Evie frowned. Her eyes had a faraway look to them, like she wasn’t seeing what was right in front of them. “It’s a bit hazy.”
Ally had known Evie since the day she was born. She knew when she was frustrated, when she was angry—and when she was hiding something.
I can’t believe I didn’t notice it sooner. Maybe it was the long hours she’d been working or her sheer exhaustion, but Ally hadn’t noticed any issues with Evie’s story when she’d originally told it. But now?
“You never told me why you were wearing the necklace that day,” Ally said, sitting down on the bed across from the one Evie was standing in front of. “We’d made a pact to take it off andhide it away whenever we went out, just in case something like this might happen.”
Evie nodded, looking at the floor. “I’d been wearing it earlier and I… I just forgot.”
That was plausible. Evie was an artist, and sometimes, her head stayed in the clouds while her body walked around on autopilot. But the irregularities didn’t end there.
“You said there were two of them, but you never told me what the second one looked like. Did he have the tattoo as well? If so, where?”
Evie tossed herself on the other bed, burying her face in the pillow. She spoke, but it was so muffled that Ally couldn’t make it out. “What?”
Evie turned her head so her voice was clear. “I said I made it all up.”
Ally’s eyes widened in shock. “You made it up?” she repeated, unable to process what her sister had just admitted.
Evie shifted so that she was lying on her side, looking at her sister. “Yes. I knew you’d never sell it, even if we were on the brink of starvation. I planned to sneak out and sell it one night when you were at work, then confess only after we’d booked passage off-world. But you went storming off to accost the Raven and I got nervous. Then you showed up with a wad of credits and we no longer needed to sell it, but I didn’t know how to tell you what I’d done and—oh, I’m sorry!”
Tears were rolling down her sister’s pale cheeks, but Ally sat unmoving.Evie lied to me.
On her sister’s information, she’d confronted the Raven, setting off this chain of events that had almost gotten them kidnapped and sold into slavery, and currently had them speeding off, light-years away from the Rings, on a ship full of pirates.
And it turned out the damn King of the Pirates wasn’t the liar she’d thought he was.
Ally groaned, and this time, it was her turn to shove her face in the pillow to muffle the string of curses she couldn’t keep inside.
“I’m sorry!” Evie repeated. “I’ve got the necklace. See? It’s right here. So you don’t need to worry about getting it back!”
Ally turned her head to see Evie holding out the necklace to her. “Put that thing back where you hid it,” Ally hissed. “This isn’t the time to start flashing it around. They don’t need to know anything about this, okay?”
Mortified at the way she’d leveled all those accusations at Lyk, Ally didn’t need him rubbing this change of narrative in her face.
“This is all my fault,” her sister said, falling back against the pillows in a dramatic fashion. Ally frowned. Evie wasn’t usually so over the top in her emotional expressions. She must feel really bad about this.
“No, it’s my fault too. You’re right. I was being unreasonable. I wouldn’t have sold the necklace, no matter our need. And your opinion has value, just as much as mine does. So I’m sorry I was blind to that before. I will do better.”
“Ally, you’ve done great.” Evie sat up, her face intent. “You got us out of a dangerous situation, hid us away so we could regroup and figure out what to do. You kept a roof over our head and food in our belly.”
“Barely. What we were doing was no way to live.”
“But at least we were alive. And free.” Evie’s face fell. “Please don’t think I’m being ungrateful. You kept me safe while working yourself half to death. I can never repay you for what you did.”
“You never need to.” Ally smiled at her little sister. “I’m always going to watch out for you, no matter what.”
Evie gave a mirthless laugh. “Well, it looks like you have your work cut out for you this time because we’re either ending up at some outpost stranded again, or we join this crew of criminals.”
“We’re not pirates, Evie.”
Her sister looked her up and down. “I don’t know, Ally. You’ve always had a cutthroat quality about you. Are you sure you don’t want to pick up a sword and start swashing some buckles?”
Ally couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “I don’t know where you get this nonsense.”
Evie shrugged. “I like reading history books. On Territh, pirates were known as swashbucklers.”
“But what’s a swash?” Ally asked, confused.
