Page 103 of Twisting Beauty

I drew out a square of paper and a vial.

Found in A’s study.

What is it?

I turned the vial to the light, saw the label.

Christ. If this was what I thought it was…

I closed my hand around the note and vial and pocketed them. Then I waited, listening to the house breathe around me.

I heard a low voice from the next window along the wall. Her voice.

I moved along the ivy toward the next window, stopping at the edge of the frame, and peered around, giving me an angle on the room.

The boy’s room.

That detail landed low and hard, a mean little jolt that turned my stomach and left my grip on the wall tighter than it needed to be.

She was standing at the mantle facing the Lasair boy, who was turned away from her.

Her lacy nightie. The smeared gloss on swollen lips. Her messy hair. Even as I cataloged the evidence, a vicious streak of jealousy sliced through me.

My teeth snapped together, my fingers tightened on the ivy until the stems bit into my palms, and for one ugly second, I had the absurd urge to put my fist through the glass.

She turned and walked to the door to leave, her lips pressed together, her shoulders curled around, arms across her chest as she was trying to hold herself together.

Only when her back was to him did the boy turn.

Something in his face stopped me.

His expression had shed every layer of the cool authority and managed indifference that he usually wore.

What was underneath was raw longing. Naked enough to make me feel like I was intruding.

He gazed at her with such yearning, his fingers flinched out for her as if he wanted to pull her back into his arms, his features contorted with such pain that I knew it hurt him to let her go.

Something tightened in my chest.

She had been in that room, with the enemy, in a state that had nothing to do with our agreed strategy.

My mind seized on the operational breach with almost indecent relief. Mission drift. Compromise. Improvisation. Those were words I could work with. Those were words that did not require me to account for why the sight of her in his room had injected violence into my blood.

My plan was clean. Every piece of it had been built for a reason, and none of those reasons included her tangling herself up with the Lasair boy.

She was running a seduction play. Yes, that explanation was neat enough. She was trying to convert Lorcan into a personal asset rather than a target. Instead of finding the one piece that would send this whole wretched family crumbling, she was focused on redemption.

The sheer stupidity of that made my molars grind.

She had let the line blur, and the evidence of it was still written all over the boy’s face.

I descended the ivy, my jaw set, my movements jerky. She was focusing on the wrong damn thing. Wasting precious time. Every second she gave that boy was a second stolen from the work that actually mattered.

The plan was to destroy them all.

Not to save him.

If she had forgotten that, I would remind her. If he had started imagining himself exempt from destruction, I would correct that too.