Perfect Lies

“Why did your sister go back?” he asks.

I curl up, resting my chin on my knees. “I honestly don’t know. Maybe she wanted to stay with James.” I glower, thinking about him. I hate him. “But who knows? Maybe she has some grand master plan.” I snort, then move so my eyes are against my kneecaps, pushing into them. “Then again, planning was never her strong suit. She probably just felt like it.”

“She loves you.” He states it like fact.

“How do you know?” My eyes burn with tears, and I push them harder into my knees.

“When we took her, you were the only thing she cared about. She was desperate to get back to make sure you stayed safe.”

I gasp a messy snort of a laugh. “I really thought she was going to kill me.”

“And you still showed up.”

“I owed Fia her freedom. And she needed me.”

“As a general rule, when you think someone’s going to kill you, you run the opposite direction.”

“Yes, sir.” I stand, brushing the sand off my pants. He joins me in the walk back to the house and I turn things around in my head, everything mixing together and jumbling up. Cole’s tragic history. Fia’s choice to leave me. Her relationship with James.

The world bursts into bright colors, and I see a girl, a teenager, but tiny. She’s got white hair and black eyes. She’s sitting across from a woman I actually recognize—Doris, from the school—but she looks bored, slouched with one leg draped lazily over the side of her chair.