Page 6 of Twisting Beauty

For one stolen second, I let the mask loosen and dragged in a breath of dust and wood, but my pulse still wouldn’t settle.

First Lorcan.

Then Alistair.

My body was still catching up, skin too tight, pulse still tripping in the wake of one too-close threat after another.

At least I was safe here for a moment in this room. Right?

Rua’s room looked just like it did in my memories.

Her memories that Deargán had forced into me.

The black poster bed loomed against the wall like a dark altar dressed for mourning, its sheets stealing what little light the room allowed. Above it, an iron chandelier spread its curled arms across the ceiling while the red wallpaper crawled around the room in heavy damask patterns that made the room feel swollen and overripe. Gold-framed paintings crowded the walls.

Dark floorboards groaned under my step as I walked around the room.

Her room in the asylum had been a sterile copy. But this version still held the shape of her.

A long black jacket had been tossed over the desk chair and left there, rumpled and paint-smudged. Paint tubes and charcoal sticks spilled across the table by the window. A jar of cloudy water sat beside them with brushes splayed inside like dead flowers. An unfinished canvas rested on the easel, abandoned halfway through as if Rua had only stepped out for a moment and meant to come back to it.

Any minute I expected her to barge in, door crashing as it slammed open, furious at me for trying to steal her life.

The bed smelled wrong the moment I went near it. Sweet almonds and paint rose first, familiar enough to tighten my throat, and with it came that thin, haunted music-box melody I already knew belonged to Rua.

Then something bitter slipped underneath it, herbal and faintly medicinal, and the melody warped against a clash of organ notes, fighting each other inside my skull.

I recoiled from it.

The walls were crowded with canvases, and unlike the blurred versions in the room Deargán had built for me, these had no softness to hide behind. Every line had been painted with brutal clarity.

She had painted and sketched him over and over until the room felt crowded with him. Lorcan with a cigarette between his fingers and smoke curling past his mouth. Lorcan asleep, his face stripped loose and unguarded. Lorcan scowling, all sharp lines and contempt. Lorcan half-turned, mid-laugh, mid-sneer, mid-thought.

Her need for him lived within these walls. Every brushstroke felt too intimate, too hungry, as if painting his face over and over had been the only way Rua knew to keep him, punish herself with him, or survive wanting him. She had not decorated this room with him. She had trapped herself inside him.

Christ, it was a fucking shrine to him.

A sour twist of jealousy moved through me before I could stop it, which was absurd and vile. It did not make it any less real. I had only just met him, and already another girl’s obsession with him was getting under my skin.

I was going to have to sleep in here with his face staring at me from every wall, as if even in Rua’s room he still got to crowd me.

I repressed a shiver.

One smaller canvas near the corner stopped me cold. A woman’s body beneath dark lake water, pale limbs blurred under the surface while the water closed over her like a mouth. A chill skated down my arms before I could remind myself it was only paint.

A blocked vent high up on the wall caught my eye. Recognition hit with the sick certainty of my borrowed memory.

The vent opened into Lorcan’s room.

Rua had stood on that desk in the dark with her breath held, peering through the ornate iron grate while Lorcan stripped off his shirt on the other side, every line of his body revealed in stolen fragments through metal and shadow. The heat of her fixation bloomed so sharply in me that my stomach turned.

I went to the desk looking for proof of what the vent had already told me, my pulse kicking harder with every drawer I pulled open.

In the bottom drawer, under a stack of loose charcoal sketches and dried paint-stiff cloths, I found a vintage video recorder. The sight of it hit like a jolt.

Rua hadn’t just been watching him through that vent, she’d been recording him.

The cut on my throat throbbed.