Page 1 of The Next Lie

CHAPTER ONE

REVA

Sometimes, you want to burn the whole fucking world down and start over from ash.

Not because it’ll fix anything.

But because at least then the ruin would make sense. At least then you could stand in the middle of all that blackened nothing and say, yes. This is what happened. This is what’s left. This is what they took from me.

Instead I’m standing in Noir Night with the bass pounding upward through the floor and into the soles of my feet, the lights cutting over bodies and silk and smoke, and nothing makes sense.

Not the woman in front of me.

Not the discordantly familiar shape of her mouth, the eyes I used to see across the breakfast table. The voice that just said my name—older but hers.

My sister is dead.

Delia is dead.

I know this the way I know the scar on my knee came from falling off my bike when I was five. The way I know Cal hates cilantro and keeps a spare gun sitting on top of the refrigerator in his kitchen. The way I know my own name.

Delia is dead. She died with the rest of them. I saw⁠—

My thoughts stop there.

They don’t break. They don’t blur. They just stop, slammed hard against some wall inside my skull.

I saw...

I did see it. I saw the carnage.

Didn’t I?

The room tilts a little, or maybe it’s me who tilts. Someone near the bar laughs too loudly. Glass clinks. The bass drops low enough to crawl through my ribs. Men and women move around us like this is still only a club and not the place where my entire life has split open for the second time.

Delia is three feet away from me.

Alive.

My gaze scours her, starving for information. She’s an older replica the girl in my memories, and although as twins we look similar, we’ve grown different as we grown older. She’s sharper. Thinner in the face and sleeker, tougher, somehow, in the body. Her dark hair is pulled back in a sleek knot that makes her cheekbones look carved.

I think she may be taller, or maybe it’s just higher heels.

Her lips part. For one second, I think she might reach for me.

For one stupid, desperate second, I’m seven again, looking for the sister who used to steal the marshmallows out of my cereal and tell me monsters couldn’t get us if we kept our feet under the blanket.

Then her eyes flick to the side, to Deacon. Her face barely changes, and still, I see it. A warning. A plea. Maybe an accusation.

Deacon goes still.

The air thins, until suddenly I’m dragging glass through my lungs with every breath.

“Deedy,” I say. My old nickname for her comes out wrong. Small. Shredded around the edges. Because that’s what I’ve been reduced to.

She flinches.

That tiny movement does more damage than a scream could have. My sister—my dead sister, my alive sister—takes half a step back as if my voice touched her with something dirty.