Page 19 of Twisting Beauty

Something hot and stubborn moved through my chest.

I had to walk around in her skin all day. But I did not have to lie here all night staring at his annoyingly beautiful face.

I got up, throwing the covers off me, and pulled the first canvas off the wall, leaning it face down against the back of the wardrobe.

Then the next one.

I worked quickly and without ceremony, lifting each painting or sketch of Lorcan from its hook and carrying it to the wardrobe, packing them in efficiently, not looking at his accusing face as I went.

The last canvas went in and I closed the wardrobe door.

The room looked strange without them, the walls dotted with empty hooks, darker squares where the wallpaper had been protected from the light.

But I stood in the middle of it and felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn’t realized had been tight.

Right then. Better. I was done being passive. I needed to know the shape of this house, its rhythms, its weak points, who moved through it and when. Information was the only currency I had, and I was spending it faster than I was earning it.

I tied a robe on over my pj’s and slipped out of Rua’s room before the manor woke.

The corridors were dim, the kind of gray predawn light that made everything look like a photograph of itself. I moved quietly, barefoot on the worn runner, taking turns I hadn’t taken before, trying to build a map I could trust.

I wandered into a different wing of the manor, the runner beneath my feet giving way to something thicker. The walls turned darker, the proportions of the hallway widened, the cornices becoming even more elaborate, like this was a more important part of the house.

Portraits lined both walls now like an art gallery, oil paintings in heavy gilt frames, generations of Lasair men staring out with the same strong jaw and stern eyes.

I moved past them slowly, reading their names on the small brass titles, feeling like I was being watched.

Between the individual portraits, family paintings filled the gaps. Each generation of Lasair men rendered with their wives and children, formal and unsmiling, the compositions all following the same logic: patriarch at the center, family arranged around him. The wives were beautiful but none of them were smiling. The children stood straight-backed, arms clasped against their sides like toy soldiers.

I slowed as I moved through the generations, a suffocating weight pressing against my ribs. This wasn’t just one cruel man and the son he was molding in his image.

It was a lineage. A structure. Generation after generation of men raised to power. How was I supposed to fight something that ancient, that ingrained, that thoroughly bred into the bones of this house?

I found Alistair’s family portrait, hung at the corridor’s midpoint. He’d had himself painted in what looked like a trophy room, stuffed animal heads looming out of the background in their glass-eyed rows, antlers and open mouths framing the composition.

Alistair sat proud in a high-backed chair that stopped just short of being a throne, one hand resting on the armrest. He was looking directly at the painter with an air of entitled arrogance.

Lorcan stood at his right side. He was already too tall for about eight, shoulders rigid, hands clasped hard in front of him, knuckles almost bloodless.

But it was his eyes that held me. They looked wrong in a face that young. Too hollow. Too watchful. Like whatever should have still been boyish in him had already been cut out of him.

I stared at the boy in the painting for longer than I should have.

Wait. Where was his mother? Where was Mrs. Lasair?

I took a step back and stared at the painting as a whole.

The border cut in tight on Alistair’s left side, closer than any of the others, the gilt edge sitting almost flush against the arm of Alistair’s chair. It was the kind of framing that didn’t happen by accident.

I leaned in.

On the back of the chair, just where the frame bit into the canvas, was a hand. A woman’s hand, pale and long-fingered, resting lightly on the dark wood of the chair back.

Lorcan’s mother.

That was all that remained of her. One hand on her husband’s chair, cropped out of her own family portrait with such precision that if you weren’t looking for it, you’d never know she’d been there at all.

He hadn’t destroyed her. He’d had her removed and reframed and made it look like she’d never existed.