All Chapters of Lovely Little Liar : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

THIRD PERSONArande stood outside his door and smiled.Konstantin's voice was still in her head. “Use your woman power. Fight for what's yours”. She had never needed the instruction. She had simply been waiting for permission.She pushed the door open.Nikolai was on the bed, exactly where she expected him, one arm across his chest, his breathing slow and deep. The glass on the side table was empty. She crossed to him and looked at his face — the tension he wore constantly had gone out of it, his jaw unclenched, his brow smooth in a way she had almost never seen when he was awake.She reached out and brushed her fingers through his hair."You make everything so difficult," she said softly, to the room, to him, to the years of being looked past in her own marriage. "All this time fighting me, and for what? For her?" She looked at his face. "She was dead, Nikolai. She was supposed to stay dead."She pressed a brief kiss to his forehead, then straightened.Then she worked quickly and wit

THIRD PERSONNoah had stopped counting the cracks in the ceiling.There were eleven of them, and he had memorised each one because staring at them was better than staring at the door or listening to the men in the next room laugh at things he didn't understand. He lay curled on his side with his knees pulled up, his wrists still tender from the rope even though they had taken it off hours ago, and he cried quietly because his mother had always said it was okay to cry as long as you kept thinking at the same time.He was trying to keep thinking."Mama," he whispered, to the ceiling. "Where are you?"She didn't answer. She couldn't hear him. She was somewhere that wasn't here, and here was a room that smelled badly with a door he couldn't open and voices beyond it that belonged to people who had grabbed him from behind in the trees when he was only trying to see where the rabbit went.He pressed his face into the pillow.She had tucked him in two nights ago — it felt like longer but he

ARIANNA POVI didn't let go for a long time, I just held him, my arms around his small body, my chin on top of his head, feeling him breathe. Three days I had spent imagining the worst things a mind could produce and now here he was, real, and I couldn't make myself loosen my grip because some part of me was still not convinced that letting go was safe.Noah didn't complain.He held on just as hard, his small fingers curled into the back of my shirt, his face pressed into my shoulder. We stayed like that without talking because there wasn't anything that needed saying yet, just this, just the fact of him being here and me being here and both of us knowing what the last three days had been.Then his stomach growled loudly, and we both froze.Then Noah pulled back and looked at me with an expression of profound personal betrayal directed at his own body, I laughed, and he started laughing too, and across the room I heard Nikolai make a sound that was not quite a laugh but was something

ARIANNA POVHis back was to me when I said it.He had found his shirt, and was buttoning it quickly. I watched him from the bed and felt the sentence sitting in my chest like something I had been holding underwater, and finally I let it surface."Nikolai."He turned his head slightly, just enough to show he was listening."I want to leave," I said again. "Now that Noah is back, I want to take him and go. I think it's time."My heartbeat was extraordinary. I could feel it in my throat, my wrists, the backs of my hands. I had rehearsed this sentence approximately forty times in the last two days and it still came out sounding like something I was confessing rather than requesting.He went very still, like a man thinking. I watched it move through his shoulders and his jaw and the way he held himself when something had landed that he hadn't prepared for.I had wanted tonight.I needed to be honest with myself about that, at least in the privacy of my own head, because Noah was safe and N

THIRD PERSONArande waited with her eyes closed, one hand resting loosely at her side. She lay on the sofa and listened to his footsteps go up the staircase, and then down the upper hallway. She counted to thirty. Then she opened her eyes.The smile arrived before she was fully upright.She sat up slowly and released the breath she had been holding. The fainting had worked. The maid appeared in the doorway with water on a tray, bowing before offering the glass.Arande took it, drank it at her own pace, and set the empty glass back."Thank you," she said pleasantly.The maid bowed and left.The moment the room was empty again Arande set her hands in her lap and thought. Nikolai was already suspicious, knowing she was responsible for the water. What she needed was evidence that pointed away from her and toward someone else, and she needed it before he started pulling the thread in the right direction.She would not go down alone.That was the only principle she had maintained consisten