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The room shrunk around us. How long had Alek known? How long had he known about my mother—about the veil?
I took a step backward. Suddenly, Salem was not a friend of mine at all. She was a stranger, she was dangerous, she was ademon.
I needed to get out of there. I took a frantic step to the side, toward the bar door. But my back collided with a sturdy body.
“What the hell is going on here?” Alek growled. His voice held something sharp that made my entire body run cold.
I spun around to face him. “You’ve been lying this whole time?” I asked. “You’ve been using me for the veil?” I searched his face for some sort of shock, some sort of denial. But his eyes became unreadable.
Alek held his hands up in surrender. His eyes flickered to Kylar once before returning to me. “Lyra, calm down. Let’s take a second and talk about this.”
“What else is there to talk about?” I pushed. The pain I had been feeling morphed into an unending flood of anger. “Yourfriendshere filled me in on all of it. You’ve been pretending to need me for your fake relationship all while you’ve been trying to figure out my secret. Well done, Alek. You fucking win.”
“It’s not what it sounds like,” he pleaded.
I scoffed, “Isn’t it? Which part of it isn’t true, Alek? I risked everything for you. I riskedmy lifebecause you made me feel like someone in this fucked-up world actually cared about me. If you wanted to know my secret so badly, you should have just locked me up and tortured me for it. It would have hurt way fucking less.”
I shoved past Alek and aimed for the basement door, but he gripped my arm and forced me to stop. His eyes were dark in a sea of unsaid words.
“At first, yes, I needed to know your secret. I killed my brother, Lyra. I was willing to do whatever it took to bring him back! My father ensured I would give it my best shot! When we heard about you, I sent those invitations. I knew Natalie would bring you with her to Night Raven. But that was before I got to know you, Lyra. That was before all of this! Can you let me explain?”
I shook him off. “No, Alek. You did a fabulous job convincing everyone that you actually cared about me.” Tears blurred my vision. “You even had me fooled.”
Nobody stopped me as I stormed up the basement stairs and out of the bar. The cold winter air slapped my skin, freezing the tears that now poured down my face.
How could I have been so blind? Of course Alek didn’t want me. Of course he wasn’t falling for me.
Who would fall forme? Who would possibly catch real feelings forme?
She was right. My mother was fucking right. I was worthless, only on this planet for one purpose.
My mind raced, imagining Alek laughing with his pack about how ignorant and gullible I had been. Did he tell them how scared I was when he bit me? Did he tell them about my stupid little apartment and my stupid little life? Had he told them about our kiss? About how he was my first?
Fuck.It had been so easy for him to infiltrate my fragile, protected life. I had practically handed him everything he wanted on a silver platter.
“Lyra, stop!” his voice called out after me. I ignored him, but his footsteps grew louder as he jogged up behind me. “Lyra, please talk to me.” Alek stepped in front of me, cutting off my sidewalk path. I fought the urge to throw my fist into his face.
I quickly wiped the tears away with my sleeve. “What more do you want from me?” I asked. “Haven’t you already done enough damage?”
Alek stepped forward and grabbed both of my shoulders. “I want to explain,” he said softly. “I want to tell you everything. You deserve to know the truth.”
The wind picked up. Cold air sliced across my exposed skin, infiltrating my crumbling barriers. My sharp, shallow breaths sucked in painful breaths, but it was the pain that pierced through the growing numbness in my body.
The numbness I never thought I would have to feel again. The numbness I had been spending the past month growing out of.
“What truth?” I managed to ask.
“My father, he—he knows that Theia holds the secrets to opening the veil. He wanted to open the veil, and he wanted me to find out how to do that. After Wrath, I… I didn’t see another choice. I didn’t know you were still living in the city, Lyra, I swear it. When he told me Theia had a daughter, you were not who I was expecting.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“I wanted to tell you so many times,” he continued. “But I didn’t know how. After a while, I knew I couldn’t use you to open the veil. Not if you didn’t want to help us. I care about you, Lyra! I didn’t want to hurt you. I never planned for you to—”
“To what?” I interrupted. “To open the veil for you? That’s what you really need, isn’t it? That’s the reason you’ve been pretending to like me all this time? So that you could discover how to open the veil. So you could bring back your brother.”
Alek opened his mouth to respond, but no words came out.
My heart twisted.
