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

  Vicious

  a Dark College Bully Romance - Beautiful Tyrants Book Three

  Vanessa Winters

  Contents

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  Vicious

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Book 4 - The Conclusion: Coming Soon!

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  Copyright © 2020 by Vanessa Winters

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America.

  Disclaimer: This book is intended for adult readers 18+. THIS book contains dark themes of bullying, suicide, abuse and detailed sexual situations, and may not be suitable for all readers.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Vicious

  I honestly didn’t expect to wake up in the hospital.

  But when I heard Michael’s voice, I knew we’d be inseparable.

  He found me.

  He came for me.

  But, things in my life are never as simple as that.

  Now, the shadows are reaching for us again.

  Creeping, and whispering, and attempting to shred us apart.

  And with the guys soon fighting with one another, I wonder if we can even keep it together.

  Death knocks at the door of darkness.

  Threats loom in the cobwebbed corners.

  And when I stumble upon a journal that finally connects my mother’s dots, I’m determined to fulfill her legacy.

  Even if it kills me.

  Even if it swallows me whole.

  And even if my Aunt Naomi wants me dead.

  *Contains Dark themes*

  Vicious (Beautiful Tyrants Book Three) is a dark college bully reverse harem romance intended for readers 18+. This book contains dark themes, including bullying, abuse, violence, suicide and sexual relationships that some readers might be uncomfortable with. These heroes are human with dark histories and actions that may make you hate them at times. But redemption is never a straight path. It’s dark, twisted and comes at a steep price…

  1

  I pressed my eyes closed harder and tried to ignore the pounding of my heart against my ribcage. I must be dreaming or hallucinating from all the pain meds that I’m sure the nurses had pumped into me. There’s no way that Michael could actually be here.

  I figured that when I opened my eyes back up, my delusion about hearing Michael’s voice would be gone and I would find myself cold, and in pain, and alone in this hospital bed. I would wait until I was able to get up and unplug myself from all of the wires and tubes that protruded from my skin, and I would leave to continue on my way to Maine. My car probably hadn’t fared so well if the crash I suffered had landed me in here. So, I would need to figure out what to do about that. I wasn’t really sure where I was, but I guessed that Maine was surely too far to walk and, since I didn’t have any money, I couldn’t really take a cab. First things first; get rid of the delusion, then worry about how to get back on track to Maine.

  When I heard the door open, I pretended to be asleep. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t care what had happened or what injuries I had sustained. I only cared that I was alive and had a mission to get back to. I would heal and wrecking Rob’s car was probably the least of the things that he would be angry with me about.

  Whoever had come into the room, came to sit down beside me. I could hear their breathing and could feel their warmth radiating off their body. It was hard not to open my eyes. The temptation of knowing that I shouldn’t, but yet wanted to see who it was that was sitting there staring at me, was difficult to sustain. It reminded me of when I was a kid and would try to close my eyes during the scary parts of movies. I could always still hear the sound playing, and even though I really didn’t want to look, something always made me peek just a tiny bit between the cracks of my fingers. I always regretted it afterward too because I was usually up with nightmares after seeing a quick flash of whatever it was that I was hiding from behind my hand to begin with.

  This time, I wouldn’t peek.

  “You know that I can tell you’re awake, right?” Michael’s voice asked. “You keep trying to fool me with things, but at some point, you’re just going to have to realize that you can’t hide from me, Lisette.”

  Oh my god, is he really here?

  I opened my eyes slowly and the bright fluorescent lights above me in the hospital room were so blinding that as much as I strained my overly-dilated pupils, I still couldn’t get a clear view of who was there.

  “It’s okay,” Michael said as he leaned forward and placed his lips against my forehead.

  He saw me starting to panic a little when I couldn’t see clearly and how I was struggling to focus my eyes. As soon as he kissed my skin, I knew it was him. I didn’t have to see or hear him in order to feel that he was there with me.

  “It’s me,” he murmured. “I swear that I’m here.”

  I started to cry. I had a thousand reasons to cry and I didn’t know which particular one was to blame for the sobbing that opened up like a tsunami and made me choke on my parched and scratchy throat. I could tell that the hospital must have put one of those tubes in my throat at some point because it felt like I had swallowed a box of razor blades.

  Michael stayed close to me with his mouth pressed against my temple and his arms wrapped around behind my shoulders and back as I turned toward him. He held me closely and I cried as I felt his warm breath against my face. I don’t even know how long I cried for, but when I had finally stopped, he was still holding me in the exact same spot without moving at all.

