Page 66 of Sweet Lies

She smiles, and I tense. She sits on the edge of the bed before slowly leaning over me till she’s lying against my chest. One hand grips my shirt in a tight ball as her face inches closer to my own. Her hand caresses my face—then, just as quickly, she pulls a knife from her side. The tip lingers against my cheek.

“If you’re going to use that, you better do it quickly and make it final,” I growl, pissed.

“They’ll never know the truth about what happened. That’s my past. My story. Leave them the fuck out of it,” she hisses.

In a split second, I move and have her pinned under me, her knife thrown across the room. She gasps with surprise. I hold her arms against her sides in an iron grip as she thrashes and kicks.

“Enough,” I order. “You pulled the knife on me, remember.”

She keeps moving. Slowly, panic slips into her eyes.

“Fuck,” I mutter, shifting up.

She just lies there staring at the ceiling before sitting up.

“I was doing better,” she says, more to herself than me.

“I know.”

She shifts over to lean her head on my shoulder. My head falls against hers. “It’s going to be okay. No one else has to know. But Bec, he may find out. Now that he knows you’re alive, he’ll dig into what happened. He’ll want answers. You need to be prepared for him to obtain that information.”

“He can never know, Andre.Never.” She whispers the last word, closing her eyes.

“You’re the strongest person I know, Bec. You’ve found yourself when you’d lost yourself. That made you like steel. Use it, but don’t forget the best of you.”

“What’s the best of me?” she asks, laughing bitterly.

“Your ability to know who’s hurting in a room and what to do to fix it.”

“Look at you being so poetic.” She laughs a little, but I can tell she’s still reeling from her flashback.

“The poetic hit man.”

“They’ll write sonnets about you.” She laughs more easily.

“They better, otherwise I’ll send you after them.”

Kissing the top of her head, I tug her closer, hoping that she’ll pull away. She needs to pull away because this isn’t something we need to start again.

“Iampretty good with a knife,” she says, and I hear the smile in her voice.

“When this is done, where are you going?” she asks nervously.

“I don’t know, Bec. I think we should both return to the worlds we made before the return of your siblings.”

“Yes, that’s probably for the best,” she answers with no emotion.

“You should go.”

Seconds hang between us before she answers, “I know,” but she makes no move to put distance between us.

“We should have done a lot of things.”

Slowly, she moves out of my arms but not off the bed. Without intending to, I move a stray lock of her hair behind her ear from where it’s fallen forward.

“You know what I was thinking about on the plane? How you forced me to give you your first kiss.”

She chuckles. “I don’t think anyone could force you to do anything you didn’t want to.”

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