Page 62 of Twisting Beauty

“There isn’t.”

“You said that very quickly.”

“Nuala.”

“I’m just saying.” She tilted her head. “Good girls. Bad boys. It’s practically a law of nature.”

I turned to look at her then, because something in her voice had shifted, a brightness pulled too tight over something softer underneath.

The pink rushing into her cheeks gave her away before her eyes did.

“Is this about me,” I asked softly, “or you?”

“No,” she said, and the word snagged in her throat like it had caught on something sharp. Her gaze moved, just for a moment, barely a flicker, past my shoulder. Small enough that I might have missed it if I hadn’t been watching her so closely.

I followed her gaze toward the far end of the courtyard where Finn sat among Lorcan’s usual crowd.

My breath caught.

Lorcan was already watching me. He always seemed to be lately.

There was nothing soft in the way he looked at me, only that hard, knowing stillness.

I tore my eyes away and fixed them on the path, telling myself whatever had sparked between us before was nothing. Nothing I couldn’t smother.

I had managed to avoid him since the party, getting lifts with Nuala instead of the Lasair town car. Eating dinner in my room. I just had to keep avoiding him until I’d completed my mission.

By the archway, a cluster of girls had gone quiet to watch us pass, their whispers not even making a pretense of discretion anymore.

Nuala’s expression sharpened. “Take a picture,” she snapped. “It’ll last longer.”

The cluster of girls pulled back like a tide going out, their whispers dying mid-breath, two of them suddenly finding something very interesting to look at on the ground. One had the grace to look faintly ashamed.

I stared at Nuala, something unexpected and warm moving through me. Nobody had done that for me in a long time. I’d forgotten what it felt like.

She bumped her shoulder lightly against mine, and when she looked back at me, her face had softened into something else entirely. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not leaving you to deal with those vultures alone.”

Something in my chest unknotted. Just a little.

We moved through an archway, the neighboring courtyard opening up.

Elias was up ahead, which was already enough to make me slow. But it was the girl beside him that stopped me completely.

She was clinging to the front of his blazer with both fists, her pale hair, almost white in the flat morning light, falling loose around a face that was still pretty under the wreckage of it, despite her mascara tracking down past her cheekbones in dark smudges. Her mouth was shaking. Her voice kept pitching too loud and then dropping, snagging on whatever she was trying to say, and there was something in the whiteness of her knuckles, the desperate twist of her fingers in the fabric, that made my stomach pull tight and keep pulling.

I didn’t know her. But I knew what she looked like. She looked like someone begging out of desperation.

Nuala went rigid. The color left her face so fast it looked like something had reached inside her and wrung it out by hand. Her gaze locked on the girl and for one unguarded moment, something raw and terrified moved through her eyes before she pulled it back under.

I leaned closer. “Who is she?”

“Bridgit.” The words scraped out of her, thin and horrified. “Jesus Christ. My sister.”

I looked again. Now that I knew, I could see the resemblance, the same pale skin, the same almost-white hair, though Bridgit’s face still held the soft roundness of someone a year or two younger. Pretty in a rounder, less finished way than Nuala. Cute-pretty rather than the clean severity of Nuala’s beauty.

Elias had one hand clamped around her elbow. Not steadying, but restraining, the way you’d grip a problem you were trying to manage rather than a person you were trying to hold. His face barely moved when he said flatly, “Don’t make a scene.”

The coldness of it turned my stomach.