“I don’t intend for you to be hit with another dart,” he says.
I shake my head. “You aren’t going to be able to prevent a flying dart from hitting me.”
“You vastly underestimate my abilities, huntress.”
I smile, sadly. “That’s because I’ve overestimated your abilities before and you failed me.”
His face looks crushed. He couldn’t prevent me from getting raped. He couldn’t keep me safe. From that point on, my life was different.
Langston reaches out and grabs the back of my neck as his thumb strokes my cheek. “There is no reason you should trust me in this. All I can do is apologize for failing you. I was young and stupid and cocky. I’m grown up now and have experienced the world. I won’t fail you. If I make a promise to you, I’m going to keep it. Even if it kills me.”
Everything inside me wishes I could believe him, but everything is screaming not to trust him.
17
Langston
Liesel doesn’t believe that I’ll do anything to protect her, and she shouldn’t. But it’s a vow I’ll keep all the same.
“Maybe we should tell each other everything on our half of the letter? Stop hiding secrets from each other, so we have all the information we need to steer our interrogators astray? Or at least if only one of us survives, we can have the information we need to go after the treasure ourselves,” she says, suddenly, completely out of character for her.
“You’re willing to give me the information that I’ve been begging for and threatening your life over, just like that?”
She stills and then blinks. “Yes.”
“And how would I trust that anything you said was the truth?”
“You’d know, just like I’d know if you were telling a lie.”
I don’t know her true motives for wanting to discuss what we know. But even if she wants to tell the truth, it can’t happen here.
“First of all, no one is going to die. I won’t let that happen.”
She sighs. “You aren’t God; you can’t control everything.”
“I can.”
She shakes her head with a smile. “Pompous asshole.”
“That’s me, but we can’t talk about the truth of what we know about the treasure. Whoever is holding us might be listening, and no one but the two of us can ever know the truth.”
She narrows her eyes, trying to understand what I’m not saying. She still doesn’t know the truth of why I want the treasure, why I’m pressing the issue so much, and she’ll probably never know.
“You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just can’t sit down here day after day and wait to be drugged, tortured, and most likely eventually killed.”
I know what she means. Even now that we have a sort of plan, I don’t want to just sit and wait, filled with an unlimited amount of anxiety. I’m paranoid that every sound is them coming for us—coming to hurt Liesel.
“Then let’s not just sit around waiting.”
“What do you suggest?” Her cheeks blush, telling me the dirty thoughts she’s thinking.
“You want to be honest with one another so we feel like we are fighting on the same side. Then let’s be honest. Rattle off random truths. Simple truths that don’t really matter but tell us something about each other.”
“And if either of us lie?”
“Then, the other gets to steal a kiss.” It gives me more incentive to lie than tell the truth, but we are both far more comfortable lying than telling the truth anyway. And Liesel needs more excuses to kiss me. Or maybe she needs an excuse to pull away from me. Either wa
y, I’m going to learn more about her feelings for me this way than if I ask her questions directly.