The City of Crows by Bethany Lovejoy (great books to read .txt) 📕

still a chance, right? She didn’t tell you anything otherwise, did she?” It was funny to be reassuring him like that when not even I was sure that that was true.

He nodded as he tore his eyes away from the sketchbooks, turning to face me. I hadn’t realized how close I’d gotten to him until then, his warm breath splaying out across my features as a heavy exhale escaped him. “Yes,” he breathed. “She said there was a chance.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” I asked, looking into his eyes for some comfort. He was scaring me.

He nodded mechanically.

“So, what are you doing?”

He blinked, dark eyes closing and opening far too quickly, as if coming out of a trance. Immediately his black eyebrows furrowed together, not understanding my question. His eyes scanned me, then he looked back to his sketchbooks, turning a final page on the one in front of him and then, evidently finding what he was looking for, tucking the other pages beneath it. I opened my mouth to speak again, wanting to ask him what he was doing, but then he interrupted me.

“My father had crossed your name off, you know,” he informed me, his eyes studying the images below his hands. They were different than his usual style; hard lines pushed down by a heavy, black pencil onto the page.

“I don’t know what you mean, Leo--”

“When I wrote your name down, wrote down your address-- I had a small piece of paper from my father, a list of names, the ones that he had already tried to contact crossed out.” His jaw tightened, finger running across the graphite lines. “I wasn’t supposed to write it down. He’d written you off when you were with your mother, said that knowing her, you’d never help us. But I was stubborn, yours was the only name that had never been formally contacted, and I was tired of having people reiterate their previous nos to me. I wasn’t supposed to meet you, and I don’t know why I did it.”

“Dumb luck,” I mused, tilting my head. “Don’t think too much about it, not now. Leo, you should really eat.”

“Yeah, dumb luck,” Leo frowned, setting down the sketchbook again. His eyes drifted down to his plate of food, a grimace forming on his mouth that almost offended me. Toying with the bit of eggplant nearest him by prodding it with his fork, he did not lighten up. “They’re supposed to be you, you know. The girls,” he looked to me almost shyly, “they’re what I thought you would look like before I met you.”

Oh. My eyebrows raised as I lowered the bite of food that I was previously attempting to shovel into my mouth, now far more interested in the sketchbooks than food. I could feel Leo regarding me as I picked up one of the sketchbooks, scrutinizing the girls on the page.

He didn’t have much to go on before, they looked like my mother. Each had a variation of her raven hair, high cheekbones, and ever-present scowl. Small notes, almost undetectable on the page, wrote theories and observations, things to look for when he was talking to me. He imagined a person, one that he’d never met. The lifeless, dull eyes then made sense, she was a character to him. He’d yet to meet the living, breathing person in front of him.

“You see why I need to draw you?” Leo said awkwardly. “Not a single one of them looks like you. How will I remember you when this is over?” Optimistic, he assumed that he’d live.

“You don’t need a picture of me, Leo,” I said, regarding the girls on the page. “You should want to forget it when this is all over, be thankful that another chapter of your life has ended.”

“Right,” Leo agreed, and I could hear the discouragement in his voice. “Just another chapter,” his fork clinked against the plate, though he’d likely only gotten one bite in. “I’m just another chapter for you too,” I tried to ignore the displeasure in the way that he said it.

“Hopefully one with a happy ending,” I said. It was hard, though, to see an ending to it all. Leo brought with too much trouble, and now there was no way out. There was no turning to anyone and saying we only wanted one little thing. Somehow we’d gotten embroiled in something big.

“Rowan will take care of you when this is all over,” Leo informed me. “I’m sure he will. You’ll be able to go back to your life, it’s me that has to worry. If I’m not dead, I’ll probably have to leave the state.”

I squinted, whipping my head back to look at him. “You don’t know Rowan. There will be no going back.”

“You’re right,” Leo said, but his voice did little to convince me he believed that. “But you know him well, don’t you?” There was no malice in the way that he spoke, nor bitterness. If anything, there was regret, a desperate wish for reality not to be what it was. Leo seemed to realize his mistake immediately, his mouth gaping at his last word. But there was no way to take it back, no way to divert my laser focus. He tried, a change of topic slipping out of his mouth. “She gave me a list of names, we should--”

“Leo, what did that old woman tell you?” I interrupted. “And why are you so concerned with Rowan?”

“Nothing,” Leo shook his head frantically. But that wasn’t true, so he tried to recover, “just those names, that list. The fact that I could very well live and nothing more.”

“I don’t believe you,” I announced, shooting him a glare. He flinched in response, but that wasn’t enough for me. “Stop lying.”

“Lyra, I promise that that was all--”

“But it wasn’t,” I countered, “because you’re mentioning Rowan again, and you know that I don’t like to talk about him, especially not in our current situation. Might I remind you, I was off his radar