Page 5 of Twisting Beauty

His hand stayed on my shoulder as I lifted the rifle back to it, even as my hands trembled, even as I screamed for it to stop in my head.

The memory let go.

I slammed back into my own body and found Alistair watching me with mild paternal warmth.

He was standing between me and the door, blocking my exit, inspecting me, his gaze moving over my face, my shoulders, the way I held myself.

I pulled Rua’s coldness over myself and stood still and let him look.

His eyes dropped to my throat, lingered there, then came back to my face unchanged.

He knew. He said nothing.

Whatever Lorcan did to me in this house wasn’t just known, it was permitted.

The cut throbbed.

He opened his arms and smiled.

Everything in me recoiled. My stomach turned over so hard it made my knees feel hollow, and a cold slick of dread broke under my skin.

But there was no room for that here, no room for instinct or disgust or the desperate urge to step back.

I dragged a smile over my mouth, false and brittle, and walked into his arms.

I counted the seconds by the throb under my jaw. I kept my spine straight and my hands loose at my sides. I breathed through my mouth, but the herbal bitterness still got in. Wormwood coated the back of my throat until it suffocated me.

His arms came around me and held me too close, his chest pressing into mine with a certainty that allowed no distance. He kept me there too long, long enough for my pulse to start knocking in my throat, long enough for each second to turn wrong.

His hand settled at the small of my back.

Too low.

It settled with the ease of long habit, with the certainty of a gesture that had never once been successfully resisted, and after a moment his thumb moved in one slow, deliberate arc.

Another memory slammed into me, pure sensation, full-body and immediate, the echo of being crushed against her adopted father, his hands moving across her body, her non-consent never spoken aloud because the body learns, eventually, not to protest.

The wrongness hit first. It crawled under my skin and turned my stomach. Underneath it sat a soft, numb terror, the kind that taught a girl to go still and call herself willing because naming the truth was worse.

Tangled up with both was something even sicker. Relief. The shameful easing of a body that had learned that it was safer if she just let him.

Oh God. Rua had learned to crave his notice, his approval, the small mercies of his hand lingering instead of striking. Something in her had begun turning toward him even while the rest of her recoiled, and the split between those truths made my throat burn.

Alistair’s body shifted, just slightly, and his hips pressed against me. I could not tell, could not let myself decide, whether it was accidental.

Disgust hit hot and immediate, clean where Rua’s memory had been sick and split. I wanted to shove him off me.

I caught the instinct before it showed and turned it into something smaller, a careful shift of posture, a slight adjustment of weight. I edged my hips back just enough to keep my body from meeting his groin, as if I were only settling into his hold.

Finally, he stepped back, held me at arm’s length as his gaze crawled all over me, his voice too low and intimate.

“Welcome home, my unlucky girl.”

3

LIATH

Islipped inside Rua’s bedroom and slammed the door shut behind me. I stayed there with my spine pressed to the wood as if the lock could keep the rest of the house from swallowing me whole.