Page 43 of Twisting Beauty

I squeezed my eyes shut. Every breath landed too loud in my own ears as I waited to be violated.

Seconds passed.

The hand on my thigh hadn’t moved. He hadn’t moved. Not to rip off my panties. Not to touch me.

I opened my eyes.

He was looking at the tattoo, at the Medusa staring up from my skin in the low light. Lorcan’s thumb moved to the edge of the design, tracing it without quite touching, his brow pulling in by a fraction.

I could only imagine what Lorcan was seeing. What he was thinking.

There was no way Deargán could have copied Rua’s tattoo perfectly. Good enough to pass if you’d just glimpsed at it. But it would not stand up to Lorcan’s scrutiny.

Perhaps the eyes were wrong, not realistic enough the way the original had been. The original artist’s linework in the scales was beyond what he could replicate cleanly.

And the lines along the thinner skin near the inner edge, the ink had bled out, softening what should have been sharp. Something a seasoned artist knew how to avoid.

The tattoo was too fresh. Rua’s original had years in her skin, that slight fading, the way old ink settles and loses its edge. This one was raised and vivid and new in a way that no amount of Rua’s old clothes or her careful handwriting copies or her hollow smile could account for.

Lorcan’s thumb stopped.

His silence tipped into something heavier. His grip on my wrists above my head didn’t loosen. But something behind his eyes moved, a shift so small yet so complete.

He knew I wasn’t Rua. He’d found the proof. Now he was deciding what to do with it.

My whole body waited for the cold sting of the blade at my throat again to finish off what he’d started the day we’d met. For him to haul me upright and take the whole confrontation somewhere I wouldn’t come back from. For him to toss me in front of Alistair so they could devour me together.

He straightened instead, slow and deliberate, releasing my wrists and stepping back from the bed, his gaze staying on me.

Cold rushed in where his body had been a second before, skimming over my skin. Shame burned through me because some ruined part of me felt the loss of his warmth and wanted it back.

“Lorcan—”

He turned and walked out.

The door clicked shut behind him, and the silence rushed in to deafen me.

The adrenaline holding my spine rigid suddenly snapped. I collapsed back as tremors racked my limbs. I curled my legs up to huddle in a ball on my side and clutched my ruined pants against my chest, my skin freezing everywhere his heat had just been.

He knew.

And he wasn’t done with me.

He was just done asking.

Whatever he did next would be crueler, calculated, and impossible to stop.

“Do you know that guy?”

Nuala’s voice was casual, her chin lifting toward the colonnade running along the south side of the quad. She wasn’t looking at me when she said it.

But at him.

The wind had picked up since we’d come outside the main Ravenwood building between classes, stripping the last of the leaves off the old oaks along the grounds and sending them skidding across the flagstones in pale dry clusters. Gray clouds had settled over the spires, heavy and low, pressing the warmth out of the air.

Students were pulling their coats tighter, hunching into scarves, cutting across the quad at a clip.

Everyone moving except the man against the far pillar.