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My Bully’s Crush, Vol.1 Chapter 49 98%
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Chapter 49

*Ryder*

“Ryder?” Her voice sounded groggy with sleep.

“I’m here, baby girl.”

“I thought it was a dream.” For a few seconds more, she held on tight until she came fully awake, and reality set in. Then she tried easing away from me, but I wasn’t yet ready to let go.

I knew that once I did, the fear would be back in her eyes, and it was killing me that, once again, I’d handled things so poorly. I should’ve waited until things were settled, but still, how could I have done that, knowing she was in trouble?

There was no threat of immediate physical danger, and I knew I had to take things slow and be extra careful with how I handled things in the next few days. I came here knowing that I would have to leave her physically for at least a few days, but I couldn’t wait to rekindle the bond that had been broken. Now, I was having second thoughts about my strategy.

There was no hope for it, though, no turning back, and all I could do was make sure she knew that I wouldn’t ever leave her again, that I was here for her and with her, and that we were back together as one again. That I will never abandon her again in this life, no matter what. To me, that was more important than anything else and still is.

It sucks that we had to go through what we had in order for me to get to this point, to come to the realization that hurting her hurts me more than it does her, and now that I know, I’d rather cut off my right arm before harming a hair on her head. Still, here we are, and once again, I have to play the bad guy. I’m going to be the bearer of bad news.

It never once entered my mind that she wouldn’t believe me. If there’s one thing I have going for me, it’s the fact that I never lied to her, not even when it hurt like hell. But this, I know, is going to sting, and I wish like hell I didn’t have to do it. I wish I could spare her more heartache, but my hope is that now that she has me again, it will somehow soften the blow.

“Baby, wake up, I have to leave soon, but before I go, there’s something I need to tell you.”

She came fully awake, maybe alerted by the tone in my voice, and when she tried to sit up, I let her go to face me. “What is it?” I could tell she expected me to say something bad, maybe that I’d been using her again, and that hurt, but not as much as what I was about to say.

“I thought long and hard about telling you this, and believe me, if I could spare you, I would.” Even now, I find it hard to say the words.

“What is it? Just tell me already.” I watched her brace herself as if expecting a blow and felt pain in my heart and gut. She’s so tiny, her little body almost half of mine, and she’d been through so much. Why had I lost sight of that?

“Rachel is part of it.”

“Which Rachel? Part of what?”

I didn’t want to answer that question because I could already see the fear in her eyes. Just rip the Band-Aid off Ryder.

“Your roommate.” She tried jumping up from the bed, and I grabbed her hand and brought her back.

“I’m sorry, but you have to hear this.”

Her breathing was already accelerated, and I was afraid that she’d have some sort of panic attack or something. Being mindful of her already fragile mind, I wrapped my arms around her to offer comfort, as if that alone would keep the world and the darkness at bay.

I told her what I knew, trying not to leave anything out and hating myself with each word. This, too, was on me. I’m the one who had put her in this position, the one who had brought the danger into her life that had, in a roundabout way, caused her friend to betray her.

When the first tear fell on my arm, I could’ve killed someone. No matter what we’d been through or how long we’d been apart, the one thing I could never endure was her tears.

Each time I read about her breaking down on stage or being photographed with red puffy eyes, it was as if someone was poking me in the chest with a hot poker, and that’s when I was still getting high. Seeing her like this with nothing to buffer the emotions I felt was torture for me, and I could only imagine what she was feeling.

Rachel wasn’t just a friend. She was someone she’d trusted enough to let move in with her. Someone she’s been taking care of in many ways for years. So that makes two people who’d betrayed her in the worst way possible, and the rub is that she doesn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve it from me, nor from her friend.

I knew this news would devastate her and had tried coming up with a million other ways to break it to her, but there was no way to soften the blow. “Let me see what you’ve found.” Her voice sounded the way I remembered it from our youth. That sweet, gentle soul that had swept me off my feet was still alive in there, and it was her I was afraid of harming.

The new brave Elena was something I was going to have to get used to, but the soft-spoken angel I fell in love with all those years ago wasn’t very good at handling betrayal. As someone who’d betrayed her in the worst way, I now found myself in the precarious position of wanting to protect her from even more treachery.

“Okay, I’ll show you. I downloaded everything to the files on my phone. Come here.” I sat up with my back against the headboard and pulled her around between my thighs so that her back rested against my chest as I reached over and grabbed my phone from the nightstand.

I took a deep breath before pulling up the files I’d compiled and allowed her to read without interference. Her body had gone stiff, and I was afraid that she would break at any moment, but miraculously, she held it together.

Even when we played the recorded messages between Rachel and the organization run by the church that was behind this whole thing, she didn’t give me any indication of what she was feeling.

“What do you want to do? I’m here; nothing is ever going to hurt you again; I won’t let it.”

