think I do. But before I tell you about that, I need to apologize,” he said as he sat up straighter against the head of the hospital bed. “Lisette, I lied to you. I lied to everyone. I never wanted to lie to you. You have to know that I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  “But you did hurt me,” I said as the tears came to my eyes again. “I never thought you would be dishonest with me, Adam. I have always trusted you.”

  “I know,” he said as his eyes got glassy too. “And I’m not sure how to fix that now, or how to rebuild the trust that we once had. I just couldn’t imagine a life without you. I didn’t want to. I know that I made that agreement with Michael and Rob, and I know that I should have kept it. But Lisette, I just couldn’t think clearly when I thought about not being able to be with you anymore. It was stupid and horrible of me to do, and I am so sorry. I can’t ask you to forgive me for that.”

  I leaned forward and kissed the side of his cheek.

  “I’ve already forgiven you,” I said.

  “You have?” he asked in surprise.

  “Yes. We’ve all done awful things that we wish we could take back, myself included. We’ve been through so much, and sometimes we do things without thinking because we’ve just reached our limit. I understand that. Trust can be rebuilt over time; I’m just glad that you’re okay.”

  Adam reached out and held my hand as I sat on the edge of his bed beside him.

  “Can we come in?” Michael’s voice was accompanied a small knock against the open doorframe.

  “Yeah,” Adam said with a nod.

  “Look, I owe you both an apology,” Adam started to say again. “Michael, especially you. I—”

  “Not necessary,” Michael said as he extended his hand out for Adam to take. “We heard everything you said from the doorway. And just like I told Lisette, I would have done the same thing.”

  “Nah,” Adam said. “You’re a better man than me. You wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Well, I would have done something similar,” Michael said, still holding his hand out to Adam.

  Adam took his hand and with one solid shake, their friendship was on its way to being mended again.

  “So what’s this idea that you have about how you could’ve gotten poisoned?” Rob asked as he sat down in one of the chairs in the room.

  “Right before I went to bed, Sarah brought me a glass of whiskey. She told me that it was from Michael; an apology for bashing in my face.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” Michael said.

  “It’s okay,” Adam replied. “I deserved it.”

  “Wait, so you’re saying that Sarah was the one who poisoned you?” I asked as a pit formed in my stomach.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why would she do that?” Michael asked.

  “I told her that I was going to tell you guys the truth. She had seen me upset a couple of days before and she asked me about it. I wasn’t thinking clearly and when she told me that she was pregnant and then asked if there was anything that she could do to help, I came up with the stupid plan of lying about Michael having slept with her. As soon as I did it, I knew it was wrong. I knew that I would regret it and almost immediately wanted to tell you guys the truth. But the longer the lie went on, the deeper it got, and the more difficult it was to crawl out of. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I told Sarah that I was going to come clean. She seemed angry and upset about it. She told me that she liked it the way things were, and she wanted to keep pretending that Michael was the father of her baby. She tried to convince me to keep playing along with it, but I told her no. I told her that I was planning to talk to you guys about it the next morning. At first, she seemed mad, but then she calmed down and just said okay. I thought it was over at that point. When she came in to give me the whiskey and told me that it was a peace offering between Michael and I, I was so hopeful about fixing the relationships that I had damaged, that I didn’t give it a second thought. I drank it and fell asleep, and that’s when the crazy nightmares started happening.”

  This was bad—really bad. Sarah was not only psychotic, but she was dangerous. She actually poisoned Adam and she could have killed him. She had intended to kill him.

  “We need to get her out of that house before she has the chance to hurt anyone else,” Michael said.

  “Agreed,” Rob said. “Do you want to press charges?”

  Adam looked at the two of them, not knowing what to do about her.

  “No, I don’t think that would do any good,” Michael said. “Sarah is mentally insane. She needs help. She needs to be locked up in a mental institution, not a prison.”

  “I’ll call some of the guys at the precinct and ask how we should go about removing her from the house and getting her into a place where she can’t hurt anyone else, and where she can get the care and medicines that she obviously needs.”

  “We need to stop,” I said.

  “Stop what?” Michael asked.

  “All of this. The Sanctuary, trying to manifest my mother’s wishes. It all needs to stop.”

  All three guys looked at me with concern and confusion on their faces.

  “But this was what you said you wanted,” Michael reminded me.

  “Yeah, I know. But this,” I said as I motioned toward all the tubes poking out of Adam’s arm and stomach, which had helped flush his body of the poison that could have killed him. “This craziness and damage are not what I wanted. I was a fool to think that this was going to work out. We’re in over our heads and we need to end it.”

  “And by end, you mean what?” Michael asked.

  “I mean give it all up, hand it all over to someone else to deal with and be done trying to fulfill my mother’s wishes.”

  “You sure you want to do that?” Adam asked. “You’ve been trying to avenge and honor your mother ever since the day she was killed.”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  After Adam was discharged from the hospital and we were all back at the house, the first thing that the guys wanted to do was to get Sarah out of there. I did too, but I also wanted to know why she had done something as horrible as trying to kill someone. The guys protested, but I wanted a couple of minutes to talk to her alone. Of course, Michael still stood right outside of the closed door to Sarah’s bedroom, just in case I needed him so that he could be within earshot. But when I asked Sarah why she did it, she simply stared at me and had no answer to give at all.

  When I left her room, I knew that my decision to walk away from all of this was the right one. I realized that I couldn’t try to be like my mother any longer, and that I couldn’t run this place the way that my mother would have wanted. I had spent so long trying to fulfill the empty hole in my heart that my mother left behind when she died. I had tried to fill it by chasing after anything that reminded me of her, including trying to be her. I tried to do the things that I thought would make her proud of me and that
would honor the memory of the kind of woman that she was. And I now realized that I had finally found closure in letting go. I let go of my mother’s wishes and came to terms with the fact that my mother would just want me to be happy and to live my own life. Maybe I had to go through all of those other things first, so that I could finally know that it was okay to let go and to move on.

  It wasn’t nearly as difficult handing The Sanctuary over to someone else, as it was getting it all set up. In fact, the process was so fast and simple that it was symbolically like closing a door. Rob had managed to get a friend from the precinct to arrange for Sarah’s transport to a nearby institution. They made an agreement that as long as Sarah was being confined to the institution and being treated for her mental illness, that no charges would be brought against her. Ownership of The Sanctuary was transferred, and the four of us got packed and ready to head back up to Asheville. This time, it was unlikely that all of us would remain there for too long. We talked about it and decided that all of the guys would stay together at the cabin for a little while longer to decompress from everything that had happened here and rebuild our relationships to bring everyone back to a good place. Then, Adam and Rob would find their own places to live somewhere nearby so that we could still all hang out as friends. Michael and I would stay together in the cabin.

  It didn’t take long to get things packed up and ready to go. We didn’t have that much in the way of material things that we cared about anymore. Really, all that any of us cared about and wanted was just to leave together and get back to the place that we loved. This time, before we got in the car, we stopped to take our last breath of Charlotte.

  “We’re not coming back here again this time, right?” Rob asked.

  “Right,” I said. “Never, ever again.”

  It felt good to get in the car this time. We weren’t running from anything. We weren’t leaving each other. We were simply closing the door on all of this and heading toward a new future. This time it was a choice, not a reaction. And this time we were all equally on board. There was no one calling the shots; we were all equally vested in the futures that we would create.