Page 36 of The Lies We Steal

When we all met out here in the woods and Chris had woken up, everything after that had also gone to plan.

Well, it took a minute or two for him to talk, after he finished screaming and I beat him to a literal pulp. He still just didn’t get the fucking hint. We weren’t taking no for an answer.

“Just tell us how your product ended up injected into the side of a dead girl’s neck, Chris. You tell us that and this all goes away.” I spat in his face, while he knelt on the ground in front of me.

He had one of those posh faces, where his nose was really thin and his eyes wide. I’d known Chris, prior to this moment and prior to starting at Hollow Heights. I knew him before I started going to classes I wasn’t taking, just to watch him be a shit teaching assistant. Thumbing around on his phone playing Candy Crush.

He’d been friends with Dorian in high school. They ran in the same circles, were both on the swim team and Chris had always been a douchebag. There are just some people that it sticks to like glue.

“Go fuck yourself, Caldwell. This won’t be going away, my father will be hearing about this!” He complains, died blonde hair coated with disgusting mud, his words coming out in a stutter because of his busted lip.

I grab the collar of his shirt with both of my hands squeezing the material tightly as I lift him up towards my face.

“You think I’m scared of your fucking daddy? The only person who should be scared right now is you. Especially if you don’t tell me what you know.” I repeat.

There was a feeling in the air. A sorta buzz. It hummed and slithered through my body like a livewire current, because I knew no matter what happened tonight, Chris Crawford would not be walking out of these woods alive.

A feeling of finding the truth about Rose. Of avenging a soul that never deserved what she got. My grip seems to tighten on his shirt, jaw twitching with impatience.

I wasn’t surprised, I just didn’t think he had the guts to do something like spit in my face. But sure enough, he reared back and spit right on the side of my cheek. The warm saliva mixed with blood was my breaking point.

He cackled as I turned my face from him, dropping him to the ground with a thud. The demons that live inside of my head raged. I was done playing my part. The truth was, I was the least dangerous of us. I’d always known that.

“I cannot tell you how much you’re going to regret that.” Thatcher says from behind me.

I lived for pain. For watching people crumple below my feet and succumb to the agony I warranted. If I never ate again, but could continue inflicting damage to others and feed off only the energy that came from their suffering I promise I would.

But something that connected all four of us. Something that we all enjoyed, was people’s fear. We never wanted to be popular or homecoming kings. We wanted to scare everyone. So that when we walked into the room, they were terrified to look up. Afraid that eye contact would be the last straw before we did something horrific.

I made it a point to know the things that scared someone. What made their heart pound and their palms sweat.

While I knew Chris swam and enjoyed drugging girls at parties in high school just so he could get laid, I also knew something very important about him that was going to help me get what I wanted from him now.

Chris was deathly afraid of snakes.

He’d been over at the estate one summer, fucking around in the yard with my brother when a simple, harmless garden snake made its way past them. Dorian had laughed about it for days, how Chris screamed like a girl running into the house without thinking twice about it.

I relished that memory. That gift I had been given at such a young age. To remember what it was that truly scared people. Not just superficially, but underneath it all. What made their skin crawl and caused them to have night terrors.

And then I’d exploit it. Because I ached for the power it gave me.

We all did.

The only real power in life is fear.

Money can be taken away. Titles can be stripped. But once you build a reputation the way we have, the inclination that walks up everyone’s spine when we walk into a room, can’t be taken away.

I lifted the bottom of my shirt up, wiping roughly at my face. The spit coming off with ease.

“You bring them?” I ask Rook.

He lifts the brown sack up, shaking it a bit, the weight of it looked heavy. “Of course I did. This isn’t my first rodeo. Are you forgetting about our senior prom?”

The prom we never attended. Well not technically.

We did however, release four fully grown boa constrictors inside the building it was being held at. They didn’t bite anyone, but it was fun to sit on-top of the roof watching as students and teachers spilled out into the parking lot. Their screams echoing from the inside.

One of the many tricks we’d done.

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