Stolen Lies (Fates of the Bound 2)

“No.”

“She had a vision of you coming here. How else would I have known you were coming?”

“She didn’t have a vision, Jake. She knew because your husband called her from a Randolph holding cell. He burned his one call on the oracle.”

“How’d she know the others would come?”

“Because it would have been stupid of me to come alone.”

“You’re wrong.” He frowned.

“When I was teenager, my best friend made me go see the oracle.”

“You saw her mother?”

Lila nodded. “She claimed she had a vision about me, too. I was walking down the staircase in our family’s great house. My hair was still dark, I had a toddler in my arms, and I wore a sad expression. I also wore the whitecoat. The woman is a fraud, Jake, just like her mother. They’re all frauds.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he called out while Tristan and Dixon followed her from the apartment.

Chapter 13

“Thanks for helping out,” Lila said as they reconvened in front of the lowborn convenience store a block from Jake’s apartment. A trickle of people entered and left the store, small bags swinging, feet skipping.

Dixon held his hands out for the truck keys.

Tristan wordlessly tossed them to his brother.

“It was no problem really, but I want to know what’s going on with you and the oracles.”

A door slammed. An engine started. Tires squealed.

Tristan’s truck pulled out into the street without him.

He chased Dixon for half a block before giving up. People on the sidewalk stared and giggled. One bored workborn held his beer aloft as a toast. “May you have better luck catching a cab.” He snickered, cracking the tab with a hiss.

Lila grabbed Tristan’s arm and tugged him down the street. “We’ll take mine.”

“Did you see that? He just took off without me!”

“Dixon interacted more with his oatmeal than with us. You should talk to him. An actual conversation, not just painting his room a rainbow of tacky colors and hoping the weirdness goes away.”

“It’s not that tacky.”

“Yes, it is,” Lila insisted, unlocking her sedan.

“How can any of it go away? It’s never going away.”

“Well, it’s certainly won’t get better if you let it fester.” Lila could think of another conversation Tristan should have. The one where he confessed why he kept bringing her into his bed if he had no intention of touching her.

“Let’s talk of something else.” Tristan slipped inside the car and strapped on his seatbelt with a sharp little click. “The oracle, perhaps? How come you didn’t tell me you were mixed up with her?”

Lila pulled out her palm and began to check for bugs. “Because it doesn’t concern you? Because I don’t need to run every job I have past you? Because—”

“Don’t be snippy.”

“I’m not being snippy.”

“Your father asked you to investigate them, didn’t he?”