Path of Thieves

by Sunniva Dee

  I’m not flaunting any illegal sides to Mom. “Naw, just a Coke for me.”

  “Nadine?” Keyon continues his quest for takers of beer, but my girl is loyal even though we haven’t discussed it. Once we get back to Mom’s, we’ll be disobedient. When Mom goes to bed, I’ll find my way to Nadine’s room. Because the times we have apart are so much longer than our times together.

  “Hello?”

  The darkness is deep. Beside me, Nadine shuffles in an unconscious protest against the early hour and my greeting on the cell.

  “Cugs.” The familiar voice rocks me fully awake, and my heart clamps on a warning beat as he adds, “Hey.”

  “Dad. What’s going on?”

  Mom sleeps next door. My father sounds wrong here and wrong in my life.

  “Well, you know, I miss you.”

  My thoughts find only bitterness and sarcasm. I don’t want it out of my mouth, so I keep quiet.

  “How are you? It’s been, what, two months, since we spoke last?”

  “Yeah.” It’s better this way.

  He clears his throat, sounding uncomfortable. It must be early morning in Florida. If he’d been hitting houses, he’d be asleep now. The holidays are high season for burglars, with tons of empty houses, so for a second, I wonder if he has changed.

  “I saw you on TV the other night. You got to play, huh?”

  “I did.”

  “Real good. Real good. Your coach happy with you?”

  “Uh-huh, he is.”

  “Who’re you talking to?” Nadine’s breath warms my arm. I cover the receiver and whisper his name. She sighs for me.

  “It’s good to hear your voice, son. I love you. Would’ve been nice to have you home for Christmas. Wish it weren’t like this with us, you know. Cynthia made a delicious turkey with all the fixings. Couldn’t have been better. Her grandmother’s recipe.”

  I don’t have a reply now either but manage a grunt of agreement.

  “You at your girlfriend’s for Christmas?”

  “At first, yeah. Now I’m at Mom’s.”

  Stunned silence. I expected it, because the likelihood of Mom or Paislee having told him was nonexistent.

  “What mother?”

  “I only have one mother: Margaret Cain. I’m in Rigita with her and Paislee.”

  When he finally speaks again, he does it in a dirty rush. “You chose her over me? So you’re this hot-shot football star now, too good for your own father, and then you run to her of all people? I’m the one who’s been supporting you all these years. I took care of you. I was the one buying you your first cleats. What the hell kind of—”

  “Dad! It’s late here.” I check my watch to verify, and yes, it’s four a.m. “I’m going back to sleep. Say hi to Cynthia from me. She’s cool.”

  “Cugs, cut this nonsense right now!” he shouts, but then he deflates so fast I don’t recognize him. “Please?”

  “Bye, Dad. Happy New Year.” Nothing has felt better to say. My cell buzzes again as soon as I hang up. I reject his call. I reject the next call too and then the next. Finally, I switch the phone to mute.

  “I might block him.” My heart still stutter-beats. “Am I callous if I do?”

  “No. You’d be smart if you did. I mean, finally. I’d have blocked him a long time ago.”

  We fall silent. I rub Nadine’s shoulder. Stop myself from moving down her arm unless she asks for more from me. I can’t even imagine everything that must have gone through her mind in the year we’ve been together.

  “How can the ultimate betrayal be the start of a relationship?” The question sieves out on its own, hitting a lock above the tip of her ear. She shivers.

  “It can when it’s the right kind of betrayal.” She settles in closer and shapes to me.

  “You’re losing me, here.”

  “You think you betrayed me by robbing my family’s houses?”

  “Of course. Yes.”

  “I never saw it that way. When I was little, you were this small ninja, a child who came to my house and warned me against the thief with the knife downstairs. You explained how I could stay out of danger, betraying not me but the thief you came with, your own father.

  “You helped save my grandpa’s life. Without you, he would have died; I would have slept through the night and only found out that he wasn’t home the morning after. No one would have looked for him until it was too late.”

  “You were the one alerting your parents.”

  “Right, because of you. Then a year ago, you returned and came to my rescue again. You made sure your father didn’t come upstairs, and you never told him I’d seen you. You kept out of my father’s office, which was where he stored his prototypes. The lord knows where he would have been without them. Now, he has backups and stores his stuff in better places.”

  I’m the opposite of a hero, but I accept Nadine’s arms and let her squeeze me.

  “I’m a criminal.” I kiss her neck.

  “No, you’re not. You’re a football player and a student. My boyfriend and my love. Shove the past back where it belongs, Cugs, because you’re done with it.”

