Page 47 of Lovely Deceit

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I try to keep my heartbeat as steady as possible. “To get an education.” One of the suction cups on my stomach zaps me. “To fill in for my sister.” Another. “To make my parents happy.” Several of the suction cups go off, and I cringe.

“Stop lying.”

I hadn’t really thought they werealllies. Some of them are close enough to the truth without telling him everything.

“Why are you at Carnegie?”

“Why are you?” I counter, fixing him with a stare. “You want to play this game? Tell me something big, Alaric. Tell me what you’re here for that has nothing to do with the Knights.”

His throat works. “I have a sister,” he starts, and my mind whirs, trying to connect the pieces. “I found out she was adopted as soon as she was born. She would’ve been older than me,” he emphasizes, and I get it now. His parents gave her up because she wasn’t a boy. He nods. “I’ve confirmed it.”

“So, that’s why you’re back at Carnegie? Is she here or something?”

He shakes his head. “No, she’s not here.” He pauses, then watches me through fanned lashes. “I found out the same day your sister died. In a matter of minutes, my faith in everything the Knights stood for fell out from under me. So, I came to the Knight epicenter to see what else they’re secreting away.”

My heart pounds in my head. I search his chest for the telltale sign of a lie, but I can’t find it anywhere.

Could it be that Alaric and I are on a similar mission and I didn’t even know it?

23

Alaric

My heart thumps against my ribcage. Eden peers at me with the most innocent, yet perplexed expression I’ve ever seen. It’s completely misogynistic for me to think this but people like Eden don’t belong in this world. Her pure self is better off far, far away from here and the Knights’ games.

“You said you being here had nothing to do with the Knights.”

My stomach twists. The whole point of this charade was to not lie to her, so I refuse to do so now. I want her to see the real me. The one that’s been living under this guise of power and money. The one that will no longer stand for women being treated the way they are now. The person I’m only just beginning to know myself.

“What I told you that day wasn’t a lie.” I wait for the electric shock to come, but it doesn’t. I should hook myself up to this device more often. Find out what I really believe without the cobwebs of other people’s wishes shrouding me. “My journey is about my sister. Your sister. I feel like their paths are intertwined.”

“Still sounds like a lie,” she says, eyeing the round nodes hooked up to my chest and abs.

I can understand why she’d think so. She was brought up in a world where women are just supposed to look pretty, and I was in it so deep, so why would I suddenly change my tune? “I’m not lying. Here, I’ll tell a lie, so you can know what I’m saying is the truth.” I take a deep breath, then trudge forward with the first lie that pops into my head. “Eden Astor is weak.” I flinch as the spark shoots through me. “She’s ugly. She doesn’t deserve to be here. I don’t think about her at all,” I growl out as the shocks finally make me double over.

When I peer toward her, she’s gripping the bars in front of her. As our gazes collide, she says, “If that was some sort of declaration, it was fucked up.”

I shrug. I thought I would’ve been given a little more credit than that.

“If you thought all these things, why didn’t you help me on the dock? Why didn’t you show your face?”

“Because I’m the weak one,” I tell her. “I thought at first it was because they still had some hold on me.” A shock ripples through me, and I peer down at my chest.

“Ha!” She points at me through her own cell bars as if she caught me running from a jewelry store with a pocket full of gemstones.

I close my eyes. It’s time to admit the truth to myself, then. “I guess I don’t know who I am if I’m not a Barclay or a Knight.” The stone room seems to close me in. “My whole life was set up for me. I knew what I was going to be from a very young age, you understand that.”

“If you call yourself a victim, I’m going to explode.”

My shoulders collapse. In a way, I am, just as everyone else surrounding the Knights is. But it’s hard to think of someone as a victim when they’ve lived off the spoils of others’ misfortunes their whole life. “I don’t know who I am,” I force out through clenched teeth. “I don’t want to be defined by them anymore, but if I’m not, I have to figure out what I really believe without someone else dictating it to me. Don’t call me a victim if you don’t want to, I don’t care. I’m just trying to be as real as possible with you.”

She bites her lip, mulling my words over as a myriad of emotions distort her face from one second to the next. The pregnant pause that follows grows and grows, not interrupted once by even a flicker of electric shock from the nodes suctioned to my skin.

“Now I’m going to ask you again, Eden. Why are you here?”

“Why do you care?” she asks, lifting a brow.

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