Winning the Heir Who Bullied Me Chapter 127

**NATHAN’S POV**

I don’t look at her. I *can’t* look at her.

But I hear the tremor in her voice, the hesitant, disbelieving, “*What?*”

I inhale, and agony burns through me. Pretty sure Lucas—that *fucking bastard*—bruised my lungs.

Those awful, hideous four words hang in the air between us like poisonous gas.

*I’d rather eat shit.*

“Nathan.” I flinch when April grabs my arm, unknowingly pressing her fingers against a bruise. “*What?*”

God, I want to hold her. I want to take her in my arms and kiss her till we both forget our names. Till we forget the ugliness of everything.

But my wanting her is what got us into this mess in the first place.

“You heard me.”

“No.” She shakes her head, and the scent of her lavender shampoo hits me. She smells so good. She always smells so good.

“No, I must not have heard you. Because I’m pretty sure you said—” She inhales sharply, cutting herself off.

The words must still hurt, five years later.

Good.

That means they’ll achieve what I need them to.

“I said…” Fuck, everything hurts. “I’d rather eat shit than marry you.”

Her hand slips from mine, and I have to clench my arms really tightly around myself to keep from reaching out and holding her.

“I…you—I mean. We—” She stops, inhales. Inhales again.

“Why would you say that?”

I shrug. My deltoids scream with pain. “Because it’s true.”

She makes a sound—incredulous and confused. “The fact that you’re joking right now is one thing, but that you would choose to use—”

“It’s not a joke,” I say. And then force myself to look at her.

I regret it immediately.

Her gorgeous face is a mosaic, reflecting different versions of the same emotion. 

Bewilderment. Perplexity. Befuddlement. *Confusion.*

Did she look like that when Lucas propositioned her? When he groped her in the ballroom *right under my fucking nose*. When he cornered her in the forest?

Or was she scared? Frightened? Terrified?

I tear my eyes away from her, unable to look at her without seeing his hands on her. Without seeing all the ways I failed her.

*I know you’re fiercely protective—you’ll do anything to protect those you care about.* April said that to me when she was trying to convince me that I wasn’t a total piece of shit.

But she was wrong. She’s the only thing in the world I care about, and I couldn’t protect her. I let him—

I dig my fingers into a bruise on my rib cage, and the pain is so swift, so biting, that it distracts me from the sudden urge to scream.

“I don’t…I don’t understand,” April is saying, her voice sounding smaller with each word. “I—you... You *proposed* to me. You asked me to marry you. What is *happening*?”

I force myself to scoff. “Yeah. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.”

And that’s the fucking truth.

What the hell was I thinking? Why did I believe we could escape all this?

My family is a black hole, and everything and everyone that comes into contact with them gets sucked into oblivion, into darkness.

I was naïve to think I could escape it.

But she… She can.

“Nathan. Look at me.”

I glare at my feet.

Suddenly, her hands are warm on my cheeks, guiding my head toward hers until she fills my vision—until she’s all I can see.

*Fuck*, she’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like her before—strong and smart and brave and—

*He tried to do it to me.*

I move, tearing her hands off my face.

“Don’t touch me!” I don’t mean to be loud or harsh. But I’m so aggravated that my words come out so, and she flinches.

I see it—the moment she realizes that this isn’t some sick joke. I seem to mean what I say.

I wonder if she’s seeing the dumb fuck from Truth or Dare five years ago—the idiot who saw this pretty girl moving to kiss him and inexplicably knew that if her lips touched his, his world would never be the same again.

He panicked, and he mirrored the only behavioral pattern he’d ever known—cruelty.

*Me? Kiss you?*

*I’d rather eat shit.*

“Why are you doing this?” she whispers.

*Because I need to get you away. Because it’s too late for me—it’s in my fucking blood. But you can get out. You don’t have to call monsters your family.*

“Did you really think you and I had any kind of future together? Wake up, April.” I force my voice to remain strong, steady. She has to believe I mean all this. She can’t see how much the words cut as they tear out of me.

“So you don’t… You don’t love me?”

My breath hitches.

That’s the one thing I can’t say. I can repeat ugly phrases bound to dredge up awful memories. I can lie about my intentions to protect her.

But I *can’t* say I don’t love her.

Because I do. I love her more than anything in the world, and that lie will *wreck* me.

“Say it,” she presses, moving closer. I take an instinctive step back. I can’t let her touch me again. If she does, my flimsy resolve will crumble, and I’ll hold her and kiss her and beg her not to leave me.

I’ll ask her to marry me, dooming her to a life where she has to worry whether or not she’s safe from her brother and father-in-law.

“Say it, Nathan,” she hisses. “Say you don’t love me. Say everything has been a lie. Every kiss, every touch, every time you held me, the time—the *times*—in your room and mine, the football field, *fucking yesterday*. Look me in the eyes and tell me everything was a goddamn lie!”

“Miss Farrah!”

April whips around, and my head snaps up. Easton stands at my door, looking like a drill sergeant about to deliver corporal punishment.

I breathe a sigh of relief. He doesn’t know it, but he just saved me from making the monumental mistake of retracing my steps and holding on to the one thing I have to let go.

“You have been eliminated from this competition,” he says to April. “Which means you are—”

“Trespassing, yeah…” She turns back to me with a sardonic smile. “I’ve been made aware.”

“Then let's go.”

I feel her eyes burning into me, but I can’t, *I can’t*, look at her.

I blink when her hand enters my line of vision, holding something—a small velvet box.

I shake my head, my throat closing up with emotion. “No,” I choke out. “That’s yours.”

She shoves it against my chest, and I wince. “I don’t want the physical embodiment of a lie.” Her voice is empty, dead.

I chance one last look at her—and immediately regret my decision.

Her beautiful, expressive face that I could always read like an open book, is shut—a locked door.

She spins on her heels and walks out of my room like she can’t get out fast enough. She slams the door hard enough that I feel it in my chest.

My knees instantly give way, and I sink to the floor.

There’s no separating the pain lancing through my body from the agony stabbing at my heart. There’s no piecing me back together.

*You’re scarred and broken and lost, and sometimes you hate yourself so much, you can’t breathe.*

*I love every part of you, Nathan. Even the parts you hate.*

She was wrong. I’m not broken.

Broken pieces can be put together—a little bit of glue and they’ll be good as new.

But there’s no putting back together shattered glass, and trying would only cut her.