Page 16 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
ed!” I stumbled after him, but a hand tugged my shirt back. I jerked away, and Nash released me, even when I fell into the wall.
“Let him go.”
For a fleeting second, I wished to be Nash Prescott. I wished to have whatever chemicals in his brain allowed him to see the people he cared about and let them go.
But I wasn’t Nash.
I was Emery Winthrop.
And Emery Winthrop?
She’d realized her crush on Reed Prescott wasn’t as small as she’d thought.
It was an itch inside my heart.
I wanted to rip my flesh and tear him from my system.
/bolt/
To hold together
To separate by fleeing
Bolt is a contronym—a word that is opposite itself. If you bolt something, you hold it together. If you bolt, you separate by fleeing.
Bolt is a reminder that words were made by humans, and sometimes, humans make mistakes.
Mistakes are powerful, not because they have the power to ruin your life, but because they possess the power to make you stronger.
The worst mistakes make the greatest lessons, and those who learn them… bolt.
It’s your journey to figure out which bolt.
Emery, 18; Nash, 28
Starless nights rarely descended upon Eastridge. They reminded me of golden tigers—one-in-a-million, striking, intoxicating. Like golden tigers, they seemed bigger, as if the emptiness of the sky meant I could fill more space.
Reed had once informed me that starless nights were a sign secrets needed to be shared. The abyssal darkness provided protection, and he’d said, if I was going to tell a secret, it had to be under an empty sky.
We were nine, and Timothy Grieger had given me a secret Valentine’s day card Reed begged me to show him. I did, sneaking into the tree maze in the backyard and handing it to him with my cheeks flushed red.
Until we’d realized it was too dark to read it under a half-hidden moon without stars.
We ended up leaning against the Hera statue in the center of the maze as I told him what the card said from memory. It was one of those fill-in-the-blank, store-bought cards, where the first five lines had been typed out and all Timothy fucking Grieger had to do was figure out the last word, and he’d written “poop” in brown crayon beside a picture he had drawn of, of all things, a briefcase.
Dear Emery,
I love you more than pretty birds
and all the words.
I love you more than clear blue skies
and fresh apple pies.
I love you more than poop.
Love, Timmy.