  “How did you find me here?” I asked once I had finally stopped.

  I wiped my face with the sleeve of my hospital gown and Michael sat back up in his chair. He kept his hand over mine and wrapped his palm around my fingers. After a few long seconds, my eyes had adjusted to the light and I could see him. He looked tired, and worried, and he looked like the best thing that I had ever seen in my entire life. As much as I hadn’t wanted him to find me and had wanted him to stay in Asheville and stay safe, I would have been lying if I said that I wasn’t glad that he was here. I was so happy to see him that I almost started to cry again.

  “Your I.D. was in the car,” he said. “Ever since you left, Rob had been keeping an ear out for you and listening on the police scanners. You made the mistake of taking his car, so as soon as you got into the accident, Rob heard that it was his car, and shortly afterward they said your name over the police radios. I had already left to go looking for you even before the accident happened, so I wasn’t too far from where
you were. Rob and Adam are on their way here now.”

  I couldn’t believe that he hadn’t listened to me and stayed in Asheville. Actually, yes, I could believe it. I should have known better than to think that Michael would just give up and let me go. Of course he wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have done it either, if the situation had been reversed.

  “How did the accident happen?” I asked.

  I didn’t remember anything about it at all. I barely even remembered driving, which was probably the problem. I knew that I was too tired and too emotional to be driving, but I drove anyway. I was running toward something that needed to be dealt with, and also running away from something that I couldn’t bear to leave behind.

  “You ran your car off the road when you fell asleep at the wheel,” Michael answered.

  His expression looked full of pain. I knew that he was angry at me for leaving. He was probably exceptionally angry at me for leaving the way that I did; disappearing after a wonderfully intimate night of lovemaking, and leaving nothing but a little note behind.

  He looked more hurt than angry right now though, and I didn’t know what to say to make things okay again. I don’t think Michael knew what to say or how to make it okay either, because instead of asking me what he really wanted to ask me, he regurgitated the information the nurses had told him.

  “They said that you’re lucky to be alive,” he said as he tried not to let his voice crack. “A kind couple stopped when they saw your car and they called the ambulance and stayed there with you until the emergency workers arrived. The nurses said that you have a few broken bones, some bruised organs, and you lost a lot of blood so you’ll feel weak for a while, even with the transfusions that they gave you.”

  “When can I leave here?” I asked.

  Michael looked at me harshly. We were both just dancing around the conversation that we really needed to have. But I couldn’t forget why I had left to begin with. I needed to make it to Maine, and I needed to make it there before my Aunt Naomi did. Michael was hesitant to answer my question. How could I expect him to tell me when I could leave again, when the only thing he wanted to know was why I left in the first place; why I left him. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I couldn’t stand feeling this awful heaviness between us that was pulling us apart like an undertow.

  “Ask it,” I said as I stared straight into his eyes. “Ask me the question that you want to ask.”

  Michael’s eyebrows wrinkled and the corners of his mouth dropped into a frown that he could no longer keep from quivering.

  “Why did you leave?” he asked.

  His voice sounded desperate, laced with anger and sprinkled with the pain of abandonment and betrayal.

  “Why did you leave me?” he asked, a bit more softly this time.

  The tone of his voice broke my heart, but it didn’t stop my answer from pouring forth.

  “You almost died,” I said as I pleaded with him to understand how I could have broken our promise to stay together and left him with more questions than answers. “Naomi nearly killed you. Don’t you understand what that did to me? I can’t lose you, Michael. I couldn’t just sit by and do nothing while I was constantly worried that Naomi would come back for you again and again, until she finally succeeded in killing you. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. I’d rather die.”

  He leaned in close, his gaze filled with both love and fury. “Now you know how I feel then,” he said.

  Michael stood up as if he were about to leave and lifted his hand from mine before turning to walk toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” I asked. “Are you leaving?”

  He stopped walking and stood completely still with his back to me. Then, Michael turned around and I saw the tears streaming down his face in an uncontrollable swell of emotion.

  Then, he snapped.

  “Why don’t you get it!?” he shouted at me, his hand white-knuckling the edge of the door. “What can I do to make you understand that I can’t leave you, Lisette. You can try to run away a thousand times, and I will come looking for you each and every one of those times. You can tell me that your reasons are to keep me safe, or to chase some noble cause, or whatever the hell reason you convince yourself into believing. But I will always come after you no matter what you say, because I simply have no choice. I can’t live without you, and you know that. So, stop fucking acting like you don’t know, because I’m tired of it.”

