Page 17 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
Poetic.
He’d even spelled my name right.
It seemed fitting that, all these years later, a starless night numbed my fingers as I decided to spill my biggest secret to Reed.
If you want to date a boy Dad doesn’t own, you’d have to leave the state, I reminded myself as I snuck my way from Dad’s mansion to the servants’ quarters.
The chill of the North Carolina winter taunted me, nipping at my bare arms. Like it was trying to tell me something. Maybe even stop me.
I lifted my phone and reread Reed’s text again, twice to be sure.
I broke up with Basil. For real this time.
Hope spun threads of excitement and anticipation through my body, and I ignored the rest—the part of my brain that told me to turn around, to preserve us because once I professed my love for him, I couldn’t take it back.
We would never just be friends anymore. Either he felt the same way and we became a couple, or he didn’t and something ugly and awkward would cloud whatever remained of our friendship.
Don’t worry, Emery. You know what you’re doing. It’ll be worth it.
Plus, I’d never possessed an aversion to risk. I jumped first and dealt with the consequences later. Only this time, I had too much to lose. Anxiety tied a chain around my legs, weighing them down with each step I took.
Toska.
Lacuna.
Kalon.
I muttered unique words that made me happy, keeping my voice low. I shut my phone off in case it rang inside Reed’s house. Because I had no pockets, I slid it into the Prescott’s wooden mailbox, the same mailbox Reed and I had once watched Hank Prescott make.
Reed’s dad had let us paint it. It ended up a royal blue with the Duke logo on Reed’s half and black with wilted, gunmetal roses on mine. Betty had pretended to love it, while Hank laughed, patted my head, and said I was something else.
Tucked beside a purple heart pergola, the Prescott’s tiny three-bedroom cottage seemed ant-like compared to my parents’ mansion. I slipped my key into the back-door lock and turned it as quietly as possible. The door creaked and so did my steps as I slithered through the kitchen and crept into Reed’s room, ingrained memory of the cottage allowing me to navigate it without light.
Are you sure about this?
I could almost hear Reed asking me that, his smooth accent dipping its way past my ears and into my heart. He was ever so cautious, the one to watch my back as I leapt. And he always caught me.
Always.
Countless scraped knees and a constellation of faded scars told tales of childhood adventures on my body, but they didn’t speak of the golden-haired boy who stood beside me for them all, even when Mother sneered at him and made jabs about his secondhand clothing as if she couldn’t pay the Prescotts what they deserved to make in the first place.
(If Dad ran the house rather than Mother, I bet Reed would never wear used clothes again and I could eat more dinners at the Prescott’s without feeling like I was taking something I shouldn’t.)
Bottom line—Reed had my back. The scar across Able Cartwright’s face proved that. It sent a secret thrill down my spine each time I passed Able in the halls of Eastridge Prep and saw it.
Being near Reed made my stomach quake like it’d been hit by an avalanche, and tonight, I was going to sleep with my best friend.
“Are you awake?” I winced. My voice had come out tentative, but the Southern drawl still filled the room louder than I’d intended.
I inched deeper into the small space and shut the door behind me, not bothering to turn on the lights. No sense in waking Mr. and Mrs. Prescott. Not a hint of moonlight filtered in past the black-out curtains, but I’d been in Reed’s room enough to reach his full-size bed in the center without missing a step.
“Wake up,” I urged, not quite knowing what I’d tell him when he did, indeed, wake up.
I’d planned a speech on the flight back from winter break in Aspen, but standing in front of Reed’s bed, it felt stupid. Like something one of Nash’s groupies would say to him after spending the night.
“You’re so sexy, Nash.”
“The things you do to me, Nash.”
