“Lie, Lie, Truth.” I change lanes, passing a truck moving too slowly, the Aventador responding to the slightest pressure of my foot with eager precision. “I tell you three things about myself. Two are lies, one is true. You guess which one is true. Then you go.”
Her posture shifts—interest, wariness, calculation. Good. An engaged mind means honest answers. She turns in her seat, angled towards me now. She crosses her legs, not an easy thing to do in a pencil skirt, but she manages with a graceful economy of movement that surprises me.
If I could stop myself from looking, I would. But I can’t. Only her calves are showing, the hem of the skirt sits just below the knee, but it’s enough for a flash of desire to smolder inside me. A simple, human reaction I immediately compartmentalize.
She sighs at my request, and when I drag my eyes up from her legs to her face, I find her looking out the window at the blur of guardrails and trees flashing by, her profile sharp against the glass.
“All right,” she says. Reluctantly, I can tell. She turns to face me, a strand of dark hair falling across her cheek. “I’ll play.”
If I were her, I would ask questions about this game first. Questions like, “Will I earn a reward if I play?” or “What will itcost me if I don’t?” Because I can already tell, she doesn’t want to play a game with me. She’s too smart not to recognize this for what it is—an extraction technique dressed up as entertainment.
Newsflash, Emmaleen. You’ve been playing a game with me since that night you broke a thousand dollars of crystal.
But Lie, Lie, Truth is a game of secrets. And she wants nothing more than to keep hers that way. I can see it in the tightness around her eyes, the careful neutrality of her expression as she meets my gaze like an equal.
It occurs to me now that I haven’t done a background check on her.
Why?
Well, I know why. Before she came down my steps, she was nobody. Inconsequential. A temporary distraction not worth the twenty minutes it would take to do a thorough check.
Now she’s occupying a space in my head that hasn’t seen the light of day since I was eight. The space of curiosity. The space of wonder. The space of…danger.
Not the kind that ends with blood on marble or bones in a field—those I can manage.
This is subtler. Quieter.
The kind that rearranges priorities.
The kind that makes a man forget to finish the job because he’s too busy trying to understand the reason she smiles when she should be afraid.
Or maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe it’s me who should be afraid?
She clears her throat, obviously uncomfortable with my prolonged staring and silence.
It snaps me out of the introspection and back to the game.
She’s waiting for me to begin. I consider what to offer. I have plenty of secrets of my own. Some more important than others. The trick is choosing one that elevates my authority in her mindmixed in with a calculated vulnerability that creates the illusion of trust.
That’s the point, after all.
My authority over her. She’s mine. Not forever, that’s stupid. But for now.
And I want her to not just know it, but embrace it.
“I hiked the Appalachian Trail alone for three months when I was sixteen.”
She looks at me. Eyebrows furrowed. Probably trying to picture me wearing hiking boots and carrying a backpack. The image doesn’t compute with what she knows of me.
Then she laughs, a small sound that seems to surprise even her, quickly stifled behind pressed lips.
“I trained a tiger to shake hands like a dog.”
Her expression switches, her nose crinkling up in what appears to be genuine amusement. But she’s smiling now, the tension in her shoulders easing fractionally. The game is working already, creating the illusion of normalcy between us.
“I shot someone when I was eight.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. I can see the calculations happening behind those pale green eyes, the way they narrow slightly at the corners as she evaluates each statement. Her fingers twist together in her lap, a small nervous movement she probably doesn’t realize she’s making. She’s analyzing the probability curves of each statement with methodical precision, weighing the hiking story against the tiger training against the violence. The silence stretches between us, filled only with the purr of the Aventador’s engine as we cruise down the highway toward Pittsburgh.