Page 65 of Twisting Beauty

A single black rose. Velvet petals, too fresh, too perfect, like it hadn’t grown but been conjured whole. The sweet scent hit the back of my throat, thick and cloying.

He could have left anything. Something ugly, something rotting, something meant purely to frighten. Instead, he’d left this.

Whatever Rua had hidden in here, whatever she’d wanted to keep secret, Lorcan had taken it. And he’d left this in its place.

A gift. A promise. A threat.

I didn’t have to wait long to find out which.

Nuala’s text came as I was crossing Ravenwood’s front courtyard.

I felt my phone buzz in my blazer pocket and pulled it out without slowing, scanning her message as I walked.

Nuala: Can’t make it in today. Have to stay with Brid. Sorry!

I stopped walking.

Me: Is she okay?

Nuala: She will be. TY. Sorry to leave you.

Somewhere nearby a group of boys erupted in laughter, loud and careless, and the sound of it landed on my skin like a slap.

I looked up. Around me, Ravenwood carried on, the crunch of gravel underfoot, students moving in loose clusters across the courtyard, the ravens making their noise in the elms overhead. Ordinary morning sounds. I stood in the middle of all of it and felt the morning close around me like a fist.

Without Nuala, I had no buffer. No sharp look cutting across the corridor when someone stared too long. No shoulder bumping lightly against mine that meant I see it and I’m not going anywhere. Just me. Alone. And those boys were still laughing, and I didn’t know if it was at something else entirely or if it had already started.

I pocketed my phone and kept walking.

I was still moving when I heard his voice carry across the courtyard, and I understood in the same instant that this was not coincidence. He’d been waiting. Watching the gate for the exact moment I came through it alone.

The courtyard was full. Students spread across the grass and benches in loose clusters, nowhere to disappear into, no crowd dense enough to swallow me whole.

He was already performing.

“I can’t stop watching him,” he cooed, pitching his voice into a breathless singsong falsetto, high and breathy and wrong in a way that made my skin crawl. “When Lorcan plays, I imagine his fingers on me…”

The words hit like a slap. My breath caught, chest caving on itself.

That wasn’t me. That was Rua’s voice he was mocking, Rua’s words he was holding up to the light and turning slowly so everyone could see the shape of them. But to everyone standing in this courtyard, watching with wide eyes and poorly suppressed grins, I was Rua. There was no distance between us. There was no me.

Gasps rippled through the crowd, nervous laughter following like a second wave, and then the eyes came, dozens of them swinging toward me, crawling across my skin like something with legs.

I turned.

Lorcan stood on a bench like it was a stage. He held a crumpled page above his head, waving it.

A journal page. Rua’s journal page, the handwriting unmistakable even from here.

His eyes found mine across the courtyard and something moved in them, hot and deliberate, before his mouth curved.

“Shall I go on?” he called. “Or do you want to read your filthy little ode to your stepbrother yourself?”

My teeth ground together hard enough to ache. “Lorcan. Stop.”

He didn’t stop. His voice rose above the rustling leaves and the hushed, electric chatter of the crowd, carrying with cruel precision as he recited another line, the words landing in the air between us like something thrown.

“I dream about his hot mouth on my breasts.” He drew each word out with mock reverence, slow and deliberate. “On my pussy. Tasting me. Licking me. Sucking the soul out of me.”