Page 152 of Twisting Beauty

Bron. Stop!

A woman’s voice.

Then it hit me.

I remember him.

44

LIATH

Lorcan’s hand stayed clamped around my wrist as he hauled me up the narrow stone staircase of the Lasair Manor’s forbidden tower.

“Lorcan.” I tried to dig my heels in. “Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t slow.

At the top, he pulled me through the door of Lena’s bedroom and let go of my wrist.

I stumbled forward two steps before I caught myself.

It looked the same as I remembered. A four-poster bed. A mirrored vanity catching the afternoon light. A pillow at the head of the bed painted with her name. Lena. A portrait on the wall with the canvas torn across her face.

I rubbed at my wrist where his grip had been, the charms of Rua’s bracelet clicking against each other.

The last time I had come here he had thrown me out. He had bared his teeth at me for stepping inside it. So what the hell were we doing here?

My eyes flicked to the door. He stepped in front of it, making it clear that I was not leaving. Not yet.

I had failed to get through to Deargán. Now Lorcan had isolated me.

“Lorcan.” I kept my voice level. “Why are we here?”

“Who is Deargán to you?” he demanded.

Every word of truth crowded on the tip of my tongue and not a single one of them was safe to give him. So I swallowed them down.

“He’s just a teacher.”

“Try again, Gray.”

“He’s our new lecturer. You watched him introduce himself. You heard the same⁠—”

“He planted you.”

The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

“He planted you as Rua, didn’t he? This whole thing is his plan.”

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. Not without giving him the next piece, and the next, and the next.

This was no longer about keeping two men from hating each other. I was standing between two dangerous men who both believed they were protecting me, and both might destroy everything to prove it.

“What does he have on you, Gray?” Lorcan’s voice hardened as he took a step toward me. “What does he hold over you that you’d lie for him to my face?”

Fuck. The whole mission was unraveling.

I wanted to scream at him that he was ruining everything. That if he forced me to tell him it would mean making him choose between me and his own blood.