Page 125 of Twisting Beauty

I knew the trick. Find a point on the ceiling. Pick a memory. The one with the sea. Smell of salt, sound of gulls, the thin gray Irish light on a Donegal beach in September. Put yourself there. Leave your body in the bed and put yourself on the beach. Let whatever would happen, happen.

I picked the corner of the room and stared at it.

I started to step away from myself.

His fingers caught my chin and turned my face back to his. “Let’s see those pretty eyes, pet.”

Bastard. He wasn’t going to let me leave my body. He wasn’t going to let me have even that.

His thumb stroked the line of my jaw. “There she is.”

I held his gaze, even as sour bile threatened to choke me.

I have survived worse than this. I have survived worse than this. I could survive this.

I had to.

37

LORCAN

Ihad my eye to the vent again.

I’d told myself it was surveillance. She was a known threat using my sister’s name, a fake tattoo on her thigh, and a mission I had not yet figured out. The chair beneath the vent was a strategic position. The hours I’d stood on it watching her were operational diligence and not the most pathetic thing I had ever done.

The lies were getting thinner.

Tonight, she was asleep on her side with one hand curled under her chin and her hair fanned out across the pillow. Awake, she was the imposter who’d walked into my house wearing my sister’s face and lying through her teeth. Asleep, she was just a girl. A tired girl with a small frown between her brows and one bare foot escaping the blanket, and I had been watching her for forty minutes without moving.

I had a small filthy thought about the way her hair would feel in my fist, and I shoved it down hard. It came back.

I had ignored her for a week, used her intrusion into my ma’s room as an excuse. Detach. Withdraw. Refuse. Watch the unwanted feeling starve until it died. It had always been reliable before.

It hadn’t worked with her.

It had gotten worse.

Every day she’d been more in my head, not less.

And the silence between us was the worst of it. The absence of her was a sound I could not stop listening for. A door not opening. A footstep not crossing a room. A voice not arriving. Every minute of the day was now organized around where she was and where she was not. I hadn’t had a thought in seven days that hadn’t routed through her first.

So I stood on the chair, watching her sleep.

But tonight, unlike any other night, her bedroom door opened, the sound loud against the midnight silence.

I went still.

Measured footsteps sounded across her room, a wrongness climbing up the back of my neck even before he stepped into view.

My father.

He sat on the edge of her bed like he owned the space, the mattress dipping under his weight. He hadn’t told anyone he was back.

Something cold moved through me.

I watched her wake. The flutter of her lashes. The slow surface from sleep. Then the moment she registered who was sitting on her bed, a small jolt traveled the length of her body before she locked it down.

But it was their conversation that made my fingers curl against the grate. She was deflecting. He was batting her excuses aside. A verbal chess match with her as the pawn.