Page 94 of The Lies We Steal

“Please tell me your clean.” I breathe, wincing as I try not to check him out while he pulls his pants up, zipping them and shaking a hand through his hair. Waltzing out of the tight space as if none of this bothered him.

There is something that flashes over his eyes. Annoyance? Frustration?

He breathes, “I’m clean.”

Relief floods me, taking care of one of the major glaring issues I’m dealing with right now. The siren continues to blare as I jog slightly to the window, seeing that one of the trees in the commons is incased in a rage of orange flames. The fire cackled and hissed loudly, raising higher and higher as it consumed the old tree.

“Oh my God, Lyra.” I breathe, worry filling me for my friend that I left with three out of the four psychos.

I spin ready to bolt out of this office and back to where I left her in the grand hall. Alistair’s arms catch me before I can, stopping me with his tall frame, hands holding my forearms tightly.

“Lyra’s fine.” The human in his eyes is gone, returned are the black orbs that leave no room for anything but darkness.

“Yeah? And you know that how?” I argue.

A knowing smirk builds onto his face, twisting his face into the stunning villain he is. My stomach rolls, God I had sex with him. I had the best sex of my life with him and now what?

“Because she helped Rook set the fire.”

Alistair

“Don’t you have your own dorm?” I recline in my desk chair, “And your own bed?”

Rook, lifts his head from my pillow, raising his eyebrows, “Can’t I hang out with my two best friends?”

“Thatcher is in the shower and I’m practically ignoring you. You just don’t want to sit alone in your room.”

“Silas is at The Graveyard, he wanted to go alone. I’ve got to learn to trust him to do things by himself but if I sit in our room without a distraction, I’ll end up following him to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.” He admits, tossing his zippo into the air above his head, catching it smoothly as it falls back down.

I nod, turning back to the sketch on the table, my pencil pressing into the paper shading the outside of the rose to give it more dimension.

“Speaking of Silas,” Rook continues, sitting up and hanging his feet off the edge of my bed. “We are already taking care of Greg, I know. But what are we gonna do about the mayor? We’re just gonna let him live knowing what he did?”

The lead of my pencil snaps from the pressure I’m applying.

“It’s not our call.” I say, still looking at the drawing, “It’s Si’s. We handle Greg, get what we can out of him, then we leave it up to Silas if we go after Frank. This is his war. We’re just soldiers.”

I knew when I told them what I’d seen it would take a minute for it soak in. Let the truth burn the already bleeding wounds we were sporting. Once we confronted Greg about his involvement, once we figured out if he was the one who injected the drugs and wound-up killing Rose, I knew Silas would begin shifting directions.

The plan was to kill Greg grab the USB before anyone else could and keep it for when we were ready to send it in anonymously to the police. We wanted the ones who had been entangled in Rosemary’s death, not a sex ring. That wasn’t on our agenda, but we couldn’t keep the information to ourselves when we knew there were other girls missing. We would let the police take care of that once we were done getting the revenge we deserved.

Mayor Donahue would get what was coming for him either way. Whether that be at the hands of me or by the hands of the prison system, he wouldn’t make it out alive.

I thought about that video for hours upon hours over the past few days. Replaying how easy of a decision it was for Frank. How quickly he’d chosen one of his daughters to bargain.

Deep down I felt guilty.

I felt partly to blame because Rosemary’s relationship with us was probably the reason he picked her over her sister. Sage Donahue did not run in or even around our circle. While Rose didn’t mind getting dirty, hanging with ones with a reputation, and letting our antics slide, her sister couldn’t have been more opposite.

Sage had been a cheerleader, a Ponderosa Springs’ Sweetheart and wouldn’t have been caught dead around people like me. She hadn’t been a bitch to us, rather pretended we didn’t exist. Which was fine, we weren’t going out of our way to be welcoming to her either.

Silas had said, she always made herself scarce when he came over to see Rose. While they were twins who shared DNA, they couldn’t have been more opposite. Minus the hair color, that was pretty spot-on even if one of them loved bubblegum pink and the other hated it.

“Would you have done it?” Rook asks, looking over at me his jaw tight. A storm brewing in his mind, that made his eyes so blue I thought they were glowing.

“Done what?”

“Would you have chosen if you were Frank. Would you have picked between your kids?”

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