Page 20 of Twisting Beauty

I stood there longer than I should have, my mind tumbling over the mystery of Lorcan’s mother.

A clock ringing out like a warning somewhere in the house got me moving again.

At the end of the corridor was a door. Heavy oak, brass fittings, a hound’s head knocker that matched the cane. I stopped in front of it and stood there in the half-dark and felt the pull of it.

My hand moved to the handle before Rua’s memories splashed me like cold water.

This was Alistair’s private wing. His bedroom, his private library, his bathroom, his study, all of it behind this door and the ones that flanked it, all of it entirely off-limits.

The memory came with a rule that had never needed to be spoken aloud, the consequences of breaking it were understood by everyone in the house.

Unless invited, this wing is forbidden to anyone but the Master.

I yanked my hand away and stumbled back.

I imagined Alistair opening this door from the other side, finding me here, barefoot and trespassing in the darkness of the gray morning. I didn’t want to find out what kind of punishment awaited me if I were caught here.

I turned on my heel, walking fast, then practically jogging back the way I’d come, out this wing and down the corridors back to the main part of the house.

I took the next corner at something close to a run.

And collided with a wall of heat and muscle.

The impact knocked the breath out of me. My hands flew up and landed flat against bare skin, warm and damp, and for one lurching second, all I registered in my vision was the tattoo ink under my palms, the hard solidity of him, and the sharp smell of sweat and woodsmoke and underneath it, rising fast and unwanted, the low sweep of violins.

I looked up and found Lorcan glaring down at me.

He’d caught me by the arm without thinking, steadying us both, and we stood there in the narrow corridor closer than was necessary.

His chest was still rising and falling hard from his workout, sweat beading his skin, gray sweatpants sitting low on his hips and nothing else.

Ink running down his arms, geometric and architectural, wolves tearing through a realistic heart on his right forearm. The Celtic knotwork across his chest and throat resolving itself into ravens as my eyes adjusted, dark birds mid-flight, and below them, scrolled across a banner held in curved talons with a quote written across it.

Deep into that darkness peering.

There was an angel rendered in fine lines down his left rib cage, softer than anything else on him, a woman’s face barely visible at the wing’s edge.

The heat coming off his skin went straight through me in a wave. It slid low and hard through my body, tightening my stomach, turning my knees into jelly, sending a hot pulse between my legs so sudden and intense it made my breath catch. My nipples tightened under the thin cotton of my robe.

Damn it. Damn him. I couldn’t even pretend that this was all Rua. This was my body reacting to him in a way I could not excuse.

He turned slightly. Just a fraction. An angling of his shoulders toward the wall as if he were trying to hide something directly behind him.

“Sorry,” I heard myself say, my voice breathless and utterly mortifying. “I didn’t— I wasn’t⁠—”

I spotted the mirror behind him, long glass set into the corridor wall, old and foxed at the edges, wide enough to catch us both.

His back was reflected in it.

It was covered in a crisscross of old scars, silvered and flat. Overlaying those were newer ones, still raised and angry. And then there were the newest ones from yesterday, a long welt across his shoulders, purpling at the edges. And a raw and angry gash across the center of his back.

I gasped.

Lorcan’s head turned and he clocked the mirror. Saw what I was seeing. Saw his own back reflected in the old glass.

He went very still.

Then he turned his back square to the mirror. Slowly. Deliberately. Giving me the full view, shoulders square, chin level, eyes on my face like he was daring me to keep looking.