Page 51 of Beautiful When He Breaks

“Listen to me—”

“I am listening, Jules,” he interjects. “I’ve been listening. That’s why I’m telling you this ends now.”

“I know it ends now.” The words come out harder than I expect because for all the shame and confusion and self-disgust, there is one clean thing in me tonight. “I fucking know. But it’s not easy, because this man could literally kill my career before it even takes off.”

That checks him for a second. I take the opening and keep going before he can bulldoze over me again.

“I’m not defending him or making excuses. I know what this is now, okay? Maybe I knew before and didn’t want to say it, but I know it now. I just… I need to do this right. I need to not blow Eli’s life up worse in the middle of his shit or lose my scholarship. I can’t trigger some mess that takes down the team before we’ve got proof, or a plan, or something stronger than me finally saying it out loud.”

Luca stares at me for a long moment. Then he exhales through his nose, and some of the immediate violence leaves his posture, though not much. “Fine. We plan. But you are not seeing him again. You’re done. No more calls, no more meetings, no more letting him get you alone because he asks in the right tone.”

“I’ll try,” I say, and this time I mean it.

He studies me before he eventually offers me a nod. “Tomorrow, we talk to Mara.”

My head jerks up. “Killian’s lawyer?”

“She’s already handling Eli’s mess, and this just became a bigger mess,” he says with a shrug. “We need to know what your options are, what reporting looks like, what the school can do, what the team can do, and how to keep you safe while we burn that bastard’s life to the ground.”

The bluntness of it would almost be funny if I weren’t suddenly so tired I could sleep standing. My throat tightens before I can stop it, and Luca sees that too but mercifully doesn’t comment. One breakdown per night is my current limit.

“You should sleep,” he says. “And if he calls tonight, you don’t answer. If he texts, you screenshot and send it to me.”

I blink at him. “That feels aggressive.”

“It is aggressive.” His mouth goes flat. “I’m in an aggressive mood. Get some sleep. We deal with the rest tomorrow.”

I almost tell him to go fuck himself because kindness at the wrong moment can feel like an exposed nerve. Instead, I nod once, because that’s all I can manage without my throat going dry.

Then I open the door and walk straight into the last fucking person I wanted to see.

Killian is leaning against the opposite wall, arms folded, and head tilted to the side. He isn’t pretending to have just walked by. He’s staring directly at me.

Fuck.

There’s no point in insulting Killian’s intelligence by pretending otherwise. “How much did you hear?”

He looks at me with that terrifying level of calm and says, “Enough.”

16

Eli

I realize I am not built for pediatricians about three minutes after we walk through the doors.

Up until then, I was still under the delusion that I was handling this fine. Not well, exactly, because “well” would suggest I’m calm and competent and functioning like a grown man who definitely didn’t spend ten full minutes in the Sin Bin kitchen this morning asking Mrs. Alvarez whether Mila’s poop looked “normal two-month-old yellow” or “hospital-needs-to-be-called yellow.”

But I’m upright. I’m dressed. Mila is in her car seat in a duck onesie because the entire house has entered some unconscious duck cult, and nobody can stop buying her yellow things with beaks on them.

She’s two and a half months old now, which means she feels bigger in my arms than she did in those first wrecked days, but not big enough for any of this to feel less terrifying.

I remembered the diaper bag, the extra bottle, the wipes, the spare onesie, the blanket, and the little folder Killian made for “medical essentials” in a terrifyingly neat plastic sleeve. I even remembered her insurance paperwork, which Mara said would help speed up some of the intake process while the rest of the legal stuff keeps moving.

That felt like winning three minutes ago, right up until the receptionist smiled and asked, “Mila’s two-month checkup?” and my mind immediately went, absolutely not.

The pediatrician’s office is too cheerful. That’s my first issue. The walls are painted in soft blues and greens with little animals stenciled along the trim, and there’s a bead maze in the corner next to a low bookshelf full of board books with titles that sound aggressively wholesome.

The chairs in the waiting room are arranged in one of those friendly little semicircles that make it impossible to avoid eye contact with other adults. A toddler in tiny sneakers is trying to feed crushed crackers to a stuffed giraffe while his mother looks like she hasn’t slept in six months. Somewhere behind the desk, a printer keeps spitting out forms.