Page 153 of Twisting Beauty

Instead, I said nothing. I held my ground.

He nodded. “Fine. I’ll ask him myself.”

He turned for the door.

I caught his arm. “Wait.”

He stopped, but he didn’t turn back.

“He saved me.” It came out before I could stop it. “When I was in the asylum. He showed me the truth of—” I caught the rest behind my teeth. The truth of Magdalene.

I still didn’t know if Lorcan would choose me over his father. I still didn’t know if any of this was salvageable.

I chose my next words carefully. “He protected me. I owe him.”

He was very still under my hand. Then he turned to face me, his eyes scanning across my face like he was reading every line of it. “So this is a debt?”

“Lorcan—”

“Seducing me? Begging me? Fucking me?” His voice grew hard. “Is that what he’s owed?”

“No.”

“Were you going to stab me in my sleep, Gray?” He almost smiled. “Wait until I was inside you and put a knife in my heart?”

“No!”

He pulled the knife from his pocket, took my hand, and wrapped my fingers around the hilt. Then he brought the point to his own chest.

“Go on, then,” he said as he dropped his hands from mine. “It’s yours anyway.”

I let go like the knife burned me. The blade hit the floor between us.

“I would never.” My voice cracked.

“He would.” He held my eyes. “That’s what he’s after. Me. My father. My whole family. Dead. That’s the only thing that man has ever wanted.”

I opened my mouth to tell him about Magdalene. About the ward. About Maeve whom they’d killed. About Dervla and Bridgit and the girls who were still praying to be freed. About what Deargán’s plan actually was, what mine was, what Alistair was sitting at the center of.

I closed it again.

I didn’t know yet if I could hand any of that to him.

“Bron Deargán,” he said. “I remember him.”

I went still. “What?”

He crossed to the wardrobe and pulled the cupboard door open, its hinges letting out a slow, complaining creak.

The inside of the door was papered over with newspaper clippings. Dozens of them. Yellowed at the edges, some pinned over each other in layers.

My gaze caught on a photo of a younger Deargán, his hair dark all the way through, his jaw set, his eyes flat at the camera, a board with numbers held up under his chin.

The same numbers tattooed on the inside of his right wrist.

It weren’t a birthdate.

It was a prison number.