Perfect Lies by Kiersten White

annoying me and I’m jittery and anxious to see Pixie safely off. They can’t hurt her. I won’t let them. I need Pixie secure even though she holds my most precious secret in her head, and that makes her far more dangerous than I ever thought she’d be.
    “What about you?” she says, looking at me now.
    I smile. “I’m always fine. Hail your cab.”
    The main raises his hand. “Hold on, she can’t—”
    I kick his Achilles tendon. “Here’s how you know I’m telling the truth: I love this shirt and if I have to kill you, I’ll get blood all over it. Do you know how hard blood is to wash off? I do. You can never get it off. Not ever.” Never, never, never, never. Tap tap tap tap. “So you let her leave and I let you keep your blood on the inside where it belongs and we go talk to your friend who is so desperate to see me.”
    Pixie looks scared. “Fia, don’t—”
    “Get a cab. Now.” I glare at her and she turns, walking stiffly to the edge of the sidewalk. Two men move to follow her.
    “Tell them,” I whisper in the ear of my man.
    “Let her leave,” he says, his voice tight.
    Pixie looks back at me as a cab stops and she climbs in. I give her a thumbs-up with the hand I have wrapped around the front of my man. Then she is gone and that means she is safe, so I don’t really care what happens now. I’ll be fine.
    I let go of the man and he jumps away, rubbing at his neck and calling me nasty names under his breath. I toss the bottle to the side with a tinkle of glass and smile cheerfully. “See? Easy! Who wants to take me to my earnest suitor?”
    I follow a tall, broad-shouldered man with a gun’s bulk pushing out the edge of his sports jacket. We walk around the corner to where a car idles in an alley. “Disappointing,” I mutter. “I was hoping for a party bus.”
    He opens the back door to the car and gestures for me to go in. As I slip past him my hand darts to his belt and I snatch the gun, then yank the door shut and hit the lock.
    “So!” I turn and point the gun at the man sitting next to me. “Surprise!”
    A smile slides over his face like oil pooling on water and I wasn’t ready for this, because I’m back—I’m back—oh no I don’t want to remember what he makes me remember. Lips and hands and a dance floor and—
    “Hello, Sofia,” Rafael says.
    I lean back against the plush leather seat and sigh, still training the gun on his head. “I didn’t miss you.” (His lips on mine, the first lips on mine, my first kiss, oh I want to be sick.)
    He laughs, and his teeth are white and his throat is tan and I want to cut break cut smash it. I hate him. He is as slickly beautiful as ever, and I don’t know what he’s doing here but it’s twisting my stomach and making the space behind my eyes heavy with the insistent pressure of wrong.
    “How do you like New York?” he asks.
    “If you brought me here for small talk, you could have used fewer guns. Just a thought.”
    “I was actually hoping you could help me with something. See, I had a bit of a disappointment today. Something I’ve been working on for a while fell through.”
    The would-be assassin. “Whoops.” I flash him an off-kilter grin, but inside the spinning needle whirls faster. I cannot believe I stopped her. I cannot believe it was right. I hate Rafael, hate his smell and the feel of him near me.
    But maybe Rafael is the only person doing the right thing.
    My stomach drops as I realize … oh, no.
    Oh, no.
    Lerner. Casey was working for Lerner.
    She was working for
Rafael
.
    Rafael is with Lerner.
    Maybe not. Maybe she was so good she could think about Lerner to frame them. It’s not right, I know it’s not right, but I cling to it. She didn’t think about Rafael, she didn’t!
    He smiles and everything buzzes, feels off, more off than ever before. “You win some, you lose some. And when I heard you were finally in deep with Daddy Keane, well, that changed everything. Let’s talk about how you’re