The Lies He Spoke

TWENTY THREE

Hi everyone! I'm still alive, I still exist, I promise! Longer author's note at the bottom, but a quick recap:

The Russo siblings are living in witness protection. Elijah is in prison for apparently murdering their marshal, John Hendricks. Blake is living with his roommate Andy. Logan is living with Olivia. The Sons of Solomon found Logan and Olivia at a grocery store and they managed to escape, but WITSEC said they could do nothing because they had no proof. Logan asked Elijah for help and Elijah gave him an address, Logan went to said address which was a bar, he was slipped drugs by someone, and magically made it home. Everyone was in the hospital because Logan was passed out. Logan and Blake went back to the bar to try to figure out who roofied him, and Blake did a sketch of a guy Logan kinda remembers, which is now up on their fridge.

OLIVIA

"Who's this a picture of?"

Olivia held Blake's pencil drawing in two fingers gently, admiring his quick yet precise strokes, the carefulness with which he had drawn the man's eyes. The picture was taped up on their refrigerator with two jagged pieces of tape on the top left corner and the bottom right.

Logan glanced at her as he tried to spread his toast with cold, clumpy butter. He licked a smear of butter off the butterknife handle, frowned, and wiped it on the edge of his shirt. "I don't know. Some guy at the bar where I was."

"Like - you actually don't know?"

"Yes, Olivia, I actually don't know," Logan said impatiently. He put his toast in his mouth and handed Olivia's lunch bag to her and busied himself with putting his own in his bag.

"So there's just a random sketch of some random man on our fridge?"

"That is really not my biggest problem at the moment," Logan mumbled around a mouth full of toast. "Hold this." He hooked his water bottle and wallet onto her fingers and turned to get his backpack. Olivia glanced down the hall into his room.

"Where's Blake?"

Logan took her by the shoulders and steered her towards the door. "I took him to the train station this morning already. He's going to take the west line back to his apartment. Now stop asking questions and start walking! We're going to be late!"

"I can walk and ask questions!"

"Well, I can't walk and answer them!"

*****

During Ms. Mayhew's class, Olivia sat in the hallway with Angel, trying to copy his homework for her next class as fast as possible. Since she'd been in the hospital with Logan, Blake, and Andy all weekend, she hadn't done her homework and she hadn't remembered to ask Logan to write her a note or make a phone call to convince her teachers to let her get some sort of extension.

Angel sat against the wall opposite her in the hallway, his long legs stretched out in front of him, playing a video game on his phone, quiet noises of gunfire and hacking punctuating the quiet hallway. Olivia was grateful for the background noise in the silence.

Every time she had a moment to think by herself, her thoughts would inevitably stray back to two nights before, when Logan ended up outside the apartment door with no explanation.

And who on earth had rung the doorbell? That was what kept her up half of last night. It gave her shivers just thinking about a complete stranger ringing the doorbell and leaving Logan there on the floor in some twisted version of ding dong ditch.

There was a nudge against her foot and she glanced at Angel, who was gently prodding her shoe with his. She shook off the crawling feeling inching its way up her spine. "What?" she asked.