“She messed with my medication?”

“Yes, it was all so that they could control you, the same way I was being controlled.”

“Is all of this true?” I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the top of her head. There was so much hurt and misery in her voice that I almost wished that I hadn’t told her any of this. That I hadn’t thrown her life back into turmoil just hours after making up.

Why am I always hurting her? No matter how I try, I can’t seem to escape that fate. But I had made a promise to myself that this time around, I would be honest with her, that I wouldn’t hold anything back. It was the only way

“I’m sorry, yes. I made doubly sure before I brought it to you.”

“I feel so stupid. I’ve trusted her all these years. Why did she do this to me?”

“I don’t think it was personal; they used something against her. It’s just what they do. These people are monsters. They have no human emotion whatsoever. They do it for money.” She shook her head and gazed off across the room.

“No, there’s got to be something bigger than that at play here. Do they do this with everyone?”

“I’m afraid so. It’s like some sort of cult.”

“What do you mean?”

“In a nutshell, it’s the price we pay for stardom. They want to own us in every way possible. Those of us who don’t toe the line will be dealt with in ways you can’t even imagine.”

“What about my diagnosis, was my doctor in on it as well?” She looked back at the screen and started scrolling furiously.

“Yes, most of the people we know are part of their sick organization.”

“But he said it was genetic.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder why no one else in your family suffers the same thing?”

“Anyway, I looked it up. It’s not only genetics but the environment as well as chemical restructuring of the brain.”

“What does that mean?” I was afraid she would ask that, and this part, believe it or not, was the worst.

“It means they fed you something that brought on your psychosis and manic episodes to make you think you were crazy. And then they attacked you in the press, knowing that you’d have a relapse. All the while, she was feeding you this thing to keep you off balance.”

“This sounds so farfetched. I always wondered how it could happen that way, just out of the blue, but I never imagined it could be something like this. I just thought the stress from the breakup had brought it on, and I was led to believe that it could’ve played a part, but this….”

“What about the cancer?”

“You were injected.” Now she turned in my arms to look at me with a look of disbelief on her face. That I could handle, but it was the tears that filled her eyes that unmanned me.

“Don’t cry, baby; we’ll take care of everything. I promise you.”

It had been hell hearing about all of this and not being able to go to her or do anything about it, but the guys had reassured me that it could be handled, that they had people on hand who could help her with what had been done to her. I’m no medical expert, but I’d learned to trust them and took their word for it.

“When you came in last night, it looked as if you were scanning the room, were you?” Now comes an even harder part. “Your house is bugged, and so was mine. How else would they be able to keep tabs on our every move? This bedroom was safe; I guess Rachel told them that no one uses this side of the house, so they figured it was safe. When we walk out of here, we’ll act as if everything is normal.”

“Don’t act in any way that you’re not accustomed to. Keep it light….”

“Are there cameras here as well? Or just listening devices.”

“Both!” Now she panicked and tried pulling away again.

“Doesn’t that mean that they know you’re here?”

“No, I found the location of the cameras as soon as I walked in with this.” I showed her the device on my watch that allowed me to scan for any device within range. It’s one of Tyler’s gadgets that allows me to turn things off the way they did in my house without anyone watching being the wiser.

“There’s one in the kitchen, which is where you hang out most of the time, but none up here. I guess they figured with Rachel here, they didn’t need too many cameras since she’s always around.”

“That’s true. Is that why you came today? Because she’s gone for a few days?”

“I arranged that, actually.”

“You?”

“Yes, I found out that the only person she really cares about is her ailing mother, who she spends a fortune on to keep in that care facility she lives in. That’s how they got to her in the first place. She needed the money to care for her mom. Anyway, I had them call her with a medical emergency….”

“You didn’t actually do anything to her mother, did you?”

“No, of course not, I’m not them. Her mother has a condition that needs constant care, so any little change is cause for alarm. She just caught a cold, is all, which worked out in our favor. Otherwise, I’d have had to come up with something, some other way to get her out of the way.”

“So, what do we do now?”

“I have a plan if you’ll trust me.” I searched her eyes when she looked at me and released the breath I was holding when she nodded her head silently.

***

*Janie*

Has anyone noticed that Janie Andrews has been looking a bit rough lately? Well, we here at SNY might have the answer. It’s just come to our attention that the young wife of one of our leading pop stars, and soon-to-be movie star, might be suffering from something she picked up while doodling the help. You heard it here first, folks.

“What the hell is this?” I screamed at the head of my PR team as I paced the floor. This was the last thing I needed with everything else that was going on right now. Ryder has been locked away in his suite for the past twenty-four hours, and no one could get by his guard dogs to take so much as a peep at him.

