Page 64 of Twisting Beauty

I felt his gaze burning into me. Every single stupid nerve ending I had wanted me to look up.

Instead, I kept walking right on past him.

Beside me, someone launched off a bench. I heard it before I saw it, the exaggerated thud of feet hitting cobblestone, and then Rafe was in my peripheral vision, mimicking my stride with his chest thrown out and his chin up, one hand flicking imaginary hair back over his shoulder.

Finn made a noise like a man struck by lightning, clutching his chest with both hands, staggering sideways into the bench.

Then Breezy’s voice, aimed like something thrown, cutting through the laughter clean. “Careful, Lorc.” I heard it perfectly like I was meant to. “You’re losing your touch.”

The laughter that followed was loud and playful. Someone clapped Lorcan on the back. A voice from a nearby table, one I didn’t recognize, called across the courtyard, “Think she’s found someone with better pitch, mate!”

The worst part was the heat that crawled up the back of my neck. Not embarrassment. Something worse than embarrassment.

I glanced back.

Just once. But it was enough.

Lorcan was looking at me. He was not laughing along with them. His jaw was set and his eyes were flat with anger.

I recognized the exact moment he decided to remember this.

The cold settled into the pit of my stomach as I turned back around.

I had just ignored him. In public. In front of his friends and half the college.

I hadn’t meant it as a challenge. I’d meant it as survival.

But I already knew, with the particular clarity of someone who had just made a mistake they couldn’t unmake, that it wouldn’t matter what I’d meant. What mattered was what it had looked like.

And this was going to cost me.

19

LIATH

Iwoke with the scent of Lorcan in my nose, musk and woodsmoke and that low, mournful violin curling behind my eyes like something that had been there for years.

He’d been in my bedroom while I slept.

The room was still dark, the kind of thick gray dark that meant early morning, the hour before the house stirred. My pulse thudded against my throat. My skin felt strange, a prickling at the nape of my neck like someone had just passed very close, like the air had been disturbed and hadn’t quite settled.

I lay very still and made myself breathe and tried not to think about what it meant that he’d stood here in the dark and watched me and I hadn’t woken up. Hadn’t felt it. Or had felt it, somewhere beneath consciousness, and simply hadn’t been able to make myself surface.

I searched Rua’s room. Every shadow, every corner, looking for evidence of his nighttime visit. Something he moved, something left behind, or something taken.

Nothing seemed out of place.

Until I spotted the wall panel behind my bed sitting askew.

That wasn’t like that yesterday.

I crossed to it and curled my fingers around the edge of the panel, pulling. It resisted at first, swollen in its frame, and then came loose with a soft crack that seemed very loud in the empty room. I set it aside against the wall and crouched down to peer into the gap.

I chewed my lip and reached in.

Sharp pain shot through my fingertip. I jerked my hand back and watched a single bead of blood well up, dark and slow.

More carefully this time, I reached in again, holding my phone flashlight up.