Page 114 of The Lies We Steal

“Lyra, she called me on messenger.” He announces.

“Lyra Abbott? What does she want?”

“Just take it, here,” He shoves his phone at me, letting me grab it and place it to my ear.

“Hello?” I say, confused being a massive understatement.

If she is calling me to bitch me out over Briar, I’m going to let her know very quickly this is not the right time for it.

“Alistair! Oh, thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour. I didn’t have your number, and you don’t have Facebook, so I just started calling the other guys on here hoping you’d—”

“Lyra what the fuck is going on?”

I end her rambling, hoping she can get to the point.

“It’s Briar.” She says on a breath, “Is she with you?”

I’d delivered enough punishments to earn me a title in hell. I’d sent fear through more people than I could count. Pain in random men’s bodies just for fun during fights.

I had gone my entire life almost without feeling this for myself.

Absolute panic.

I feel it in my chest. Like someone stabbing it with knives, each burning and digging into my flesh. My heart pounds so hard it vibrates my entire rib cage, the rapid thumping echoing in my ears.

There is a ringing there as well, like a siren. So loud and high it nearly bursts my eardrums. Pins and needles prick my fingers, my toes, everything turning to numbness in less than twenty seconds.

It was as if I’d submerged myself into water for a little too long. Held my head beneath the surface so long that when I came up, gasping for air, my throat burned and my brain was screaming at me to never stay under that long ever again.

I’d never been scared before.

And I imagine this is what terror feels like for others.

“No. She didn’t leave with you at the carnival?” I manage.

“Oh God, Briar.” She starts to weep into the speaker, sounding out of breath, “After you guys left I waited by the bathrooms and she never came back. I got a message from her phone saying she was going to your house, but it’s almost two in the morning and she hasn’t checked in. She’s not answering her phone either, Alistair what if—”

“Stop.” I don’t need her to say the words. I don’t want to hear them out loud.

I knew what she was going to say and the reality that it could be true made me want to hurl. I’d just watched a man have his eyes gouged out of his skull and I barely flinched.

Yet the prospect of Briar being kidnapped and possibly sold as a sex slave was enough to send my stomach into a fit of kickflips. I pictured her fighting, doing everything she could think of to defend herself.

Cause she was a fighter and I knew she wouldn’t go easy.

But even so, all I could see was them using her. Touching her. Violating her.

“Wait,” I say out loud, my brain spinning, “You said she texted you? Said she was going to my house?”

Lightbulbs explode inside of my mind.

The urge to throw up is quickly replaced with a bomb of fury that is seconds from exploding.

“Yeah, why?”

“I know who has her.” I tell her, “And I’m going to fucking kill him for taking her.”

Briar