Is there any other answer?

How do you stop feeling humanity towards someone that’s so clearly nothing more than that, human? How do you stop having this empathy with someone that I’m supposed to see as a means to an end? It’s hard having to strip a person from all human qualities when you’re the same as them.

In my life, I’ve met many soulless people who proudly claim to have done some nasty things to a lot of people, but now I know that, if that’s true, they never had to look them in the eye and see their own reflection looking back at them.

Admittedly, I had gotten myself into a very hot mess. I thought I could do this job no problem, lying had never been an issue for me anyway. I actually made a living out of it. Before this, I used to live in the streets, tricking people into giving me money. By the time I hit eighteen, I could rob anybody blindly. It was almost funny how easy it was.

And that was my undoing. I guess I had karma coming.

I got noticed by some people that thought I could be useful and they offered me some very interesting things in exchange for my help. Like the stupid raven I apparently am, I can almost guarantee my eyes sparkled at the thought of being promised a lot of shiny things. So I accepted. Of course I accepted.

The job seemed simple enough: I had to lie my way into some prominent family that had some kind of precious information to the people hiring me.

Since I have the moral compass of a stone and the education of its friend, I didn’t stop to think twice if what I was doing was good or even okay. Before I knew, I was already talking to a young, child-like man on his porch. Owen, I later learned. He was the son of two very rich men with fascinating positions in the government. My employers, as far as I knew, really didn’t like these people and they were sure that they held information that could help to bring them down. They “wanted to see them burn and wonder how they could’ve been so stupid as to trust me,” they said. You know, as you do.

So they gave me the instructions for becoming close to them. Learning about them, what they did, who they did it with, and of course, be on the lookout for any juicy information so I could run to spill the tea.

Of course, I couldn’t just go up to these two grown-ass men and expect them to tell me their lives, so what was the second-best option?

I became friends with Owen, his confidant. I became exactly who he wanted me to be, who he needed me to be (a girl nothing like me, all pretty-smiles and giggles that I actually mirrored from him) in order to tell me all of his dirty secrets and, of course, preferably, his parents’ darkest, dirtiest secrets. And damn if he didn’t. He talked like he would die if he stopped. And damn me if I didn’t completely fall in love with this boy.

And it wasn’t even a romantic kind of love, it was just...the kind of love you feel for your pet or for a baby. He was just so pure and soft-hearted, with absolutely no notion of evil or betrayal. He was kind and funny and I sincerely believed that he was a saint of some sort. He never told me if I was right, though.

He trusted me as if he had known me his whole life, as if I hadn’t one day, oh-so-casually, stopped by his house to ask for directions. Even then he was so friendly he invited me in to wait for the brother that I told him would come looking for me.

We were real friends and I loved the way he looked at me when we were doing nothing but talk, I loved the way he talked to me: like we were equals. The same. Like the way no one had ever talked to me before. He made me feel seen, acknowledged.

And it melted my heart.

But, did I love him more than I loved shiny things? Did I love him more than the perks of owning shiny things? Did I love him more than I loved my selfish self?

I gave the information to my employers. All of it. I gave it to them with a poker face and a wobbly heart.

And it worked wonders for them, although I wasn’t so sure it was the case for me as I stood with them while his family fell from grace.

I am standing with them, my employers, as I look into his teary eyes and I see the kind of hurt I know wasn’t there before. I had caused that. And it was devastating to know it. I had chosen to put that pain there, and it would grow and fester and maybe someday it would turn into hate. Or was he too pure for that? Was he still able to love me, even after I had stabbed him on the back?

My face was stone cold as I watched the tears roll down his. Were they hate tears?

Did I love him more than I loved shiny things?

“Why?” he asked and my throat felt sore.

More than I loved the perks of owning shiny things?

I did not answer as one of my employers laughed.

“Why?” he asked again and for a moment I had to look away. His eyes, his pure, beautiful eyes, carried the weight of the world and my shoulders felt too weak to hold it. “Why did you betray me?” he whispered. I looked at him, and for a second I imagined it was just the both of us, laughing again and joking around. If I ever asked him about his opinion on my plans -hypothetically- he would probably tell me that no one would ever be that cruel. He was innocent enough that he wouldn’t have even suspected anything.