JUST PYNCH

THE DREAM THIEVES P.1

"Well, it's impossible, then," Adam said. "It won't fly if it has no battery and no engine."

But Adam, who had only gotten this far in life by questioning every truth presented to him, had wanted proof.

"It won't fly if it has no battery and no engine," Ronan mimicked in a higher-pitched version of Adam's faint Henrietta drawl. (ch. 1) (Blue POV)

Ronan leaned on the cracked black vinyl of the passenger-side door and chewed on the leather bands on his wrist. They tasted like gasoline, a flavor that struck Ronan as both sexy and summery. (ch. 3) (Ronan POV)

Whatever bargain Adam had struck in order to accomplish it seemed to have rendered him a little unpredictable as well. Ronan, a sinner himself, wasn't as struck by the transgression as he was by Gansey's insistence that they continue to pretend Adam was a saint. (ch. 3)

Ronan sometimes dreamt of Adam, too, the latter boy sullen and elegant and fluently disdainful of dream-Ronan's clumsy attempts to communicate. (ch. 5) (Ronan POV)

"Hello? Oh, hey," Gansey said to the phone, touching a notebook with a handgun printed on the cover. The oh, hey was accompanied by a definite change in the timbre of his voice. That meant it was Adam, and that somehow stoked Ronan's anger. Everything was worse at night. (ch. 9) (Ronan POV)

Sometimes Ronan thought Adam was so used to the right way being painful that he doubted any path that didn't come with agony. (ch. 9)

Probably, Adam had made the connection between his rent change and the tuition raise. It wasn't a complicated assumption, and he was clever. It was easy, too, to hang it on Gansey. If Adam had been thinking straight, though, he would've considered how it was Ronan who had infinite connections to ST. Agnes. And how whoever was behind the rent change would have had to enter a church office with both a wad of cash and a burning intention to persuade a church lady to lie about a fake tax assessment. Taken apart that way, it seemed to have Ronan written all over it. But one of the marvelous things about being Ronan Lynch was that no one ever expected him to do anything nice for anyone. (ch. 9)

The thing was, Ronan knew what a face looked like, just before it was about to break. He'd seen it in the mirror often enough. Adam had fracture lines all over him. (ch. 9)