This is book 2 in the "Beautiful Destruction" series. You MUST READ "Theirs to Claim" first in order to understand this one.
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When I was ten, my father told me that all of my dreams would one day come true. Naively, I believed him.
I may have gr...
Content Warning: Discussions about suicide and negative symptoms of antidepressants.
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Chapter 26 : Caleb Thursday, December 1st, 2022
The pain I felt for the woman in my arms was indescribable, watching as Madelyn's body slumped against me with the last of her tears trickling down her face.
There was silence now in the sense that she'd passed out and her sobs weren't there to cut through me anymore, but it was the words left unspoken that created the loudest of beats.
Pulling Madelyn closer to me and wiping away her unfallen tears, I didn't bother to hide mine as I looked up at the two men I loved like family, Alec quiet and stunned and Xavier just so simply heartbroken he had nothing to say.
His mom was alive—Alessia was alive—and yet never once has she reached out to him in all these years. I can't even begin to imagine how he was feeling right now, how he was handling this, but I knew just by the grief stricken on his face that he believed what Madelyn said.
Even with her truth, though, I just couldn't see how something like this could be possible. I was only twelve when Xavier's mom died—I hadn't even known him yet—but he's told me how it happened.
She'd died in his arms as a result of being poisoned by a plant called belladonna, further investigation indicating that it had been consumed orally from the drink she'd had at dinner the night she died.
You wanna know who served her the drink? None other than the nobody waiter Marcus Caddel was at the time. Madelyn would've been seven then, and according to what she's told us, her father didn't start leaving until she was ten.
At some point, however, when she was likely too young to remember, Marcus snuck away for a week to murder Xavier's mother, and yet, all I can ask myself if why?
What would he gain from that, and if Alessia really was alive now, then whose grave has Xavier gone to visit once a year when he thinks we don't notice?
"Vincent was killing her slowly in that home." Xavier spoke the first words since Madelyn passed out in my arms, my heart breaking for him as I listened. "He was killing her, and I think she faked her own death so she could escape him."
He seemed so detached as he said it, almost distant with his eyes on the girl by my side, so unwavering it was like she was grounding him and he didn't even know it.
I found Alec looking at her too before his gaze traveled over to me, all of us caught up in this shit storm with no real way out.
If what Xavier suspected was true—that his mother faked her death, even though it meant leaving him behind with that monster of a father—then the woman still alive didn't deserve him.
Of course, we couldn't confirm anything until Madelyn woke back up from the drugs we'd given her, but there were more things we had to discuss apart from this news. While I may be biased in the fact that I've never even met Alessia, Madelyn was my priority right now.
