Page 116 of The Lies We Steal

I couldn’t believe that this was where I might die. Pinned between a man I care about and the man who hates him.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I saw you two in the conservatory the other night. When you thought no one was watching.” Delusional rage spews from his mouth, I can feel the gun shaking in my hair from the force of his voice, “When she let you touch her! Let you defile her. How her body molded against yours and I couldn’t believe she’d do something like that. I couldn’t believe she’d choose you. I mean,” He scoffs, “If she looks that good with the copy imagine how stunning she’d look beside the original.”

He had taken a night that I wanted to be special and turned it into something sinister. I’d never be able to think of Alistair’s birthday without thinking about where Dorian had stood when he watched us. How long he’d stayed there.

“She’s not mine.” Alistair says, refusing to make eye contact with me, “She’s just a girl. You’d be ruining your life, your legacy, for a girl that means nothing to me.”

I grimace from his words, pulling my eyes from him to look at the ground. My chest aching so fiercely because I might die meaning nothing to someone who means more to me then he was supposed to.

“She was mine first!” Dorian bellows, my spine shaking from fear. “I saw her first! She was supposed to be mine and you took her from me!”

I wasn’t sure if the confusion was coming from the concussion I was sure I had or the words coming from his mouth.

I could feel his hand press into the side of my head, crying out slightly as he dropped his head to my hair and inhaled deeply, “I saw her on her very first day in Hollow Heights,” He mutters, like he’s talking to me, “I knew at that moment, I had to have her. I had to have you, Briar.”

All I heard was him raising the gun, the sound of it smacking against something solid over and over again as he continued, “But you chose him! You opened up your legs for my extra! He is nothing compared to me!”

This fantasy he had built in his head of us had quickly come falling down without my realization. Only having talked to him twice, I never knew he was watching me. Fueling hallucinations I wanted no part of.

My first day when I felt someone staring, it had been him. Pins and needles poked my skin thinking about all the times I felt someone looking at me and how I had assumed it was Alistair.

The gun is returned to the side of my head, the force of the barrel digging into my skin and I can feel my body trembling. My heart thumping. Sweat trickling my forehead.

“Dorian—” Alistair starts.

“I see the way you look at her! Like she belongs to you! The tattoo on her finger! You marked her!” He practically screams, “You don’t deserve her, you deserve nothing. You’re just a gutter rat, the backup in case I failed. You don’t get to have anything!”

The temperature raises as his movements become more frantic. The countdown on the bomb that is Dorian Caldwell ticking down closer to a massive explosion.

“Dorian! Listen to me,” He steps forward, hand out in a truce, “We can get you help. You don’t need to do this.”

“I don’t need fucking help! I want her!” I flinch, “And if I can’t have her, neither can you.”

It had all been moving so fast, heated words, rushed movements. Everything was spinning on fast forward and it was then that it all decided to slowed down. It felt like I’d dropped beneath the surface of the pool, falling to the bottom and just sitting in the depths. Everything in the water was slower.

I watched Alistair charge forward, the word “No” screaming from his lips.

A gust of breath escaped my mouth in slow motion, shutting my eyes before the end came tumbling towards me.

I thought I would have flashes of my future, of my past, all the things I’d never experience, but instead I just saw him. I saw him and conceived a world where I could love him without repercussions.

The way he lunged for me, how fear and pain blossomed across his face like a freshly grown rose. A rose bloomed just before the cold winter, where it would soon die. I wondered if after my death he’d become like Silas or if I really was just nothing to him.

I saw how he’d been a boy before he was lesson, before he’d been painted as the face of evil. I saw what they all had forgotten, that he was loyal, made of flesh and blood, of crooked grins and onyx eyes.

Beneath it all, a boy with dreams, with friends, who laughed.

A boy who had once loved his brother.

And I thought how lucky I was in that moment, to see him as nothing but a boy.

The gun’s blast pierced my ears, bursting the drum inside. Warm, wet splatters of liquid coated the side of my face, and I expected there to be more pain.

My eyes opened, still able to see.

I must be a ghost, right? I didn’t expect it to happen that quickly, I thought there would be a light, a gate I needed to walk through.

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