Page 121 of Twisting Beauty

I touched the fabric with one finger and pulled my hand back as if it had bitten me.

There was a line of pill bottles on the dresser, a neat little row beside a silver-backed brush, the labels yellowed past reading. Beside that was a small music box, lacquered black, the lid inlaid with a faded rose.

I shouldn’t have. But I lifted the lid anyway.

The melody started, tinny and mechanical, the little wheel turning under its needle, the notes plinking out in a thin metallic register.

I frowned.

It was familiar. But from where?

I closed the lid carefully, as if the wrong movement might wake something.

On the far wall was a portrait of a woman holding a violin, the canvas slashed clean at an angle. The edge of her mouth showed beneath the tear, one painted cheekbone, the suggestion of an eye behind the folded flap of canvas.

Lena?

I reached for the folded flap.

A hand, knuckles raw, closed around my wrist like a clamp.

I spun.

Lorcan stood right behind me. He must have come from the en suite I had only just noticed. There was a violin and bow in his other hand, his chest rising hard and uneven enough to tell me he hadn’t expected to find anyone in this room.

It was him.

He had been playing the violin in the night, the broken melody, the music that had pulled me out of bed every time, that’d haunted me even before I’d met him.

His face had gone white. His voice cracked. “Don’t touch her.”

I pulled my wrist back and he let me.

The room rearranged itself around me too fast, the pillow, the violin in his hand that matched the one in the painting, the child’s letters spelling Lena.

“Your mother,” I said.

I should have stopped there. I didn’t.

“Where is she?” I asked. “Where’s Lena?”

The pill bottles came back to me. The neat little line of them. The way this tower felt like the kind of place they’d lock someone away in.

Oh.

“She was ill,” I said, words tumbling out before I could stop them. “They locked her away, didn’t they?”

Something vicious moved across his face.

He had me by the shoulder before I could step back, his palm flat between my shoulder blades, marching me out the door.

“Get out.” His voice was shaking at the edges. “Don’t ever come back.”

The door slammed behind me hard enough to rattle the frame.

The silence afterward felt like a slap. I stood on the cold landing in my nightdress with my shoulder blades still warm from his hand and the echo of his grief in my chest like a stone.

I’d just found the softest wound in the cruelest boy I knew.