  I was frozen in a shocked and shaken silence as I saw Michael standing there in front of me, broken, and raw, and painfully honest. He was right, and I had been wrong again. I had tried to protect him and the others, but look what ended up happening instead. I broke Rob’s car, I broke my own body, and I broke the heart of the one person in the world that I knew I couldn’t ever truly be without. I should have known not to leave. I should have just told them everything and we could have worked out a plan together. Leaving never works out well for me, and I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  “Please don’t go,” I whispered through my tears.

  “I’m not leaving, Lisette,” Michael said with a sigh. “I was just going to get some coffee from the machine.”

  “Don’t even leave to go there,” I said as I sniffled between my tears and tried to hold back the sobs that were right at the top of my throat. “I’m sorry. You’re right and I made the wrong call about this whole thing. I shouldn’t have left, especially not the way that I did. Please forgive me, and please don’t go.”

  Michael walked back over to the bed and he gently slid me over on the thin, stiff mattress. He sat down in the bed next to me and pulled me up onto his shoulder. Then he turned his head to look at me and lowered his face to kiss my lips. And the second they connected, everything else in the room melted away: the lights, the beeping machines, the tubes and wires. All of it disappeared with each caress of his tongue. The only thing that I felt was the soft press of Michael’s mouth against mine. The feeling of his warm body seated against my own. And when he pulled his lips away, I rested my head onto his shoulder, and he wrapped his arms tighter around me.

  “I won’t leave, then,” he whispered.

  I must have fallen asleep like that, because the next thing I knew, it was nighttime. I opened my eyes and saw that the bright lights had been turned off and the room was quiet, except for Michael’s slow and steady breathing, indicative of a deep and exhausted slumber. I was guessing that neither of us had slept much while we were apart. He felt me lift my head up from his shoulders and he woke up too.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said groggily. “I just lost track of time and got disoriented. We need to leave here, Michael. We need to get to Maine.”

  “Maine? Is that where you were headed? Why Maine?” he asked.

  In the darkness of the hospital room, I laid in Michael’s arms and told him everything that I had found out about Naomi and my mother’s inheritance. I told him about my estranged uncle, Mark, who I hadn’t even known I had. Apparently, Mark was my mother and Naomi’s older brother, although I had never once seen him (or at least remembered seeing him) throughout my entire life. I told him about the inheritance that my mother had left to me and the condition that was put on it. And I told him that I had not only found out that Mark lived in Maine, but that I had also told Naomi that’s where I was heading.

  “Why would you tell her that you were going there?” he asked. “That will lead her straight to you.”

  “I was trying to lead her straight to me. That was the point; to get her away from you guys and have her chase me all the way up to my inheritance money,” I said.

  “Forgive me if this sounds rude,” Michael said bluntly. “But that is a really stupid plan. What were you intending to do once she got there?”

  He was right. I actually hadn’t even thought about a plan for what to do when Naomi chased me to Maine and found me at her brother’s house. I had only thought through enough of the plan to lead her away from the guys so t
hat I knew they would be safe.

  “You didn’t have a plan?” he asked when he saw the look on my face.

  He sat up and eased me back down against the pillow before hovering over me.

  “Oh Jesus,” Michael sighed. Even in the dimly lit room, I could see him roll his eyes. “Well, now we’re going to Maine together, and we need a plan.”

  “Agreed,” I said as I rolled over onto my hips a little.

  Everything still hurt, but I was aching to get out of the hospital. I didn’t see the need for the IV and all the shit that was taped to and protruding from out of my body. I hated hospitals and I would much rather be recovering in pain somewhere, than stuck to machines and given pain killers.

  “I want to leave here,” I said.

  Michael could see how uncomfortable I was, and I think he understood. It hadn’t been that long ago that the tables were turned, and it was him in the hospital instead of me. I think he remembered how awful it was.

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I know. I’ll work on the nurses as soon as the morning shift comes in and see if I can find out when they’re planning on releasing you. There are still a few hours before anyone will be around though.”

  “I guess we should use this time to talk about a plan then,” I said.

  I was tired still, but I knew that I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was uncomfortable and anxious, and I really just wanted to stay awake and hear the sound of Michael’s voice.