“Just leave me alone, and we won’t have any trouble.” The threat is present in my tone, but she doesn’t back down.
“What are you talking about? You’ve been gone formonths.Just disappeared off the face of the realm, and nobody has seen or heard from you since! We all thought you were dead!”
I was.On the inside. When I don’t respond, she takes that opportunity to study me,reallystudy me, and when our eyes lock again, hurt and anguish sit in hers.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I say, but my voice cracks, and all the emotions I’ve harbored deep inside spill out with the words.
“Kallie—”
“Don’t!” I interrupt. “Just don’t.” Seeing her has been enough to trudge up all the memories I’ve kept buried underneath all the betrayal. “I can’t trust you.”
“Of course you can! You know me.”
“No. I don’t.” My head tilts to the side, and my features pinch together in anguish. “I’m not sure I even know myself anymore.”
“Let me prove it to you.”
I scoff at her suggestion. “How?”
“Truth serum. My dad gets it from one of the shops here. Let me take it, and you can ask me anything you want,” she tells me.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would you try to get me to believe you, to trust you. What’s in it for you?”
She looks at me like she doesn’t know me at all, and she doesn’t. Not really. We spent one lunch together. I know more things about Licorice than I do about her.
“Absolutely nothing.” She looks hurt at the innuendo, but I don’t have it in me to care.
Turning on her heel, the guy follows her closely, but I keep a reasonable distance between us. The guy goes into one of the shops to retrieve the serum, and we wait outside patiently.
“How do I know that’s the right serum?” A valid question.
“Want to try some and find out?” It’s rhetorical as she downs the whole thing. My mouth pops open slightly in shock, but I quickly recover.
Going back to our little alleyway, she waits expectantly for me to start asking her whatever it is I need to know.
Peppering her with questions, she doesn’t miss a beat when answering. And with each one, my resolve slowly starts chipping away.
“Have you seen Callum in the time I’ve been gone?”
Without hesitation, she says, “No.”
“Do you know where I’ve been?”
She lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Nope,” she says, popping the P.
“Did you haveanythingto do with what happened to me?”
Rolling her eyes as if she is bored, she gives me another loose-lipped response. “Nada.”
She examines her nails as if this is the biggest waste of hertime, but screw her. She doesn’t know what I’ve been through. Or maybe she does. For all I know, that wasn’t even the right serum. Thinking of a question that she wouldn’t want to answer, a smirk quips at the corner of my lips. “What is the secret you’ve been keeping from your father when you leave the castle?”
Her gaze swings to me, and I see the magic fully in action. She tries to fight it, sealing her lips until they turn a lighter shade, but she can’t hold it back, and she lets it all out.
“I come here, to Excidium, to see Atticus, because my father would never approve. He wants an arranged marriage for me. He doesn’t care what I want, who I want to be with. So I sneak out as often as I can to be with him and live out a false sense of the fairy tale I’ll never be able to have.” She twists her head so fast I’m surprised her neck didn’t break, looking at who I’m now assuming is Atticus, who is leaning against the side of the building with the biggest shit-eating grin on his face.
