Page 88 of Twisting Beauty

He nodded, cowed, then hurried out.

Mervyn looked at me for exactly one second longer than he needed to, his unblinking stare cataloging me before he withdrew.

Alone, I sat by her side for God knows how long, staring at her like a man unmoored. Long enough that the heat from the fire dried my hair.

I didn’t dare sleep. Didn’t dare move. Just in case.

Her body began to tremble, tortured moans breaking from her lips, as a nightmare grasped her in its clutches.

I scooted forward in my chair. “Gray… it’s okay. I’m here.”

Her eyes opened, finding me through whatever she was still fighting. “Lorcan.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move. I just stayed exactly where I was, closer than I should have been, which was the only place I could stand to be.

27

LIATH

Something in the dark had a hold of me.

It breathed wrong, moved wrong, its weight pinning me down through water that wasn’t water anymore, through cold that had gone solid and pressed into my mouth and lungs.

I fought, but it was no use.

The creature were still there, faceless, and with too many hands, greedy and insatiable.

A sound came in, quiet and unannounced, a low fractured chord of violins, raw and unsteady. It rose through the dark the way heat rises, and the thing that had a hold of me flinched from it. The grip loosened. The whisper lost its shape. The cold thinned at the edges.

The violins grew louder.

The creature backed away from the sound as though it burned, letting me go, and I surfaced.

I blinked. Once. Twice.

A ceiling I didn’t recognize came into focus above me, dark wood beams catching an orange glow.

Not my room.

I turned my head on the pillow, and the whole room shifted with it, heavy and strange. Dark wood furniture. A fire burned somewhere to my left, throwing warmth I could feel against the side of my face. The walls were not red damask.

“Lorcan.”

His name spilled out of my mouth before I had quite worked out where I was.

He leaned into my line of sight. His hair was slightly damp at the ends, curling at his neck and pushed back from his face. Even without his raven mask, his expression was difficult to read in the firelight. His little finger brushed mine where my hand lay against the blanket. The touch was barely there, light enough that I might have imagined it.

He pulled back, disappearing out of my sightline. I thought he’d left.

But then the mattress dipped behind me and his arm came over my waist, heavy and certain, drawing me back against the solid length of him until my spine met his chest, his body curving around mine, the heat of him immediate and overwhelming.

I froze. Then the reality of it hit all at once. No nightdress. No sheet between my skin and his arm. No damp, ruined clothes clinging to me. Nothing. I was utterly naked.

Heat flooded my face so fast it burned. My stomach clenched. Every place his body touched mine turned brutally vivid, his chest at my back, the weight of his arm at my waist, the hard line of his thigh bracketed behind mine, and the knowledge of my own bare skin against the sheets made panic snap through me sharp and wild.

What the hell?

He’d stripped me while I was unconscious.