  A wave of it’s-over hits my esophagus, making me swallow. “How are you so wise?”

  “Born that way? Keep knocking that football around, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Okay,” I whisper so she doesn’t notice how overwhelmed I am. “I’ll do that then.”

  I was twelve when a stranger at a train station taught me the meaning of ugly. He forced himself on me and threatened to kill my family if I told. I stayed silent, and the ugliness grew.

  Now, that word rolls in film clips through my mind. All I’ve done since my best friend, Keyon Arias, left town is cement how ugly I am. Ugly on the inside—deep down to my core. On the outside… I am a Vixen. I flash men a smile and make them moan out pleasure I control.

  Not them. Never them.

  After five years of being away, my beautiful boy has come back to town for his father’s masquerade ball. He’s different. Hard muscle supersedes the skin and bone of his once boyish frame. One thing hasn’t changed though: the murderous look in his eyes when he slaughters his opponents. In the ring, I see the bullied boy, all grown up, dominating in ways he couldn’t in high school.

  He’s the mayor’s son. The rising MMA fighter. The beautiful one.

  I’m not the Paislee Cain of before, not the sweet girl he once knew, the one who chased away his bullies. I’m the town slut. The dirty girl whose shame will never fade no matter how many men I use. He’d disown what I’ve become.

  Because beautiful can never love ugly.

  PAISLEE

  The most vibrant moments of my life flicker through my brain like film clips. If I concentrate long enough, they suck in sound until they become so real they mix in scents from my memories too. Already, I realize today will morph into a clip that’ll join the rest of them—the short version of today, what I’m watching right now.

  In this moment, he doesn’t star in a snippet at the back of my brain. He’s almost tangible, himself in ways I haven’t seen him in years.

  Heat glistened off him when he strutted into the cage, arms high in preempted victory and with a cocky smile on his mouth. But now, minutes into the match, he’s not smiling anymore, no, because Keyon is fighting hard.

  He always did that. Fought hard, I mean. And I wasn’t afraid for him back when I knew him either. Who can be afraid for someone who looks murderous?

  I don’t mind his back toward the camera while he delivers the last decisive blow to his opponent; I enjoy the sight of skin and muscles under glaring spotlights and sweat that flies off hair and lashes when he turns.

  The local TV station replays Keyon’s knockout in slow motion, while I consider what’s most real; replays like these on a TV screen versus what’s in my brain—those
special clips from years ago. I let the thought go and ponder instead how Keyon and what’s-his-name survive the punishment they give each other.

  I’ve kept close track of Keyon in the news. This is the first televised event he’s been a part of, so until now I’ve found him on the Internet and in our flimsy newspaper, the Rigita Gazette.

  From the first glimpse of his face on TV, I saw the same impatience as before. Wildfire still burns in his eyes, and dedication radiates off him like red-hot quicksilver. In my imagination, Keyon is rattling the starting gates, dying to be freed into a world where he can rule, destroy, feast on his power without inhibitions.

  I’ve read about his sport. Fighters can go pro at eighteen, and with Keyon’s talent and his twenty-one years, it must only be a matter of time.

  It’s been five years since our high school principal threatened to expel him. I recognize his feral expression, the one he wore so consistently during the last months before his family packed up and moved.

  I wish we’d stayed in touch after he left. His film clips remain with me though, and since I found a small photo of him in the Gazette a year ago, I’ve become a veritable stalker. I really, truly have, and I admit that it’s freaky.

  But here he is now, on TV, all grown up. He looks so intense. So unafraid. I recall the fear infesting his eyes before everything changed, right when I was learning to tame my own fear. Would things have been different if he were fearless from the start?

  They say he took a beating in his last fight. Nothing broken, just some bruised ribs. I scan his back for signs, but the camera focus zooms to his shoulders and head.

  The referee screams something, and as Keyon twists to the camera, realization slams into me; I’ve known he was out there, but now my body internalizes it all at once. It is him, without a shred of doubt—I’m face to face with Keyon Arias on the screen, and his chest heaves, not with exertion like in so many of my film clips, but with undefeated energy.

  I’m mesmerized by his eyes as he stills. They’re honeyed, not olive-colored. Just like years ago, they fluctuate depending on his mood. I always had a hard time deciding which shade spoke of calm waters.

  Those cat eyes stare at the camera, unseeing and full of purpose, and his jaw tics when he clenches his teeth.

  Oh I know that expression. I recall him ready to grab classmates by the neck and bash them into the asphalt on the way home from school.

