...
❝He was the poison I was dying to taste on my lips.❞
...
I was a coward.
The coward who wanted to leave behind the wreckage of her life for the man who had tormented her for as long as she could remember. The boy who had spit venom at me gro...
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"GUYS, BE QUIET." I whipped around and held a finger to my lips, silently beseeching them to not blow our cover before it even got us anywhere.
Heira winced and nodded, following behind sheepishly, while Faye just nudged me ahead.
The Vanderbildt mansion was eerily quiet — as it always was — but it seemed worse during the night when every soul was sound asleep. It hadn't changed a bit in four years and I appreciated that because it allowed us to manoeuvre even in the pitch dark. I was grateful for their ignorance that allowed us to easily sneak past the embarrassingly poor excuse of security, which made our plan so much easier to execute. Only what the plan was exactly, I had no clue.
I'd told Faye what happened during lunch today and her immediate response was to find out what River was hiding by sneaking into his sanctuary to find any receipts of mystery. She'd also roped Heira into the whole heist-like mission, claiming that it was a group project and would be foolproof this way. But it was just the three of us because they told me that Malena would hate to sneak into someone's house to invade their privacy. It made me guilty because my conscience was nowhere near as good as that, but I couldn't bring myself to regret the need to bring River down a notch.
Only I was beginning to regret leaving the warmth of my bed and heading into enemy territory. This must have been what Indian soldiers had felt like when they encroached on Pakistani territory during the wars, and vice versa. Not that the two situations could be compared in any major way; soldiers were sacrificing their lives and risking an eternity of torture in prisons, and here I was, risking the humiliation of getting caught by River or his parents.
They weren't anywhere near close.
But tell that to my heart which was beating at a mile per minute. We tiptoed up the staircase, pausing every few seconds when my paranoia got the better of us. As if my legs had a mind of their own, they led us straight to River's bedroom where I'd had to clean up the mess he'd caused multiple times. Every line and crack on his door was seared into my memory and I carefully pushed it open, not intending to go inside, but halted when I found his bed empty.
"He's not in there," I whispered.
"Huh?" Suspicion filled Heira's voice. "Where is he at three in the morning?"
"Probably at one of his bitches' houses," Faye predicted, ushering me into the room. "Take the chance while you have it. Go."
Something uneasy churned in my gut at the assumption, but figuring it was just anxiety, I crept inside and headed towards his drawers that I'd only attempted to rummage through once before. But here I was again, aimlessly trying to find something about the person who wanted to eradicate every single inch of my existence.
"What are you even looking for?" Heira leaned in, squinting at the objects I was looking through.
"I don't know. Anything, at this point. Something that makes him look suspicious. Something to dampen the picture-perfect image this town has of him."
