Thief: The Scarab Beetle Series: #1 (The Academy) Read Free Page B

eyes by pretending to be engrossed with a crack in the tile on the counter.
    “How’s Tasty’s?”
    Tasty’s was the name of the Chinese restaurant where I worked part time. It was the only place within walking distance that would hire me. The owner paid me barely minimum wage under the table and it wasn’t enough for the outrageous rent required by the hotel. “Busy,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe the line of customers.”
    “Liar,” he replied. He sighed. “No leftovers for us today. Damn. I was hoping for something else besides bananas and oatmeal.”
    One of the few benefits to living in a hotel was it served free breakfast in the morning. Unfortunately, it often consisted of oatmeal, bananas, apples and a few pastries. And lately there hadn’t been any pastries. To save money on food, we picked up more than our fair share of breakfast staples to last throughout the day. Occasionally I got rice from the Chinese restaurant, and if I was really lucky, I’d get someone’s order that didn’t get picked up.
    The coffee maker beeped. Wil poured his hot water into the coffee cup, and started stirring the oatmeal mix. For being the younger brother, he was taller than I was, with the same eyes, and the same dark brown hair. His was cropped really short. Mine was straight and reached midway down my back. From that point, our looks differed. He was gruff, wiry and usually had a playful grin that seemed permanent to his face. Meanwhile, I hardly ever smiled. There isn’t much to smile about when you live in a dump hotel and scrounge for food and pick pockets to make the rent.
    A snore broke through our mutual silence. I turned my head, spotting Jack in the bed closest to the wall. Daddy, Dad, Papa and other father names never really fit well between my lips and his ears. Jack was the thing we’d settled on. And those moments he wasn’t cursing at me, he sometimes remembered my name was Kayli.
    Wil and I were more like roommates to him. He stayed up all night, drinking my hard-earned money away at the local bar, while my brother and I tried to catch some sleep before he got home. Most of the time he came back alone, but every once in a while he bought enough beer for one of the barflies to believe his promises about drugs, money, or more beer at the hotel room. He’d shoo us out, and we’d escape to spend the night in the hotel lobby on the overstuffed sofas, or by the pool that was always under repair. Management only hassled us every once in a while. If that happened, we’d break in and sleep in the hotel’s laundry room, cramped up together in the overheated space.
    The lump in the bed shifted. I groaned internally, rolling my eyes and turning away from him.
    Wil didn’t say a word, but looked at me, asking me quietly about money.
    I yanked out the twenty-five dollars I had earned working too few hours today. I also dug out the forty dollars I got at the mall.
    Wil sighed. “I didn’t get that much either,” he said. He pulled out thirty dollars and a few ones.
    I counted it again just to be sure, but including the money we’d made earlier that week, we still didn’t have enough for the rent that was due tomorrow. Jack had broken into our stash this week. I could have shot him for spending nearly seventy dollars on a barfly and himself.
    “I should just quit,” Wil said. “School isn’t that important. It takes up too much time.”
    “No,” I said. “You have to finish high school. Mom would have wanted it.”
    Wil grunted. “Do you think she’d care at this point?”
    I didn’t respond. He knew the answer to that. If I didn’t think it was important, I wouldn’t have objected. But I managed to get us this hotel room after our father had a scrape with one too many landlords and we couldn’t get another rental apartment within city limits. We were one step away from a cardboard box.
    “How did you get the money anyway?” I asked. “You went to school, didn’t you?”
    “I got a quick