My Engagement Party, His Humiliation Show Chapter 04
“Bradley!”
I used the last of my strength to grab Bradley’s hand. I stared him down, and the words came out shaking.
“You can’t do this. My mom made this dress — by hand, every single stitch. You know what it means to me…”
For half a second, Bradley wavered. Then Chloe’s voice drifted up from behind him, thin and trembling right on cue.
“Bradley, what’s even the point anymore? My parents are dead. Anyone can walk all over me and nobody cares…”
The hesitation left his hand. His fist tightened. When he looked at me again, his eyes were empty.
“You did this to yourself, Vivienne! That dress means something because your mom made it? Chloe lost her mother too — where’s your sympathy for her?!”
“She fired at me first!”
“She was trying to include you!”
“Ever since Chloe came back, you’ve picked fights with her over everything. You don’t even see it, do you? I’ve let you get away with too much.”
“That ends right now.”
He didn’t give me time to answer. His hand yanked down.
The fabric tore — a long, brutal sound that carried across the plaza. The gown split in two.
Bradley looked around at the crowd. He saw every pair of eyes locked on me. He saw what they wanted.
And he still grabbed the torn halves and peeled them off my body.
The crowd let out a collective, predatory jeer. Their eyes crawled all over me. I choked down the bile rising in my throat.
I scrambled across the pavement and grabbed the remains of the gown, pulling the ruined fabric over myself. Bradley was already closing in.
He grabbed the other end of the gown. “Bradley!”
Something inside me snapped. I locked eyes with him and my voice came out low and dead steady.
“All of this — over her little performance? You’re going to regret this until the day you die.”
“Touch me one more time, and I promise you — neither of you will be ready for what happens next.”
“Oh?” Bradley’s hand froze on the fabric. Then he grabbed my jaw and tilted my face up.
He looked almost amused. “There she is — the Beaumont princess. Except you keep forgetting where you are.”
Chloe strolled over, one hand on her hip, the other covering her mouth like she was trying not to laugh. Her gaze dragged over me — soaked, kneeling, half-dressed — and she didn’t even try to hide the contempt.
“Go ahead, Vivienne — call whoever you want. What are they going to do? It’s the Summer Splash. We splashed you with water. If getting wet during a water festival is a crime, then the whole town’s guilty.”
They thought they were untouchable. A Highcreek girl on their turf, alone, with no power and no backup.
This was never just about humiliating me. They wanted to drag the Beaumont name through the dirt.
They miscalculated.
They were still running their mouths when the ground started to shake. One hundred industrial water cannons — black, massive, and menacing — crawled toward the plaza from every street.
The roar of a hundred engines swallowed every other sound in the plaza. I looked at Bradley. Then at Chloe. And I smiled.
Fine. You wanted to play with water? Let’s play.
