Page 53 of Everything Under the Sun

I looked right at her, and she stopped.

“What’s not to understand?” I asked indifferently, pretending that her accusations didn’t bother me.

Baffled by my response, or lack thereof, she took a moment to get her own response together. She crossed her arms and tilted her head to one side, her eyebrows drawn together.

“What I don’t understand the most about it,” she said, “is why you seem so different from everyone else. I-I can’t put my finger on it, but…I don’t know, you just don’t fit in this place.”

That wasn’t something I wanted to hear—if she could see that, then Marion and Rafe and Overlord Wolf and every other soldier in Lexington City could, or would eventually, see it. And that was a death sentence.

I walked past her and went toward my desk for no reason other than to keep my distance and pretend to be busy.

“Your sister is where she belongs,” I said, though it was difficult for me to say because it was a lie.

Thais’ shoulders stiffened and her lips drew together in a hard, angry line; her arms came uncrossed and fell at her sides; it seemed like it took everything in her not to cry, or to shout at me, or to hit me, or to do all three.

I turned toward the desk, still trying to pretend to look busy and unaffected, when I was a wreck and my act was getting harder to fake.

Then out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the barrel of a gun—the gun I had given her.

“Why did you do it?” she demanded, her hands shaking, her finger dancing precariously on the trigger. She pushed the gun forward. “Why?!” Tears tumbled down her cheeks.

I raised my hands slowly in surrender.

“Put the gun down before you accidentally shoot me.”

She shoved it forward instead, making my heart stop and start back up again frenetically. It wasn’t the dying that scared me—I often thought I’d be better off dead—it was the thought of her shaky trigger-finger and the gun going off when she didn’t mean for it to—if I was going to die in an unnatural way, I at least wanted it to be intentional. An accidental death would be pathetic.

“Tell me why!” she roared.

“Thais—”

She made another move forward, cutting off my words.

I pushed the palms of my hands outward, trying to show her I would do whatever she wanted.

Inhaling a deep breath, I said, “Your sister is fine. No one has touched her.”

“You’re lying!”

“No!” I threw my hands up higher. “Just listen to me!” I gritted my teeth with frustration.

THAIS

I stood my ground, but the tears were blurring my vision, and the weight of the gun was a heavy burden in my heart. I had never shot an animal for food, much less ever shot a person before. And I didn’t want to. I wasn’t so sure that I could.

Atticus sighed.

“I’m not lying to you,” he said. “The first time I spoke to you in the room across the hall, when you told me that your sister was a danger to herself, I immediately went to find her. I put her with a friend of mine at the brothel where she’d be safe.”

“But you still put her in the brothel!”

“I had to!” he shouted, and took another step back.

Then he lowered his voice, tried to be calm. “No one has hurt your sister,” he said. “I’ve been there to check on her myself several times. She’s fine.”

I lost my focus. I wanted to believe him, and a part of me did, but I also didn’t want to fall for his tricks.

“Then why did you lie to me?” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth in the beginning?”

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