Corrupted Chaos: An Enemies to Lovers Forced Proximity Romance (Tarnished Empire)

We were twelve days in with just two days left of glamping, and I was surprised to admit that things were going well. We tested new breaches on JUNIPER daily and brainstormed different scenarios. We worked on our day-to-day tasks and did some zip-lining, campfires, and swimming in between.

Cade was on a first-name basis with everyone, and he and Rodney were practically pals—except when Rodney stared too long at me in my bikini and Cade whacked him over the head.

Lucas didn’t ask me questions, but I knew they were flying around in his mind. He’d pried about my gold bracelet that I now twisted more than I should on my wrist all the time. I didn’t disclose anything. I couldn’t. We were in a safe little bubble for now with Cade staying too close, hovering too much, and staring too long.

I told him so that night, and he laughed, not giving a shit.

“It’s not funny. We have to go back to work after this where you’re the boss.”

“I’m your boss right now,” he murmured, typing away on his computer at our table while I watered the fifth bouquet of roses that’d been brought in the days since Cade had hacked my phone. He’d murmured they were sent to match my red spray paint.

And I couldn’t stop myself from bringing out a tiny linen-wrapped canvas I’d packed in my suitcase. While he worked, I set it down on the table, folded up a piece of paper to use for edging, and started to spray paint. It took some time to move the paper and get the angles perfect before I went to grab a brush and my paints. All I needed was black and white, and I shaded it quicker than I normally would because the art flowed freely through me now.

Everything was freer. I didn’t hesitate to show what I was feeling as much. I was more comfortable in my own skin. I even embraced the emotions I’d long since bottled up. My heart and my soul were liberated because they were toppling head over heels in love with Cade.

This rose turned out jagged, but with a bright white background, it appeared as though it was growing in the sun, in the light, and not succumbing to any darkness. Would I grow in our love too? Or would there be darkness?

“You hone your talents in things outside the digital world, I see,” Cade murmured as he stared at my picture, my hands, and then my face. “You’re truly a beautiful specimen, Izzy Hardy.”

It would have been a precious moment, one in which we could have talked about what this relationship was starting to look like, had my sister not called.

Lilah’s name popped up on my phone, and when I swiped to pick up the video chat, her frown made me immediately ask, “What’s wrong, Lilah?”

“Well, I thought Bug got out, but she’s fine.” She followed up with that right away, knowing panic raced through me immediately. “But I was looking for her everywhere . . .” Her face fell and she glanced down.

“Okay, well, what? What’s wrong?”

She held up a crinkled note. The writing was almost illegible. But it didn’t have to be well-written for me to know every word. Every curve of the w’s, every period and punctuation mark.

“What is this, Izzy?” Her question came out scratchy, like she’d been crying. “This isn’t your handwriting.”

My heart dropped; the blood drained from my body.

“Whose is it?” she whispered.

Everyone had a secret, right? Everyone wants to keep one thing hidden in their life. Maybe more. People thought the skeleton in my closet was that I was an addict. They didn’t know the whole truth.

They wouldn’t want to. Life was ugly. It was unkind. It was unforgiving at times too. To keep living, though, a person has to take the ugly and find the beautiful, take the wretched and search for the blessed.

Maybe I hadn’t done that. Maybe I’d just buried it all deep down and tried to hide it instead.

Vincent was ugly. He was the ugly sort of love that shaped me, that molded me, that made me the person I was today.

“Please don’t leave me. Please. You can’t. You can’t die,” I sobbed as I cradled him.

His buddy was already standing over me, tapping his dirty tennis shoe on the ground. “You gotta go, Izzy.”

“I’m not leaving.” I fisted the paper in my hand. His letter to me. It said goodbye. It said he was leaving, but he couldn’t.

“You’re going to stay? For what?” he asked, his voice cracking with fury. “You’re sixteen. He’s twenty-one. Do you know what that looks like? He should have never been with you, and now he’s gone.”

“No.” I said desperately. He couldn’t be.

“Yes.” His friend pushed back, trying to grab my elbow to pull me from the floor where we’d slept that night, but I ripped my elbow back. “And he didn’t leave a letter to his mom or his family. He left it to you.”

Jonny never had approved with us being together. No one had. And his words pelted me like a hailstorm that I couldn’t see through.

“We love each other,” I murmured.

“He didn’t love anybody but the drugs,” he grumbled and swiped the mess off the floor. Needles and powder and . . . God, had we done all that? “How much of this did he give you?”

I was sobbing, the tears pooling so high before I blinked them away that I could barely see my lover’s blue lips. Could I drown in them? Could I get lost in my own tears so I didn’t have to wake up either? Because without him, I didn’t want to. 

“How could this happen? I was right here the whole night. I was right—”

“He gave you more than you asked for, and you passed out.” He shook his head in disgust. “He’s known for—”

“Don’t you dare talk bad about him right now.”

“He’s been cheating on you this whole time!” his friend bellowed at me. The words cut through me, trying their best to cause damage.

I shook my head in denial. I would ask him when he got up. “He needs our help, Jonny. He’s not fucking breathing, Jonny. Call someone. Call someone, please.”

He pursed his lips, and his chin shook but no tears came. “You gotta get out of here, or he’s going to be charged with statutory rape and dealing to minors before they pronounce him dead. You’ll cause the family a shit storm. Disappear. Don’t come to the funeral, and don’t mention his damn name.”

“But . . .” I glanced down at him, “He’s not dead, Jonny.”

He grumbled “Fuck me,” before he came for me. He didn’t hesitate to swoop me up and carry me to his car kicking and screaming.

“How can you do this? I love him! Don’t you love him? He needs help.”

