Page 4 of Twisting Beauty

Lorcan would open my throat in this hallway and step over me on his way to dinner. The certainty of it was immediate and animal and total.

I had no one who could save me from this. Not Deargán. Not anyone.

He leaned in closer.

“Who. Are. You?”

My mouth opened. Closed.

Tell the truth and Deargán’s plan collapsed. I’d be dead by morning in a way that looked like an accident.

Lie again and this blade would nick my artery faster than I could scream. I’d be dead in the next ten seconds.

Warm blood tracked down the front of my neck as I fought to find a way out.

The study door opened.

The blade disappeared in one motion. Between one breath and the next, his hand was empty and his face had rearranged itself into something that gave absolutely nothing away. The only proof the knife had existed was the thin sting under my jaw and the warmth still moving underneath my collar.

A man filled the doorway.

His scent of wormwood and green anise hit me first, my synesthesia answering it immediately with a pipe organ, one note, low and resonant, pressing down through my chest.

He was almost as tall as Lorcan, broad through the shoulders, silver-haired and immaculate, not a strand out of place. His face was deeply lined, the frown lines so carved in they looked structural, and his eyes were black and lightless. He took up the doorway and the temperature in the hallway felt like it dropped by a few degrees.

His gaze moved over my face, his recognition calm and unsurprised.

“Rua.”

Beside me, Lorcan said nothing. His hands were loose at his sides, his face blanked out, and the quality of his stillness had shifted entirely. It was no longer predatory. It was contained.

Lorcan was dangerous. Alistair was the only thing that could put a leash on him.

Alistair gave Lorcan a brief look before his gaze returned to me.

He stepped aside. “Come inside.”

I had no choice.

I stepped inside his lair, glancing back over my shoulder.

Lorcan was in the narrowing gap before the door shut. His stare was fixed on me, dark and flat, the knife back in his hand. He dragged his tongue slowly along the stain of my blood on the blade’s handle, tasting me, leaving a red smear on his bottom lip, his eyes never leaving mine.

Something hot and sick rolled through me at once.

The Persian rug swallowed footsteps whole as I walked farther into Alistair’s study, large, dark-paneled, the air smelling of old paper and leather underneath his inescapable medicinal smell, soaked into the wood and the curtains and the very grain of the walls. The organ note deepened with it, pressing harder against my sternum, no longer a single note but a sustained minor chord that never resolved.

The stuffed animal heads began at eye level and climbed the walls in rows above the shelving. Stags mostly, antlers spread wide, glass eyes catching the low firelight. Between them, smaller things: a fox, a hare, a bird with its wings pinned mid-spread, frozen in the middle of flight.

All of them watching.

Rua’s memory hit before I could brace for it, behind my eyes and under my sternum, already inside me before I knew it was coming.

A field. Late afternoon, the light going flat and gold. The smell of wet grass and something iron underneath it. A deer on the ground, its legs still moving like he was still trying to run, blood soaking through its soft fur.

His hand on my shoulder was heavy. His voice in my ear.

“Finish it, Rua.”