Page 48 of The Lies We Steal

The most exhilarated I have felt in a long time. My blood pumps, my mouth watering.

“Who doesn’t love a little foreplay before the main event?” Rook wiggles his eyebrows, working on his own accord to take the gun from Silas, who is glaring at him for even touching it.

We have to get creative. We have to be sinister and stealthy.

We are going to make them wish we’d end them, just to get a break from the terror that wracked their bodies.

This was what I lived for.

Briar

Ihad officially hit extreme sleep deprivation. I’d started to heavily feel the effects of no sleep after forty-eight hours. Anxiety, irritability, and even begun to hallucinate at the late hours of the night. Hearing the sounds of footsteps, creaking of doors, seeing shadows in my empty dorm room.

Even as I laid down in my bed, my eyes refused to close. My brain hellbent on staying awake and alert. I didn’t want to give them a chance to catch me vulnerable or at a disadvantage.

I felt like if I was always awake, I’d be ready at any given moment.

It’d been a few days since the commotion of my dead rat on the door. The whispers were still very loud and people talked about me behind my back in class, but I’d learned to revert back to my old self. Blocking out everything that was being said, and really just started relying on Lyra for support who thankfully, was fine with it, and leaned on me as well.

She took care of the mess on the door, quickly placing Ada in a box and wiping up the blood she’d leaked. Together we buried her at the base of a tree behind one of the school buildings, throwing her a little funeral in the process before returning to our dorm and binge watching the Harry Potter movies.

I tried to remain optimistic, but it didn’t help. Every day felt like another waiting game, another day of catching a shadow move in the corner of my eye but turning to see no one was there.

Yesterday I’d had lunch with Uncle Thomas, who was full of energy and talked the entire time. Which was fine, it meant all I had to do was smile and nod my head. He’d heard from my teachers I was good student, and he was glad I was adjusting well.

And even though I wanted to tell him, I had promised Lyra I wouldn’t. So I kept it all to myself, swallowing it down with tasteless food as he continued talking about an upcoming annual school event that I didn’t want to attend.

However, I told him I would go, hoping it was just an assembly of some sort. I wasn’t in the mood to do anything but classes and hide in my dorm room.

I was living my life in a constant state of limbo now, always wondering when it would end.

After classes today I’d went to the library to study, quickly realizing the warmth of the heater inside the large building, mixed with my tired eyes trying to read was a terrible idea because I’d ended up falling asleep on one of my books and dreaming.

And as always it was about him.

Not his wicked friends who walk with their heads high and grin like Cheshire cats as they strut around campus. Not even the one who thinks flipping his zippo around is a personality trait who I share a class with.

I only dream of him.

I’m unsure of what it is about his demeanor that sets my spine straight or how he’s able to make my senses heighten like a scared kitten. I’d never been fearful of a person the way I am with him.

There was just something about Alistair Caldwell that made me panic. Something inside of him was so dark, so damned, that it called to the deepest parts of my soul. The way he stared at me from across the courtyard, like he knew every single detail about my life.

What made me jump, what made me tick, my past, where I came from. He looked at me like he knew everything. What I would do before I even did it.

And he knew I’d stolen from him.

In retrospect I wasn’t sure I was making it out of his grasp alive and needed to have something on my body so they would know who killed me, I wasn’t stealing because I wanted to. But because I had to.

I also couldn’t walk up to him and throw the ring at him.

I liked having that edge on him.

I had something he wanted. Something he needed. If he wanted it back, he’d have to pry it from my dead hands. I felt like I had him at a disadvantage, maybe on a lesser scale than he had me, but a disadvantage, nonetheless.

After I jolted awake from my quick slumber, I went for a swim, the cold water of the school pool had woken my muscles and given me a much-needed boost of energy. It felt nice to do something normal from my old life. I’d been a great swimmer in high school, not like it mattered to be a starter or anything because I didn’t have the correct last name, but I was good.

My hair smelled like chemicals when I was finished, my fingers pruned, and even though I was nervous a shower would make me sleepy, I needed to wash off the pool water.

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