As he threw me in his pickup and slammed the passenger door, I scrambled for my purse to look for my phone. By the time he rounded the hood and got in, he held his up to his ear and said, “Yeah, my friend OD’d. I’m pretty sure he’s gone, but we need an ambulance.”

Whatever he said after that, I didn’t hear. I was bawling, begging, pleading with God. I needed my first love back, even if he was a secret. Even if I was his dirty little plaything.

At sixteen, everyone would have said I’d been groomed, coerced, pushed into loving him.

They’d have been right. I learned that much later. Jonny called me to say our drugs had been laced with fentanyl. I’d been lucky. Vincent hadn’t.

Yet, it didn’t negate the pain. It didn’t make this any less hard. He’d gave me my first kiss, my first falling in love, my first time letting go of my innocence. He’d also shared my first high, and now I’d shared his last. We were connected. He’d told me I was his forever, that he’d love and take care of me to infinity and beyond.

I crumpled up that paper and stuck it in my pocket. His last communication with the world had been for me. For only me.

That had to mean something, right?

“Get rid of that note, Izzy,” Jonny warned as he dropped me off two blocks from my house. “And here, take a few bars. If you’re feeling down, they’ll pick you up.”

I snatched them, my body already scouring for a way to avoid the sadness, the agony, and the trauma I would have to endure on my own. “Jonny, I don’t think I can do this.”

That first heartbreak, it was like a meteor flew from the sky and landed right on the one thing that pumped love through my veins. 

“You can. Do it for him, Izzy. For us. We’re your friends. We can’t have this on our records. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell anyone, or you’ll ruin the memory of him.”

My mother and sister greeted me as I walked in that day. I told them I was sick from my sleepover, that my girlfriend had been the worst kind of friend and I needed space.

They knew something was wrong.

Lilah knocked on my door for much longer than normal. She probably somehow felt my grief. So I covered it up with a pill.

And I did that for days, weeks, months. I did it until juvie, and I read that letter over and over again.

Burying emotions took time, practice, effort, and training. 

I buried that emotion so deep I could barely access it.

I hoped I would never have to again.

“Izzy.” She shook the paper in front of the phone again, but this time there were tears in her eyes. “Tell me who wrote this to you right now.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I whispered. My therapist told me over and over that I should talk with someone whom I trusted about what I’d been through. The secret was between my therapist and me alone. I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, even if Vincent was gone, even if I didn’t talk to any of those people anymore.

Now, I struggled with the embarrassment that I’d been taken advantage of, that I’d fallen for so much when I should have been smarter.

My therapist said I needed to share this with my family. But why? For them to worry even more, to be even more disappointed? My therapist had told me over and over that I’d been young, drugs were involved, I shouldn’t blame myself.

I still did.

“It does matter!” she screamed, and Cade took that moment to stop staring at his laptop.

When I hustled out of the room and down the hall to our bedroom, the man followed. His stupid sharp eyes behind his stupid hot eyeglasses read my every move as he leaned on the doorframe, watching us both like he was ready for the destruction.

The man loved to see people uncomfortable—I knew that about him now. “Get out.” I motioned for him to leave.

He shook his head no, but the look of concern on his face caught me off guard. He should have been smiling, should have relished my sister unearthing my secret.

“Izzy, I’ll make Dante call Cade and have him send you home right now if you don’t tell me. This is . . . this is a suicide note from someone! Izzy, who wrote this?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I whispered, but I remembered the words and, although I hadn’t read it in maybe a year, they flashed before me now. The hand that held my phone shook as I thought of her rummaging through my things. “You shouldn’t have been looking through my stuff. Put it back now.”

“I was looking for your damn cat, and I came across the box.”

“You didn’t have to look in it.” I raised my voice and then took a breath before I tried to rush past Cade into the living room.

He stopped me with a hand on my arm and took the phone from me.

Lilah gasped and stuttered, “Are you two working?”

“Something like that. Put her stuff away, and she’ll call you back.”

“Cade, this is serious.”

“Do as you’re told.” He hung up and stared at me.

Curling up and crying in the bathroom was what I wanted to do, but instead I stood there with my chin raised. “You already know part of the story from the campfire. The rest is I was involved with a guy before juvie. I loved him, and he was too old for me.”

I waited for his recoil, for him to frown upon my actions, but there was none whatsoever from him. He waited, like he wanted the whole story.

I took a deep breath, turning the bracelet that I wondered if he would want me to keep after I admitted this. “It was wrong and stupid and reckless. But he was my first love. He’d have been charged with statutory rape had anyone found out about us. I was sixteen and now I know he’d probably preyed upon me, groomed me, and changed me.” I shrugged, trying to shake away the heat of embarrassment I felt rising to my cheeks. “Therapy taught me all that. Yet, even still, a heart can break quickly and soundly. Mine shattered when I realized he chose to leave me, that he didn’t love me like I thought I loved him. I was embarrassed and in pain. It broke me, was big enough to destroy me.”

Cade tsked. “You haven’t been destroyed yet, baby doll.”

I let out a small laugh that held no joy. “Cade, I’ve hidden this for a long time. It’s embarrassing and wrong and . . . heartbreak and embarrassment hurt. That pain wrenches at your soul. Shakes you awake with the weight of the reminders and the pain. I couldn’t handle it at first and used drugs as a crutch. It’s how I know that love broke me, that I’m wrecked for all others.”

“Why would it wreck you for others?”

“I try to find . . .” I hesitated, looking for the right words. Cade was messy, my boss, and my weakness. Falling for him was like jumping out of a damn airplane, not knowing if the parachute would open. “I try to find love that won’t hurt, that’s safe and comfortable at best. That way, if I lose someone like I did him, I won’t go back to what I did then.”

He studied me for a moment before asking, “What did his letter say?”

Would he look at me differently if I told him?