The Lies We Steal (The Hollow Boys, #1)

by Monty Jay

“For me, love shouldn’t be comfortable. Love should make you uncomfortable, it should challenge you, it should push your limits, make you grow as person and all of those things you have to be out of your comfort zone to do. So, I don’t think you can have both, no.”

I wanted to rip his arms off for making her smile like that. For having her attention.

Proving I was nothing but his spare. Everything I had was only his to take. But not this time. Not her. Briar was mine. Mine to torment. Mine to manipulate. Mine to break.

“I’m gonna rip that silver fucking spoon right out of your mouth just to feed you back all your territorial bullshit.” “Little Thief, there is no spoon. I learned to lick wealth from knives.”

My pet. She’s the worst behaved pet ever. A beaten dog that won’t stop pissing on the couch just to make me angry.

She reminded me of a girl who’d grown up listening to fairytales. Just not the ones of kissing frogs and happily ever afters. The Brothers Grimm variety. Ones that told stories of brutality and death. Not of gold and stolen kisses, but blood and the power of dark magic.

“Gritty, terrifying, shady men like me who make their panties wet. They come harder thinking about me breaking their hearts, then they do while their boyfriends are fucking them. So, yes, they are looking at me, but they are also staring at you.”

But what she doesn’t know, what she doesn’t deserve to know with her snotty, woe is me attitude, is that when I was a kid, I begged to trade all the money I had for parents who loved me. For a family who cared. I would have rather been starved and loved, than starving for love.

“It’s called the flood.” My legs twitch at his voice. “That rush of endorphins that’s filling you up. Your brain does that before you’re about to die, so it’ll be less painful. Making you all tipsy and aroused. It’s why you liked being scared. It’s why under it all,” his chest expands with a breath, “We are the same.”

felt so near to death, yet so fucking alive.

“Fight me or fuck me, Caldwell. I’m done playing games.”

“I thrive there. We can do whatever we want inside of the shadows. It’s where I belong. Our invisibility doesn’t make us weak, Little Thief.” The pressure of my hand increases, a small whimper falling from her lips. “It gives us power.”

I knew who Briar was. I knew the girl she was and who she could be the moment I saw her at that party. I knew the damage she could wreak on this place. Now it was time for her to see that for herself.

“I prefer dark hair, and I like to take my time with them. Bleed them slowly, cut them up. The dismemberment just,” he inhales deeply, shivering as he does, “gets me going.”

I’d never seen anyone so wrathful, but he made it look beautiful. This sort of molten anger rolled through his body, leaking from all his pores so it was all you could see. A cruel volcano of human rage that incinerated anyone he touched, yet you still stood there admiring how nature could be so incredible, even when it was wreaking havoc. A god of wrath.

She looks like a ticket straight to heaven and I would have walked through hellfire to get it.

I’m triggering that fight or flight instinct in her brain. Giving her that safe kind of high she can overdose on. The kind that makes her toes curl and her blood feel like it’s on fire.

There was wave of emotion that overcame me, different than a post-orgasm high. It felt like my mind had ceased war with itself for the time being. Nothing felt heavy and everything just…was. I felt her head move, turning towards my ear. “Happy birthday, Alistair,” she whispered, a huff of a laugh trickling into the air. For the first time… It actually was.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” “As a unit?” Thatcher asks. “Too many things to count.”

The Grim Reaper gave up his duties for tonight, handing them over to Silas so that he could sentence a dirty soul to whatever hell awaited him.

This entire town had made him into something he wasn’t. They started a war within his soul and expected him to find peace. Shocked when he chose violence over harmony.

I saw how he’d been a boy before he was a monster, before he’d been painted as the face of evil. I saw what they all had forgotten—that he was loyal, made of flesh and blood, of crooked grins and onyx eyes. Beneath it all, a boy with dreams, with friends, who laughed. A boy who had once loved his brother. And I thought how lucky I was in that moment, to see him as nothing but a boy.

I wanted to be more than the man who scared her. I wanted to be a man she could love even if I had no idea what that meant for me.

“So ,my parents basically made me in a petri dish. Genetically modifying my genes so that I was the exact blood type, so that I was initially a replica of my older brother. So that if something did happen, I could give him blood, donate an organ. I was only born to be spare parts. The heir and the spare, that’s what my grandfather called us.”

My heart was a desert. Deserted, dry, without nurture or care. Nothing but sand and blistering heat. And it had just started raining for the first time in my life. The beating no longer felt painful, but smooth, the way it was always meant to beat.

“I will tear through the sky, rip Heaven’s gates apart if that’s what it takes to prevent you from being at risk again. They will have to raise Hell to stop me from protecting you. You understand?”

“And right now, I could stay here for a lifetime just feeling your heartbeat. I’m not sure what I can give you, but whatever is left of me, whatever I have, it’s yours, for as long as you want it.”

“And if I want it forever?” “Then it’s forever, Little Thief.” “That sounds an awful lot like love, Alistair Caldwell.”

“Whatever you have to give, I want all of it. All the dark, all the scary. I want it. Forever.”

Just like that, the shadow child learned that you don’t have to step into the light to find happiness. You just need to find the person willing to step into the gray area. “It’s yours. Every warped part of me. It’s yours, Little Thief. I hope you like playing in the shadows, we will be staying here for a while.”

He is the man who is savage and security. The perfect balance to make me feel alive, yet safe. The only drug on the planet that’s good for you.

We are all thieves.

“Forever, Little Thief,” I say, as I bite at her bottom lip. “This is forever.” I heard her heartbeat, just like I did the night she ran from me in the woods. It was beating for the darkness. Beating for me. I tried to catch my breath, listening to my own heart. Listening to it match her rhythm. Two hearts destined to be alone found one another, joined hands and kept beating. Together.

Remember when you were a child and they would yell at you for poking the fire? Told you that you’d piss the bed if you kept doing it, or worse, it would hurt you. Then you grew up in fear of the crackling heat, knowing if you touched it, there would be repercussions. I am that fire. The flame. The blaze. Unpredictable in ways you could never imagine.