Page 39 of Twisting Beauty

The weight of Lorcan’s attention landed on me from beside me, cold and exact, and that ended the argument before it could start. I had to do this.

The scalpel felt wrong in my hand the moment I picked it up. Shit. Were you supposed to hold it like a pen or a fork?

He let the silence stretch. His gaze tracked from the grip to my elbow to the set of my shoulders. “Gee, Rua, it’s like you’ve never held a scalpel before.”

His words landed in the chest and sat there.

I adjusted my grip and pressed my mouth shut as I leaned in over the cadaver.

I made the mistake of looking at his face properly. He was an older man with kind features gone slack in death. A man who laughed with his grandkids. Who kissed his children on the forehead. Who smiled at his wife of fifty years.

Panic surged. No, no, no, no. I can’t⁠—

I shoved the thought away before it finished forming.

He was just a medical teaching tool. I could do this. My life depended on it. Dervla, the girls, were counting on me.

I dragged up every forensic crime show I had ever watched and fixed on the one useful thing my brain offered me. A Y incision. Start with that.

I placed the scalpel at his chest bone and drew a small line down, barely a scratch.

“Press harder.” He reached across and pushed down on my hand, making the scalpel dig in deeper, my stomach flipping hard as it cut through dead skin.

His touch lasted a second and still sent heat up my arm before I could stop it.

I fixed the depth for the rest of my first incision. Then I chewed my lip as I placed the scalpel down on the top part of the Y.

“Stop locking your shoulders.”

I bit the inside of my cheek as my shoulders dropped.

“Better.” He watched me work for a moment. “Steady your breathing.”

My breathing had gone shallow, and he heard it. Of course he did. He had been tracking every weakness with clinical patience, the bad grip, the locked elbow, the stiff shoulders, the breath that kept catching.

Each adjustment brought him closer to me. Each quiet instruction gave him another excuse to study me more thoroughly than anyone in this room had any right to.

“As much as I love to watch you floundering”—he leaned in—“we’re not doing autopsies in this class.”

Heat climbed up my neck at the words.

He stepped behind me. Close enough that his warmth reached through the lab coat. Close enough that my next breath came out shorter than the one before it.

His right arm came around me and his hand closed over mine on the scalpel.

Unwanted heat climbed under my skin at his nearness, at the feel of him caging me in. His breath touched my hair, warm enough to make my stomach tighten. God, this was humiliating in so many ways.

“Along here.” He redirected the blade. “Is the brachial plexus. A nerve cluster.” He used my hand to slice a small incision into the cadaver’s arm, a gesture so casually educational it made my skin crawl. “Sever it correctly and your arm becomes permanently useless. You can’t lift it. Can’t fight back.”

I frowned. Those were odd things to say.

The blade continued its path.

“Down here,” he said, his mouth at my ear. “We’re working toward the femoral artery.”

His hand guided mine, the blade tracing a steady path through the outer tissue of the cadaver’s thigh.

“Nicked correctly,” he continued, in the same low gravelly murmur, “you’d bleed out in under three minutes. Less, if you’re running.”