Page 84 of Heart of Thieves

Lola sits on the floor, back propped against the base of the telescope, cheeks shining with tears illuminated by the glow from the window in the door behind me.

“Are you all right?” I ask, fighting the instinct to rush to her side. I don’t think Laurel would take too kindly to that quite yet, and Lola is still rightfully wary of me. If I’m going to earn both of their trust, I need to take it slow.

“Fine. Just needed a minute,” Lola says.

“Hmmm.” I glance past her at the telescope, and my stomach bottoms out. A violent nausea tears through me.

It’s just a contraption. It won’t hurt me.

I try to move closer, but a shudder ripples my bones, keeping my feet firmly planted.

Lola cocks her head, looking from me to the telescope and back again. “Have you been here before?”

“That telescope . . . ,” I find myself saying even though I shouldn’t. “It magnifies the stars so clearly you can see even the gases radiating off them.”

“Yes . . . That’s how they study them.”

I swallow. “Can we . . . leave?” I won’t be able to focus, not as long as the memory of coming apart in the exact place where Lola sits keeps sharding through my thoughts. “It’s pretty dark in here.”

She rises, crossing to me. “Nic.” Her hand lifts slowly, like she’s approaching a rogue animal, and I find myself wheezing for air as her palm cups my jaw. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I lie.

She draws her fingers to my chin, tilting my face downward toward her. When our gazes meet, heat flows through me as though the past four months did not happen, as though her betrayal in the tournament was merely a bad dream, as though I didn’t break her heart.

I want to flee from that gaze and the messy ways it’s pulling at the threads of me. But Laurel is there, watching. Waiting.

I’m supposed to be wooing Lola. Making her trust me.

“Tell me,” she whispers.

I hold her gaze, wet my lips. Gods, how I want to tell her the truth. Hand over the memory of the boy I was five years ago who’d spent weeks reading every book he could get his hands on, and finally, desperately, got up the courage to look through that damn telescope. She would hold that memory. She would welcome the pain of it, the terror, the courage. Because she, of all the people I know, is the only one I’ve ever found who was brave enough to look the truth that could ruin her directly in the eye, too.

Every alarm bell in my head crashes at a fever pitch. My curse won’t let me talk about that telescope, and Laurel would be horrified to hear the tale even if I could manage it.

But no matter how I comb my thoughts, I cannot think of what else to tell Lola now. She’s too perceptive for me to sidestep her question— that will undermine my plan to earn back her trust faster than almost anything else I could do. And she’d be able to sense my lies now that she can wield my own magic against me.

I’m going to have to give her the real story and pray that Laurel will see it as part of my act.

“The moonshard was supposed to be a myth,” I say softly.

“What does that have to do with this telescope?” Lola asks.

“If the priests lied about the moonshard . . . ,” I say, then pause. How can I say the next part in a way that won’t enrage Laurel?

But, as she always does, Lola seems to know what I’m about to say. “If they lied about the moonshard,” she murmurs, “maybe they lied about other things.” The glow of my scar illuminates the planes of her face, and I search the curve of her cheek, the dust of her freckles, the flutter of her lashes for the cracks in the disguise, the hints of her true beauty beneath.

“You came here to see for yourself,” she says when I still don’t speak.

“You know what’s amazing?” I ask, hoarse. “How long someone who doesn’t want to know the truth will avoid looking through a telescope. Because you can read every book in a whole damn library”—I wave an arm at the bookshelves below us—“and still tie yourself in the world’s most complicated knot trying to make everything fit.”

“What happened?” she asks, thumb tracing the tip of my chin in a way that sends tingles straight down my spine.

I shouldn’t go on. Laurel won’t like this.

But gods, it feels good to be honest with the one person who ever believed the things I could not say.

“Eventually, you reach a breaking point,” I grind out. “You have to know. Settle it once and for all. Look through the telescope. If the stars are gods, the way the Odelion and my father and all the priests have taught, then you have nothing to worry about, right? You’ll see that. Truth holds up.”