Page 34 of The Lies We Conjure
I clutch at her bare shoulders again, but when Wren yelps, I fling my hands out wide, palms bunching. “Sorry. It’s just—youareon my team. And I need you to focus with me on how the hell we’re going to survive the next three days.”
Wren’s lips fall into a flat, colorless line. “I am focused. Focused enough to amend your statement,Lavinia,with the fact that we aren’t locked in with a murderer.” I raise a stiff brow. “Marsyas did it. Why else would she vanish? Why else would she kill our driver?”
“If Marsyas did it and left, there’s no one to punishexcept for us.”
“You heard them in the meeting. They’re going to find a way around that. And they’re witches, surely they can.”
“We don’t know these people. They could’ve already agreed to off us if they don’t come up with a better plan,” I point out. Before she can protest that there’s no way, I add, “They had the time while we were running away.”
Wren blows out a “fine, jeez” breath, before whining, “But we didn’t have anything to do with it.” She motions to my newly repaired hand. “Auden will vouch for us.”
“We don’t know that.”
“He likes you, Lavinia. He’s helping us because he thinks you’re hot. And lucky you, because he literally has magical hands.”
Because she’s Wren, she adds a dreamy sigh.
A furious heat starts to creep up my cheeks, and I attempt to swallow it down. I barely know Auden and he didn’t seem to like me much at all until he saved our butts and my hand on the driveway. I’m not about to put all my eggs in that one very handsome basket with our lives on the line.
“He could be lying,” I remind her. “He could’ve healed me to ingratiate himself to us. I mean—we don’t know. Auden says he believes we weren’t in on it but even if that’s true, he’s one of nine other people here. There’s only so much he can do.”
“Trust him to fight for us—he already basically magically lied or whatever for us.”
He did. I don’t know why but he did. My thoughts are too jumbled to make sense of any of what he did for us when he found us escaping. Still—no. This won’t work.
I hook a brow at her. “Do you recall the last time we trusted one of these people when they simply seemed like they wanted to help us?”
Wren places a hand over her heart. “I take full responsibility for trusting Marsyas. Auden is different. And you know it—I can see it in the way you’re totally going full tomato right now.”
“Am not.”
“God, look at yourself, will you?” Wren flips our grip and hauls me closer to the mirrors. Then, my sister abandons her mission altogether when she notices the toiletries lined up in antique metal-and-glass packaging on the counter. She rummages until she finds a toothbrush and a little lip-balm-sized pot of toothpaste.
“Oh, thank God, my mouth tastes like bubbly and bile.”
The moment Wren’s dabbing the corners of her lips with a towel, fresh and clean, I launch into her.
“The point is we could become collateral damage, which they won’t figure out until we’re dead and they’re still locked in. Theycan only kill us once, and I’m pretty sure magic can’t bring us back, or Ursula would’ve been revived and doled out punishment herself.”
Wren shrugs her slim shoulders like I’m being completely melodramatic about all of this. Like she isn’t the theatrical one and I am. How on earth is this still an adventure to her? We have a single white-knight moment with Auden—who may or may not be trustworthy, by the way—and she’s back to floating on a cloud, being an adorable, bullheaded thrill seeker.
“So we’ll just tell them.”
I gape at her.
In answer, she hauls her butt onto the vanity counter—which is definitely antique and probably very breakable—and positions herself right in front of me. Wren shakes her head, voice low, amber eyes level with mine.
“We drop the accents, pull out our driver’s licenses, and prove we’re not Lavinia and Kaysa. We’re just two innocent girls who were propositioned by an eccentric witch-lady con artist while slinging falafel.”
I frown and Wren snatches up my hands, holding them tight.
“They’ll take pity on us, Ruby. Protect us. Auden is already in our corner and Evander has ‘overprotective grump’ written across his permanently furrowed forehead. I mean, even Winter is letting us wear her clothes, so she’s not totally two-faced.”
I wonder if, for all her time spent on stage and mainlining movies, my sister has completely forgotten that motive isn’t just something that appears in the aftershocks of a crime. It’s woven into all of it. Motive compels people not just to do bad things, but to do literally everything. Why on earth would the motivation to protect two strangers be stronger than the motivation to protect their own family, and its legacy?
Wren thinks she can bat her eyelashes at our problems, and they’ll solve themselves. That’s never how anything works.
Finally, I punch out an exhale. “It’s as hard to believe as it is to prove. Our driver’s licenses won’t mean anything to these people—they probably think the only valid type of identification is a passport anyway. Can you picture Sanguine Cerise driving herself anywhere?”
