by Eden Beck
His face is so close to mine that I can see the whites of his eyes as his voice drops dangerously low. His voice hisses out with a rage so intense, it makes the panic rise in my chest like never before as the scent of heavy liquor on his breath engulfs me.
“Better yet, I’ll show you what it is to be humiliated.”
Before I know what’s happening, he’s spun me around and slammed my body face-first into the wall. He presses me so hard that I have to turn my head sideways just to gasp for breath as my face is pressed against stone.
One of Jasper’s hands remain pressed to the top of my neck, pinning my head and shoulders to the wall while his other hand roughly reaches around the front of my torso and starts fumbling with the button of my pants.
My mind whirls, my thoughts so jumbled by pain and pressure that it takes me a second to realize what it is he’s doing.
His hips press into my backside, and the angry bulge there is unmistakable. The rage pulses through his body as his fingers fumble and fail at the caught zipper of my pants. He grunts in frustration, his hand instead reaching further forward to heatedly grope the space between my legs.
“I’ll show you what it is to be a man,” Jasper hisses in my ear, but something about him suddenly falters as his hand searches for something he won’t find. Not, at least, on me. “I heard you had a tiny dick but … but …”
I summon all my strength and gasp out, “Find what you were looking for, Jasper?”
His hand stops moving. In fact, all of him does.
Then he suddenly spins me back around t0 face him, my back pressed once again to the wall as his drunken eyes search over me again in a jerking, disjointed motion.
My vision is still blurry, but I can see his face as it suddenly changes. His eyes widen as he stares down at my chest in horror. I look down, following his gaze, and a drop of blood falls from some cut somewhere on my face.
In the scuffle, some of my shirt buttons popped right off. Beneath, I’m wearing a sports bra. And Jasper’s hand is directly over one of my breasts—still unmistakable despite their attempted binding.
As if the missing appendage between my legs wasn’t proof enough.
His eyes shoot up to mine. I stare at him. My stomach drops. Now he knows. Now I’m going to get it.
But Jasper’s mouth just falls open, something close to panic flashing there as he sobers just enough to realize who I am … and more importantly, what it was he was about to do.
I see the moment his eyes change, as recognition dawns on his face. The rage in him abates, replaced instead with sheer, and utter horror.
I stare defiantly back at him. I feel blood trickling from my forehead. I already know a bruise is forming on my cheek, near my eye. I hurt all over, and I’m still struggling to breathe. My vision still isn’t back to normal.
“Fuck, Alex,” he gasps after a second, his hand still frozen where he pins me to the wall. “All this time, you—” He stops himself, and I see the gears turning in his head. He snatches his hand back like my chest is filled with hot pokers. “Oh, shit. Oh shit.”
He can’t bring himself to say the words. You’re a girl.
“It was—” I cough several raking coughs that feel like they tear open the flesh of my throat. I know I don’t owe him an explanation, but it comes tumbling out of my mouth anyway. “It was the only way to get into Bleakwood.”
I gasp for breath again. I barely recognize my own voice.
He turns away from me and clutches his head. “I—I can’t. I almost—”
The way he moves is a new kind of terror. It’s like he’s lost, floating, and at the same time like he’s wrestling with an immeasurable weight that makes it impossible for him to hold his head up straight.
After a moment of pacing, Jasper suddenly bends double and retches.
“FUCK!”
His hands clutch so tight to the roots of his hair that I’m afraid he’s going to start ripping it from his scalp.
I want to run, but my limbs won’t obey my brain. Instead, I sink shakily down to the floor, feeling my consciousness slipping. My throat still rasps as I gasp for air.
Jasper heaves again, spilling the remaining contents of his stomach onto the floor. He turns and looks at me in horror once again with one hand still on his stomach. I’m sure I look a mess. I’m also sure I’m about to die; everything hurts, and my consciousness is waning. I’m seeing spots, but everything else is blurry.
But it’s not too blurry to see the moment that Jasper turns to me one last time before he flees, leaving me choking and alone in the dark classroom.
Like a coward.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Alex. Alex Trevellian?”
Blurry. Spots. Too bright, too dark. Everything hurts.
“Alex!”
I blink stupidly. I can barely remember why I’m here, all I know is that I’m not alone anymore. I’ve been found.
Found by the last person I’d want to find me.
Dean Robin appears in front of me, her outline blurry as light floods in from the open classroom door. Blood flecks the floor around her feet. Or the floor around me, really.
“Alex!” she calls again, her hand slipping beneath my elbow. “So, what do you want to do?”
“What?” My voice is slurred and creaky all at once. I thought she was trying to help me at first, but that’s not what her voice sounds like. She doesn’t sound tender or concerned. In fact, from the tone of her voice, she sounds angry … at me.