My dad’s house was in foreclosure thanks to this MengeLiNi person who wasn’t satisfied with doing it behind the scenes but had broadcasted the embarrassing event on social media for all the world to see, and now all the idiots were coming up with one conspiracy theory after the next.

There was no help coming from Mary, Scott, or even Matt because they were all dealing with their own issues. It seemed like everyone had been attacked at the same time in some sort of organized blitz attack, and as soon as we put out one fire, another was burning out of control, and Ryder was nowhere to be found when I needed him.

Come to think of it, it’s not like he needed that deal with the Saunders group anyway; he had plenty of money and fame already. He just needed to be here with me. I was slowly going out of my mind already, and now this latest post was going to send me over the edge.

I’m not sure who was giving out personal information; it could be Mary trying to take the heat off herself. My team had barely played down the leaked photos of me and the bodyguard, only for this news to be exposed weeks later. What are people going to think? Obviously, where there’s smoke, there’s fire will be their first conclusion.

“We’re already handling it, but you’ve got to calm down.” I could almost hear the censure in her tone, and it rubbed me the wrong way. I know she wanted to blast me for starting the attacks on that bitch Elena, which seems to have been the catalyst for all this, but I wasn’t in the mood to hear it.

I have very few pleasures in the world as it is, so if I get my kicks by rubbing shit in her face, so what. Nobody seems to understand my plight. Everyone is always on her side, even my own husband, so how the hell am I supposed to react?

If she wants to blame someone, she should blame him; if he had shown me even an ounce of what he’d shared with her, I wouldn’t be this miserable. I would’ve been happy enough in our marriage to forget she even existed, but instead, he’d mooned over her from afar and never did much to hide the fact from me.

I’m only human, after all, and a woman at that, and even though he’d been tricked and I’d had a hand in out maneuvering him to the altar, I did it out of love; why is that not okay for me to do? Why couldn’t the world accept us, accept me as the one who was more suitable to be by his side? And why was everything I’d worked so hard for coming undone?

For years I was in control; everything was going my way. I don’t even remember when it all started to go left. I vaguely recall that it had something to do with Mary and her bitch daughters, who I hate more and more each day.

Ever since things started going downhill, they have been trying to distance themselves from me in public, but they forget that I know some not-so-very nice things about them, so if they think they’re going to leave me holding the bag on this, they’ve got another thing coming.

I was so flustered I hung up the phone in the middle of our conversation. My only worry was whether or not Ryder had seen this latest scandal. It was only lately that I’d lost complete control of his social media to the point that he’d changed his passwords on everything, and I couldn’t even guess what they were any longer.

That’s a good thing; I suppose since the old ones had been her birthday or something to do with their time together. It had galled me to no end each time I had to use it, but the pleasure of using his platforms to drag her more than made up for it. Making the world think that he hated her that much had given me hours of pleasure.

But now he’d found some of what I’d done, not all, thankfully not even the worst of it, but it was enough to make him change everything. Why would he do that if he didn’t still care? Not that I didn’t know that, but it was like a slap in the face for him to make it so obvious.

And what fucking disease are they talking about? I started to panic at the thought that I might have caught something, but we’d used protection, except for that one time, but nothing had come of that surely; it was only the once.

My phone buzzed in my hand, and I was ready to chuck it, but this would be my third or fourth in a couple of months, and the last thing I needed was the hassle of having to buy a new one.

‘Did you like your flowers? We know you like the smell. You might want to go to the doctor soon. Your face is about to fall off.’ What? I looked across the room at the bouquet that had arrived early this morning. I’d been so surprised and pleasantly pleased thinking that Ryder had been the one to send them even though there was no card attached.

The fact that one of his watchdogs had brought them to me convinced me that they were from him. I ran from the room in search of the man who’d brought them to me just as my cheeks started to burn.

I changed course and headed to my bedroom and a mirror, and what I saw made my blood run cold. My screams were loud and air-splitting, but no one came to my rescue as I fell to the floor in pain and shock. Not my face; what’s Ryder going to think?

I rolled around on the floor, tearing at the burning, itching flesh on my cheeks, wondering why this was happening to me. Why had my life come to this? Is it so wrong to want to be loved by the man I’d fallen in love with even before I knew what love was?

Was it so bad that I wanted him even though he belonged to someone else? Shouldn’t the true love I felt for him mean more than anything else in the world? I screamed until I lost my voice, and the pain in my face only grew worse.

Like a moth to a flame, I couldn’t resist taking another look at the horror that my skin had become. Red ugly blotches formed around the peeling skin of my cheeks as my eyes grew puffier even as I looked at myself. As I looked closer, I saw that it was even worse, as something like boils started to form in the midst of the blotches.

Who had sent me those flowers? Did I really have to ask? The text made it obvious that this unknown MengeLiNi person was behind the attack, and for the first time since they started, I felt real fear.

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