Page 41 of Luka

Looking away, Lucia pulls her knees closer to her chest. Seconds pass while she thinks.

“So that wasn’t a lie?” she asks. “Piper was planning on talking me into working as a prostitute?”

“Talking you intois a generous way of putting it, but yes.”

Several seconds pass while Lucia says nothing. Never meeting my eyes, she shifts toward me awkwardly, her hands still tied behind her back. When I spot the water coating her irises, my lungs shrink.

Why do I like the anger more?

“So what do I do to make people see me differently then?” she asks. I can tell she tries to speak with strength, but her voice cracks at the end of her sentence, unveiling her despair even if her eyes didn’t.

I shake my head. “You don’t get it, Peach. There isn’t anything you can do.” I scoot up the bed and drag her legsonto my lap so I can bring her close to me. She tenses, but it’s surprisingly subtle. She wants to hear this. And oddly enough, this is a lesson I want to give. Like a fox teaching a hare to avoid predators… It makes little sense. “It isn’t just that you’re young and pretty and sweet that makes you so vulnerable. It’s that you’re quick to trust and far too naive.Everyonegets burned, but the people who thrive are the ones who put their faith in themselves and no one else.”

I lower my gaze to her neck as I trail my fingers gently over the wounded flesh. “I don’t know everything that happened, but I doubt my brother came up here without you alerting him. You saw him as a source of safety instead of the danger he was… You want to know what you can do to make people stop seeing you as prey, but you’ve got to start understanding that the whole world is your predator and your job is to survive it.”

Lucia’s teeth sink down on her bottom lip while I wait eagerly for her eyes to sparkle with the realization. With an aha moment that came too late.

But it never comes at all.

She lets go of her lip and shifts her legs on my lap. “Is that howyousee the world?” she asks, her voice low.Careful.

I don’t respond, but … of course.

“Is that why you hurt people?” she asks, even quieter. “Because you’re afraid they’ll hurt you first?”

My eyes widen for half a second before I cool my expression and smile. “Do you think I’m afraid of you hurting me, rabbit?”

“I’m talking about your brother.”

When my smile falls, she bites her lip again while she works up the courage to go on.

“Maybe you can rationalize killing his girlfriend,” she says, her chest pulling in with a shudder. “But how can you rationalize having sex with her?”

My jaw clenches as my palms flatten on the mattress, itching to curl.

“I guess what I’m getting at is,” Lucia says, her bravery growing. “Maybe it isn’t that I’m tootrustingornaive. Maybe it’s that you use your warped sense of the world to validate your sociopathic tendencies. Because if you accurately judged yourself for who you are and the things you do to those you’re supposed to love, you wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”

“But…” she goes on, the sarcasm, while light, unmistakable in her tone. “I’ll keep what you said in mind.”

I stare at Lucia, and she stares right back at me with a challenge in her eyes I simultaneously want to quash and run away from. And I’m unaccustomed to running away from challenges.

Something shifts my gut, making me feel queasy, like my world tips slightly. Not enough to send me hurtling in any direction. Just enough to cause unease. I don’t know what it is, but something nags, like there’s some truth to her words, but I know for certain that they’re false.

Maybe the world once proved to Lucia that it will be there to comfort her fears, dry her tears, and scare away her monsters, but that world was an illusion. Carefully crafted by her overprotective father.

My childhood had different lessons to teach me. I learned the reality of the world young and feelgratefulfor it. I pity fools who live their lives with reckless abandon, fools like my brother, whose girlfriends whore around behind their backs.

It sickened me when she approached me in a bar we each frequented by chance one night, her hand slyly brushing my arm three cocktails in. I’d never liked Piper. From the day I met her, I knew she was full of ill-intentions, a rat looking to gnaw her way through someone else’s scraps.

I don’t know why I did it. I don’t. That night, I just wanted to see if she’d betray him so I could confirm for myself that she needed to be ridded of.

But it didn’t stop. And I have no idea why. That didn’t start bothering me until right now.

Anger lifts through my unease, bathing me like a warm, inviting blanket that I welcome with open arms. Anything to drown the emotion Lucia conjured.

Once again, this girl is fucking with my head. It’s time I stop letting her.

A small gasp sucks past her lips when I throw her legs off of me and stand. I roll my shoulders and flex my hands, already feeling relief at having made a decision.

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