  If I interpret him correctly, he’s fighting the urge to deck his contender as the man staggers to his feet. This is new to me. Once Keyon Arias claimed the throne as the terror of our school, he made no attempt to stop until his victim was too exhausted to move.

  I used to throw myself over Keyon’s back. He couldn’t beat people with the tentacles of a girl he’d never hurt around his neck.

  “Paislee?” Old-Man lifts bushy brows from the doorway to the break room. “You’re watching TV?” He can’t believe what he sees in the middle of my shift. The mirrors are waiting, and if they’re to become gritty artisan-perfect, meeting our trademark standard, every step needs to be carefully monitored and completed within two hours. You don’t take breaks in those two hours.

  The mirror waiting for me out there, the one that’s been waiting for ten minutes, might already be yellowing into that sickening color that can’t be considered art.

  “Sorry, Old-Man. I’m… I don’t know what happened. I’ll go there now.”

  “I put Mack on it,” he rumbles, voice deep for such a skinny man. I always felt deep voices should live in chunkier men.

  I wonder how Keyon’s voice sounds now. At the time he moved, it had just changed from his young-boy pitch.

  Old-Man’s eyebrows are more expressive than his eyes. Now they sink so far down, his irises morph into muddy half-moons beneath them.

  “Can’t lose a mirror, ya know.” He nods, sniffing. Old-Man would never rebuke me. He angles a glance at the referee who’s grabbing Keyon’s arm to prevent him from lunging at his competitor.

  “Boxing?” he asks finally.

  “MMA—Mixed Martial Arts,” I say. The rickety table next to the couch is too weak to hold the old-fashioned monster of a TV for much longer. “I’ll buy us a better TV stand.”

  Old-Man bobs his head. Sniffs again out of habit. He’s been around the mirror fumes for decades, and even when his nose is dry, he’ll sniff. I feel my smile draw up on one side at how much I love this man.

  “He’s a hectic one, huh?” he says about Keyon. The words he uses are few and genuine. Only when he’s drunk does he chatter.

  “He is.”

  “Likes to fight.” Old-Man sucks air in through his teeth. Eases his hands into his overall pockets and rocks on the heels of his feet. “You know him?”

  It’s my turn to nod. “That’s Keyon Arias. He used to live here. Keyon was our high school bully,” I reply, and despite myself, my smile blows into a grin.

  To read more, click here.

  First of all, thank you to my family for always being there no matter the craziness of life. Often, I’m inside my head, discovering characters and storylines. I’m present and yet not—it’s something I need to work on, to separate story time from real-life time. Alexandra, Nicolas, Berit, Mamma, Pappa, Hanna, og Johannes: jeg er så utrolig glad i dere. Your patience and love humble me.

  Path of Thieves was my first go at a young adult book, and I owe my CPs—my critique-partner author friends—pitchers of margaritas for the work they put into its edit phases. D. Nichole King, Cheryl McIntyre, Alyson Santos, and Lynn Vroman: you flogged Path of Thieves into shape, and I loved every minute of it.

  Lynn, without your rock-solid YA expertise, this book would have turned into a new adult book, Sunniva-style. D, without your football expertise, Cugs would have perished. Alyson, Cugs is ecstatic over the techniques you threw him into. Cheryl, I’d never ever without your genial insight into character psyches. Ladies, I am forever indebted to you. Thank you!

  Renee, this is the eleventh book you read early for me. Thank you for being my loyal beta-reader! April, you rock. Thank you for going in sight unseen, book after book, as my beta reader too.

  I have a small group of incredible fans named after my angelic first novel. These readers inspire me and listen to my gushings and rantings. They rave when appropriate, they complain, and they emoticon-dance. Sunniva’s Angels, thank you for your absolutely celestial support!

  Sunniva was born and raised in the Land of the Midnight Sun but spent her early twenties bouncing between Spain, Italy, and Greece. Later, she fell in love with Buenos Aires, Argentina. Fast forward, and the United States had her interest. After half a decade in California, she’s now settled in the beautiful city of Savannah, Georgia.

  Sunniva’s favorite genres are YA, like Path of Thieves, New Adult, and Contemporary Fiction. She’s also been known to dabble in Paranormal.

  Sunniva is the happiest when her characters run off and do their own thing, effectively destroying her puppeteer’s plan for their plots and endings. Like in real life, Sunniva’s goal is to keep her readers on their toes until the last page of each story.

  Copyright © 2017 by Sunniva Dee

  Cover design by Clarise Tan

  Interior design by John Gibson

  1st edition June 27th, 2017

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission from the above author of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the various products referenced in this work of fiction. The publication/use of these tradema
rks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.