The dean seizes me under the armpits and hauls me to my feet. She’s really strong. I can’t stand up on my own, so she props me up. Her eyes scan me with a calculating expression.
There’s no pity on her face. That, even in my bleary state, I still note.
Her lips purse tight together. “This simply will not do, Alex.”
I blink up at her again, my mind finally starting to piece together the events of the last hours. The dance. The look on Jasper’s face. The way his hand snaked around my neck.
Then …
My secret.
The secret I’ve been trying to keep for months now, the same one that drove me away from Dean Robin at the dance.
Straight into Jasper’s waiting arms.
And yet here I am, facing Dean Robin anyway with my shirt still unbuttoned. If she didn’t suspect me before, she does now. It’s a cruel twist of fate that in running from her … I’ve ended up exposing myself.
Even as she searches my face, I see the moment her own expression shifts. She sees the recognition on my eyes and without waiting another moment, she pounces.
“Do you want to press charges against Jasper and lose your spot at the school?” she asks, slowing her speech so I can understand. “Or do you want my help staying?”
“Help,” I say immediately. I’m not even sure if I’m understanding her. Lose my spot? Stay? What does it matter now that she knows for sure that I’m a girl.
She pulls a cellphone out of her pocket as she wraps one arm around my waist and half-walks, half-carries me to the classroom door. I hear her talking to someone named Cynthia in clipped tones.
Somewhere between the dark of the classroom and the light of the hallway, I pass out. When I swim back to consciousness, Nurse Weber frowns down at me from above.
“You really should be resting.”
I blink. “Where am I?”
“The infirmary.”
I should have recognized it right away. I look around, expecting to take in the sterile lined walls of instruments and the view looking out onto the courtyard outside, but that isn’t what I end up fixating on. To my shock and horror, behind Ms. Weber sits Dean Robin, her long legs crossed at the knees.
It’s daytime. Sunshine falls through the windows.
“What happened?” I barely recognize my own voice. It’s sounds as broken as I feel.
“Thank you, Cynthia,” Robin says, standing up. “I’ll take it from here.”
Cynthia. The woman Dean Robin cal
led as she hobbled me out of that classroom last night. That I remember. What happened afterwards …
Ms. Weber looks at Dean Robin doubtfully, but she nods and slips away, letting the curtain fall behind her. I hear the main infirmary door shut moments later. Robin and I are left alone in my little compartment.
I glance down. I’m in a hospital gown of sorts, which makes me seem shapeless, but I tug it up self-consciously anyway.
“No need, Alex. Or should I call you Alexis?”
My stomach drops as I remember.
She saw me. She knows.
My horror must register on my face, because Dean Robin rolls her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m the one who approved your application. I’ve known you were a girl since the beginning.”
“What?” I can’t hide my astonishment.
“You want to continue at this prestigious establishment?” she asks. I blink at her wordlessly, so she elaborates. “Do you want to keep going to this school?”
“No, I—I understood the words,” I say a little defensively. “I just don’t understand what you mean.” I close my mouth and swallow my spit. My throat feels like it’s being punctured with a tiny rake. “Why would you approve my application here if you knew I was a girl all along?”
It’s Dean Robin’s turn to take a moment to find the right words. “I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long time, Alex,” she says, carefully. “I know you’re a girl. You know you’re a girl. And we both know something is terribly wrong with Bleakwood.”
I blink at her.
She stares back. “The Brotherhood,” she answers for me. “The boys’ club. The paying to get in instead of it being based on merit.”
“Oh.”
“So …” she starts, trailing off again. “So, when I saw your application … I saw an opportunity. One I couldn’t pass up.”
She begins to explain more, about how she nudged the dean here into accepting me in the first place. How she’s been hunting me down these last weeks, trying to get me to give my records to her instead of directly to the school. How she’s been trying to drop hints to me all semester.
“All semester, Alex, I’ve been trying to let you know that I’m a friend. I’m your ally, here.”
Even as she says it, things start to fall into place.
Of course, something like this couldn’t happen entirely on accident.
I wonder what else she’s had her hand in.
“But even I can only do so much,” Dean Robin says, sighing a moment as she looks me over. “That was quite the fight you got yourself into last night,”
I fall back against the pillows, and for just a moment, I close my eyes. But when I do, I see little flashes of last night—of the bulging veins in Jasper’s neck as his hand closed around me, of the burst of pain when his fists collided with me, the horror on his face as my true nature dawned on him—and I snap them back open again.
Dean Robin is looking at me closely again.
“It was …” I just shake my head. I was going to say it was my fault, that I goaded Jasper into it. But the ache in my body makes the words stall on my lips. Even if it was my fault that Jasper got angry, it didn’t give him the right to do what he did to me.
What he was going to do, before he realized who I was.
“Last night, I told the dean that you said you didn’t want to press charges against Jasper.”
