Lilith
“The freaking Crawfords?” Misha’s high-pitched screech pierces my ears, and more than a few people turn toward us. “I can’t freaking believe it.”
Misha came to the rescue, suggesting I get out of the house for a while to stop me from falling down a rabbit hole of panic. It’s not as if I was helping anyway. If anything, I was getting in everyone’s way.
I needed this more than I realized. Colter’s abrupt exit had made me uneasy. I can’t get a read on the guy. One minute, I’m sure he’s out to get me. To make me feel smalland trapped. The next moment, butterflies are fluttering in my belly and I’m on the verge of collapse from giddy excitement.
And it’s always the wrong kind of excitement. If it were as simple as blushing at the way he looks at me, or the strange things he says, I wouldn’t be struggling. But no, Colter seems to have a direct line to my pants, eliciting a response from parts that shouldn’t want anything to do with him. He’s going to be my brother next Saturday for goodness’ sake.
“Neither can I.” Lackluster enthusiasm pours out of me in spades, made worse by where we are.
Of all the places Misha could’ve chosen for us to go, she landed on a Crawford Enterprises-built mall. One of Midnite City’s earliest mega-constructions, with five floors of shops on the lower levels, and six more rising into the sky, with added low-cost housing.
She chose it before I dropped the bombshell about who my future family would be. And although we’ve often come here before, to escape reality for a while, today it’s a tomb of reminders that my life has been stripped of control and irrevocably changed forever.
“I don’t get why you’re so down about it,” Misha shrugs, raising a blue slushy mix to her mouth. She sips long and hard on the straw, pulling funny faces at the drink’s icy tickle before continuing.
“You’re gonna be a real princess. Midnite Royalty, even. You should be over the moon.”
Her excitement isn’t helping my anxiety. I want to vent my frustrations about the situation, not be bombarded by how great it’s going to be.
Guess I’ll save it for Dr. Rice.
“I don’t want to be someone else’s princess.” Least of all the Crawfords’.
This new circumstance flies in the face of everything I’m trying to accomplish. I want to find independence in a world that seems to want to keep me wrapped up in a box.
“That’s what a princess is.” Misha scratches the side of her head, confused by my statement. “You can’t be one without a king and queen.”
I sigh and turn away from her. In that moment, and from the corner of my eye, I spot something. No, someone, standing halfway behind a pillar with a small camera in his hands. My heart jumps into my throat at the low brightness of a flash picture being taken.
In a blink, the man vanishes. Probably just behind the pillar, but I’ve got no intention of heading over and finding out. Seeing him for a second was chilling and enough to freeze me the way Misha’s slushy freezes her brain.
“Did you see that guy?” I ask, pointing carefully, with my hand below a dividing wall that separates the food court tables from the rest of the mall.
Her head snaps toward the pillar, and she gives it a long, hard stare. Eventually, her head settles back into its normal position, tilted to one side, eyebrows up, glaring at me like I’m a lunatic.
“I don’t see anyone.” She opts for a calm soothing tone, but her face betrays. “Unless you mean the tall drink of chocolate milkshake eye-fucking his reflection.”
“Jeez, you really do need to get laid.” I shrug in hopes of easing the tension that’s building in my shoulders. “But no, I don’t mean him.”
I immediately regret saying that. Misha only mentioned him to calm me down.
“It’s probably nothing, then. But I’ve just got this funny feeling that—“
Colter. Thinking about him shuts me up.
Is this what he meant when he saidI’ll see you soon?
Can’t be. He probably meant his dropping by our place this morning.
But both things can be true at once. And who better to have following me around than a small, thin man who lacks everything that makes up the Crawford brute.
In an attempt to still my mind, I run through some different possibilities of who it could be, if not Colter. Maybe he’s a photographer, hired to snap candid pictures of the lovebirds swooning under the bushy arches next to us. Midnite Mall is a hotspot for tourists and social media stars looking for their next viral hit.
Other than that, I’ve had run-ins similar to this before. Encounters with journalists and gossip-rag bloggers, all because of my parents, or what happened to Tom Henderson. They don’t believe my account of what happened, but that never stopped them from picking me apart for a scoop.
It dawns on me that, more likely than those events, word has gotten out about Mom and Alistair’s wedding. Probably leaked by one of the members of staff on duty last night, or one of those publicity stunts, where it looks as if it got out when it shouldn’t have, but which was actually released by Alistair himself to announce his love for my Mom to the world.
