Page 117 of The Obedient Lie
We didn’t talk about it.
We never had.
Not when it came to women.Not like this.
Because we’d never shared.
Not likethat.
There were hookups. Swaps. Quiet arrangements. But it was never emotional. Never the same girl at the same time. That was the line. The unspoken rule.
ButEmiliamade everything blurry.
She made things feelpossible—and dangerous—all at once.
“Maybe she thinks she has to choose.” Luca said, staring at the scar between his fingers, rubbing it absently like it still stung.
“No. She would know, wouldn’t she?”
I looked at mine too.
The same raised line. Same angle.
Left there from the rusted bars ofthatcage.
And suddenly, I was back there.
Two weeks. In the dark.
No light. Not even a crack beneath the door.
Locked in steel dog crates shoved into the basement of our father’s compound.
We werefive years old.
Barely breathing.
They fitted us with collars—shock sensors that flared if we spoke.
If we cried.
If wecalled for each other.
We learned to be silentfast.
But Luca’s cage was close enough to reach—barely.
If we stretched.
If we curled on our sides and pressed our fingers between the bars, we could just touch. Justfeel.
And that was it.
Two weeks of silence, with nothing but the cold bite of steel and the faint, trembling pressure of his fingertips against mine. Slowly starving to death.
I still remember the way the metalburned.
Not from fire.