“I what?” I almost shout as I sit up suddenly, but I start coughing halfway through.
“It was either that or you lose your spot here. I assumed you didn’t want that. Did I assume wrong?”
I settle back down onto the pillows, but I keep a close eye on the woman seated in front of me.
“No,” I croak, after a moment.
She nods. “Okay, good. I did ask you, you know. That should go on the record.”
I let out a cough again, but this time it comes out mixed with a strangled laugh. “As if anything about me is really going on record,” I say. “If I were to leave Bleakwood, I bet there’d be no proof I was ever even here.”
“Not Alex Trevellian, the girl. Not right away, anyway. Not if you left now.”
I nod, lost in thought for a moment. “Then I guess I owe you my thanks,” I say, a bit reluctantly.
“You’re welcome,” she says, “but you should know, I didn’t do it out of altruism. I need you, Alex. I want you to do something for me in return for me both keeping your secret and saving your education.”
I should’ve known there was a catch. There always is.
“What do you need?” I ask. “I don’t know how I can help you with anything.”
Not when I can barely help myself.
She leans forward to give me an intense look. “I want to take this school down from the inside. Change it. They’re already suspicious of me. Dean Withers is doing everything he can to make sure that I have my hands tied, but if I have someone here I can trust …”
I think I understand her meaning.
“You want me to be … what, some kind of spy for you?”
“Call it what you like, there’s info I need,” she says eagerly. “I’ve kept your secret, Alex. Now’s the time to pay up. Bleakwood needs to change. You’ve been here for almost half a year, you should know that. Just look at that stupid Brotherhood tradition they have!”
She fixes me with a look. “You of all people should want this school to change, Alex. And this change, it could all start with you.”
She takes my hand, a gesture that makes me want to flinch away, but she only holds on tighter. “You could make sure that The Brotherhood never bullies another student here. You could make sure that Bleakwood stops turning a blind eye to the horrors taking place in these halls.”
I don’t answer. I turn away and stare up at the ceiling, confused. I start shaking. My throat burns.
This last semester here at Bleakwood has been challenging to say the least, and Dean Robin isn’t wrong. Most of that angst, that hardship, the humiliation and pain … it’s been thanks to The Brotherhood and the leeway that the administration gives them.
But still, snooping around and trying to find incriminating evidence for Dean Robin to use against this place … it seems wrong somehow. Despite all Bleakwood’s faults, it really is a good school. It will open doors for me that no other school could.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” I say, after a moment.
But apparently, it’s not really a choice.
“You either help me,” she says seriously, “or I reveal your secret, and you get expelled.”
I shut my eyes tight. My parents won’t be able to pay for my college, I know that. With Bleakwood on my resume, I’m basically guaranteed a full ride anywhere. That’s what sent me here in the first place, after all.
I’ve been masquerading as a guy this whole time. Might as well get something good out of it. And it feels good to know my secret is relatively safe with someone.
“Okay,” I sigh. “I’ll do it.”
Dean Robin grins and seizes my hand. “You won’t regret this. It’s good to have you on the team.” She stands up and walks off before I can ask what team she means.
There’s three of us at least now. Dean Robin. The nurse, Cynthia Weber. Myself.
Four, if you count Rafael … though I doubt he’d be as enthusiastic about helping me if he knew what I was up to now.
But even with these keepers of my secrets, I still find myself alone.
Nurse Weber doesn’t come back into the infirmary right away. I lay in my paper-thin hospital gown beneath the thin infirmary sheets and stare up at the white ceiling.
What in the world did I just agree to?
And what am I supposed to do now?
The semester might be over, but a new one is about to begin. I might have arrived here at Bleakwood naively not knowing what to expect, but I know now. I’ve been to hell and back already in these few short months.
I think back to when I first arrived here at Bleakwood and
remember Beck’s warning about wolves. He was right … just not about which wolves I needed to look out for.
Jasper might know my greatest secret, but now I know his. I know his violence. I know what he is capable of.
And I am bitter.
A Note From The Author
Thank you for reading Bitter, the first book in my new Wicked Brotherhood series! The next book should be out mid-to-late December 2020, and can be ordered on Amazon here.
If you enjoyed Bitter, please consider leaving a review on Amazon!
One important note—this series is meant to be a work of fiction and is not meant to glorify abuse or bullying. If you or someone you know is a victim of this kind of behavior, please consider reaching out for help:
https://www.stompoutbullying.org
https://www.stopbullying.gov
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255)
Xoxo,
Eden
Also by Eden Beck
Wicked Brotherhood
Bitter
Hateful
Wretched
Wolfish
Wolf Bonded
Wolf Broken
Wolf Bargain
Hawthorne Holy Trinity
Dirty Liars
Dirty Fraud
Dirty Revenge
