Chapter 54: Psycho Bellamy or Wrong Sister but the Right Nightmare

’My EX?’

His brain actually stumbled.

The hell.

He’d never had an ex in his entire life. That was, embarrassingly, the one clean fact in his romantic history. Somehow, despite his internet history, masturbation record, the girls from high-school he’d turned all down and the rapidly expanding collection of terrible decisions, that was still one fact nobody could prosecute.

"Yeah. Try better." Damon narrowed his eyes at her while saying it.

She cackled head tipping back, one hand slapping the nearest desk hard enough to send a little cloud of dust up, like he’d passed a test by failing it spectacularly; as if like Damon had somehow done something wonderful for her.

"Ha! Okay, that was worth a shot. Points for trying, zero points for succeeding."

Then, instant mood shift, flat and fast, the laughter disappeared so abruptly Damon almost felt something switch behind her eyes.

"I am Celeste."

Damon waited but she waited back.

The name was doing absolutely fuck-all inside his head, so he gave her the same blank face he gave waiters and God and anyone who assumed he already knew the plot of a conversation he’d just walked into.

Her whole face changed, not sad, not really, something faster and meaner than that. "Oh my god. You know what? Fuck you, Damon, seriously, fuck you. You dont know ow " She wasn’t yelling, exactly, but the volume had jumped two notches and stayed there. "You want my whole name? My legal name? Fine. Bellamy. There. Bellamy. Happy now?"

Her surname was like a light switching.

Bellamy. He knew Bellamys.

But not this one specifically, but enough to know exactly which family it belonged to, especially one of them was acquitted with Vespera and the two went to the same school; and with his brain, exhausted, humiliated, and desperately grasping for a script that made sense, connected the dots at the worst possible speed.

’Oh, so she’s Vespera’s friend. The one with my ID.’

His whole posture softened. "Oh, S-Celeste. Nice to meet you." He actually extended a hand, like this was a mixer and not a hostage negotiation involving his own genitals. "I heard a lot about you from Vespera, she— "

The slap came so fast to his wrist he didn’t process it until his hand was already stinging from it.

"That’s my big sister, you absolute bastard!" Her voice cracked somewhere in the middle of the sentence, genuine and for one half-second she looked like a nineteen-year-old who’d just embarrassed herself in front of her boy crush in an empty room.

Celeste froze right after saying it, the wild little smile vanishing while she suddenly looked exactly her age and horrified by whatever had just escaped her mouth.

"Oh my god, I can’t believe I just... I threw myself at you! Do you know how humiliating..." Her eyes widened, and she pointed at Damon like this whole disaster had somehow become his fault. "You know what, forget it, forget I said that, this conversation never happened."

She was already turning to leave and Damon almost missed how genuine the movement, Celeste wasn’t playing.

She genuinely wanted to leave before Damon’s brain finally rearranged the Bellamy family tree properly.

She was not the friend but the friend’s little sister.

Vespera’s friend was Celeste’s older sister. Celeste was the younger one.

Which meant, given her family name, she was not a stranger looking for a payday; she had her own money, her own name, her own reasons, and a rich girl with a leash didn’t want a check.

That made the picture even more of bomb than it had been before.

"Wait."

He got in front of her fast enough with his hands up and an awkward laugh and an awkward smile.

"Wait, wait, hold on, can we start over? Just, give me one more shot here."

He wasn’t even sure the words made sense as they left his mouth, they just came out, with his survival sprinting ahead of pride.

She stopped, and then she spun back around so fast her hair actually moved with her, and the... smile; he looked delighted in a way that made Damon immediately regret providing fresh material.

"Oh. Oh my god." She bounced on her toes again and said it like she’d just won something. "Is Damon Corvin fucking Viremont begging me right now?"

"It’s not exactly begging so much as—"

"Oh, say it again." She was bouncing on her toes again, phone held up between them like a microphone. "I need to hear it again. Say the word. Say you’re begging." she waved her phone to dare him to say he’s not begging.

He exhaled through his nose, long, thoroughly defeated, he had officially downgraded to the second-worst thing that had happened to him today.

"Fine. I’m begging. Happy? Can we please just talk."

She smiled wider and walked back into the room like the dust itself had cast a vote in her favor, Damon followed.

"To think," she said, almost fondly drifting one finger along a desk edge as she passed it, "all I needed was one picture of you with that huge thing to make you corporate. I would’ve planted cameras in your room after that day, you know. I would have videos not just a measly picture! But hey, progress, right?"

Damon hated that huge still registered. His brain was fucking diseased, and the same tiny compliment-preserving bastard from earlier was apparently alive and thriving but the camera comment finally made him stop walking!

Celeste kept going like she’d just mentioned the weather.

She turned at the front desk with her phone loose and glowing faintly in her fingers, eyes bright in a way that wasn’t entirely healthy and wasn’t entirely joking either; medically concerning really.

"Who knows. Maybe we’d have ended up as a couple then. Sure, I would’ve resorted to a little blackmail, a little coercion, potato, potahto. But we’d have gotten there eventually." A slow pleased smile spread across her face. "Wouldn’t we have, Damon."

That was the moment his eyes actually went wide.

Something finally clicked properly.

Bellamy! Celeste Bellamy.

He was dealing with the infamous, certified, do-not-approach Bellamy!

He had never paid enough attention because most of the stories came in pieces at galas, dinners, private parties, and stupid elite-family events where he spent half his time wishing somebody would let him go home.

But people talked about one Bellamy girl differently.

They checked who was nearby first. When they laughed at the nickname, the laugh usually sounded like they wanted witnesses proving they’d been joking if somebody asked later.

She was a genius, beautiful and wealthy enough that money meant absolutely nothing to her as leverage, wealthy enough that trying to buy her silence might actually make her angry, and apparently she was carrying old history with Damon that he did not properly remember.

And according to every hushed conversation he’d half-overheard; the same girl had just described blackmail and coercion as possible steps toward becoming a couple with the cheerful confidence of somebody discussing restaurant reservations... that Bellamy girl could only be:

’Psycho Bellamy.’

Of every Bellamy Damon could have been caught by, he’d somehow ended up standing in a dead philosophy classroom with his dick photographed by this fucking crazy and sick one.

Everyone in the elite circles had a name for her, and every single one of them said it behind a laugh that didn’t reach their eyes. Damon finally understood why people talked about her carefully. The stories hadn’t been exaggerating.

If anything, people might have been underselling her.

And she had his photo.

Celeste, the psycho girl of the family still had his picture, and she had seen part of his website too.

And she’d already decided, God help him, that this was fun.

Judging by that bright, deeply pleased smile, she wasn’t treating any of this like leverage she wanted to cash in.

’She is fucking having fuckin’ fun!’

Damon looked at the phone in her hand, then at his closed MacBook, and finally back at Celeste.

’Of all the fucking Bellamys.’

His stomach tightened while her smile somehow grew another fraction.

He would’ve preferred Vespera’s friend.

Instead, he’d gotten Psycho Bellamy.