Page 41 of The Lies We Steal

The way his hands held my wrists, his fingers digging into my skin. His palm over my mouth, the way his scent assaulted me in ways that made me ache. I could still feel his rough, hard body pushed into mine.

He felt dangerous. Like holding onto lightning. Everything about him made me feel unsafe and vulnerable. I had been at his mercy. He could have done anything he wanted to me, and I hated that.

I hated him for that power he had over me.

But what scared me more, more than his psycho friends, more than his murderous hands, was how even though I was afraid for my life, it excited me.

In that moment I had felt alive. Every cell inside of me reverberated with vitality. I could have jumped off a cliff with no fear, robbed a bank. I felt superhuman with all the adrenaline that ran through me.

My body was still holding on to the attraction I felt for him the night of the party. My mind knew how crooked it was to be pulled to a guy like him, my brain understood the consequences. The destruction he would do.

But my body.

My body loved the flow of electricity. The endorphins.

Risking my life, my freedom, had been something I’d done since I was taught how to steal. It was a drug that I had quit before coming here, one I was determined not to run back to.

And AlistairCaldwell’s hands felt like the worst kind of relapse.

I hated him most for that.

Thinking about him made me reach into my hoodie pocket, slipping my finger across the bulky ring that once adorned the king of my nightmares’ hand. I could feel the hollow pieces from his carved initials, tracing them over and over again.

I stole it in case they did kill us. That way the police would know who to look for. If I was going down, I wouldn’t go down alone.

For the past two days I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. To see him walk inside my mathematics class, head straight towards me and suffocate me with his bare hands. Finishing the job he’d started in the woods.

I hadn’t seen a single one of them and neither had Lyra.

The quiet creaks and groaning of the nearly ancient library make me shiver. I quickly turn my head over my shoulder, making sure there is nothing, or no one behind me.

Making my eyes strain to search between the rows and rows of dimly lit bookshelves almost expecting him to be lurking in the shadows. However, there was nobody of importance, just other students searching for material.

I turn back in my seat, pulling my foot up in the chair and tucking it beneath me. My headphones in my ears as I return my gaze to the laminated newspaper articles.

The genealogy department inside the school library was way more extensive than I’d thought. I’d read through what felt like hundreds of articles about the history of this place and the town it sits upon.

Mostly, I’d looked for anything with the last names, Caldwell, Van Doren, Hawthorne, and Pierson. This all felt like an elaborate chess game, and I was losing terribly because I didn’t know my opponent properly.

From what I’d read they were each a descendant from the town’s original founders. Their families had been interwoven since the 1600’s. Which meant old money and even older secrets. While there was basically nothing pertaining to them by themselves, there were a slew of reports surrounding their families.

Silas’s father was one of the world’s most successful technology owners. He’d created a system that protected big corporations from being cyber hacked. It seemed any company that made money had invested in Hawthorn Inc. He also had two younger brothers, who were both in middle school and quite intelligent, winning awards left and right.

Rook’s family was littered with lawyers and judges. The people in charge of balancing the scales of right and wrong. How could they have gotten it so wrong with this generation? There wasn’t much about his mom, and I wasn’t even sure she was around.

The Piersons, without a lack of a better word, were attention whores. There wasn’t much on Thatcher, which didn’t surprise me, but his multimillion-dollar grandparents were everywhere. They’d built a real estate empire after leaving the farming business in the fifties. But the biggest scandal surrounding that family was Thatcher’s dad who was currently on death row after killing thirteen women in four years.

Here I was, thinking my family was screwed up. I was the poster child of happiness compared to some of these people. I mean, imagine growing up the son of a serial killer, you can’t help but wonder what that does to a kid.

You can’t help but understand how he turned out the way he is now.

It also made me question, is it nature? Or nurture? Is there something biologically coded into Thatcher’s brain? Or did the sociopathic tendencies only surface after the world told him he was a monster?

Even though the other families had multiple features, The Caldwells took the cake of most articles published in Ponderosa Springs.

Pages and pages of their story. How they came from nothing and built a legacy. The original migration to the area had been for religious freedom and from that they created one of the world’s most wealthiest towns. More than that, I’d found out that Alistair had an older brother named Dorian and he seemed to love the limelight.

All-star swimmer, valedictorian in high school and at Hollow Heights, he’d won just about every award you could think of. I almost gasped with how similar they looked. Almost like twins, even though Dorian was older. The main difference was Dorian was cheerful, a bright smile illuminating his features so his dark hair and eyes didn’t look that dark.

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