Page 39 of Ladybirds

“No,” she snaps, finding her balance. “Not maybe. You’re wrong.”

Seth says nothing, but the expression he wears—the pity darkening his eyes—gives him away.

He doesn’t believe her.

What he thinks shouldn’t bother her. She should walk away, forget this conversation ever happened, and move on with her life. But she can’t shake the heat in his gaze—the conviction—when he spat David’s name like a curse.

“Take it back,” she says, trembling with a level of fear and fury she can’t find a name for. She wants to hear him say it, wants to hear the words from his own lips, so she can cover up the memory of the ones barbed in her heart (that thing). “You’re wrong, so take it back.”

He openly flinches; the muscle in his jaw straining. “You’re asking me to lie,” he says, the statement hissing past his clenched teeth. “So, terribly sorry, but no. I won’t.”

“Why?!”

“Because I refuse to lie to you for the sake of your feelings,” he snaps. “If you don’t wish to hear my opinion on the matter, then don’t ask.”

It strikes her, as quick and as devastating as lightning. She thinks of the way he twists everything, how every answer he gives is as convoluted and vague as possible.

It’s not that he won’t take back the words.

It’s that he can’t.

The implication of what that means makes her stagger. She sinks onto the couch, her hand covering her mouth and heart hammering against her ribs. Her mind scrambles to recall his words, to catch some hidden loophole, but everything is blurring together and she can’t recall his exact phrasing. And, with how carefully he words everything, she gets the sense that—if she wants a true answer—hers must be too.

“Do you really believe it’s not David?” she asks, voice soft. Believe, because to exclude that one word would be to open herself up to certainties and she just can’t. No matter his answer, even if her suspicions are right and he’s forced to tell her only truths, she doesn’t want to be left without hope.

Belief isn’t the same as fact.

“Yes.” The word leaves him in a hiss, as if it physically pains him to say it. If Sara had any doubts about her theory before, she doesn’t now.

“You can’t lie, can you?” The question is little more than a murmur, but his reaction is jarring.

He stills, face twisting into a soundless snarl and his hands, fisting, tremble at his sides. “No.” One word, one syllable. It lands between them, heavy with bitterness and edged with fury. It clangs, metallic and sharp, in her ears, and Sara realizes what that one word has stripped him of.

His armor.

He can’t hide behind twisted half truths if she knows how to ask her questions. Form them right, and there is nothing he can hide from her; no secret safe so long as she knows what words to wield to pry it from his lips.

Seth seethes, and it’s the first time Sara has ever seen him without his carefully arranged mask of control and composure. The heat in his glare is savage. Feral. Sara has never seen a wolf in the wild, but she imagines this is what it would look like—this untamed storm of fury and fear—if she backed one into a corner.

It’s at that moment she realizes what it means to hold power over someone. She’s already drunk off the potential of it—of knowing she can find the truth so long as she listens for it. But there’s a grimace, a vulnerability, hiding behind his sneer, and it’s enough to make her stomach churn. “You have to answer.”

A statement, not a question, and his answering silence is proof that whatever magic forcing his tongue has rules. Sara licks her lips, pulse fluttering in her throat. She rearranges the words, asks again, “Do you have to answer?”

Maybe it’s the sympathy weaved into her voice, or maybe he’s simply resigned himself to the situation, but he wilts. The hard line of his shoulders, the knuckle-white clenching of his fists, loosens. The jagged edges of his snarl softens until his expression is more frost than fire. “Yes,” he fumes, looking away.

Sara expects him to blink away, to run—she knows she would—but instead he sits, slouching in his chair and cradling his temple with long, pale fingers. He looks defeated, and she realizes that she probably isn’t the first (or last) to have figured it out. Still… she shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”

Seth scoffs, not bothering to look up. “Shocking.”

“Shut up,” Sara murmurs, without any heat. Her mind is still strung up on the implications. “Why do you have to tell me the truth? What’s the point?”

A muscle in his jaw jumps. From where she’s sitting, she can almost imagine the groaning of his teeth. “Why,” he spits the word as if it’s poison, “must you insist on asking questions I have no answer to?”

“That doesn’t—”

“It does,” he snaps, “If you would just listen.”

Her breath leaves her. “You... you don’t know?”

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