Page 9 of Twisting Beauty

4

LORCAN

The damage wasn’t bad.

I stripped off my shirt in front of my bathroom mirror, the black marble cold under my palms where I’d braced against the sink. Moving carefully, already feeling the stiffness setting in, I worked in the silver-framed mirror without looking at my own face. There was nothing useful in that.

Shoulders first. A long welt was already purpling, the skin raised but intact. The cut along my right shoulder blade was shallow. I pressed a cloth to it until it stopped bleeding, before I cleaned it with antiseptic and bandaged it. The bruising across my ribs would take care of itself.

There was another open graze oozing out in the center of my back.

But I couldn’t reach it.

I stood there with the cloth in one hand, then the other, my arm cranked at the wrong angle as it sat frustratingly out of reach. I had no one in this house that I trusted to ask for help.

For a moment I just stood there as it stung.

Then I threw the cloth into the sink and walked out.

My bedroom was dark and quiet, the navy walls and the familiar tidiness of it settling around me. Decanter on the chest. Books stacked on the nightstand, four of them, spines aligned. Everything in its place. He’d taught me that much, at least.

My eyes went straight to the violin case in the corner, my ma’s violin, dark leather worn soft at the corners, brass catches tarnished.

My hand had actually lifted before I registered the movement.

I pulled it back at the familiar spike of disgust. Wanting comfort was a sign of weakness.

I turned my back on the case and crossed to the wardrobe for a clean shirt.

The girl came back to mind while I was shrugging the shirt on, lips pressing together at the useless flares of pain from my back. She was not a deliberate thought. She was just suddenly there, the way a splinter makes itself known even after you thought you’d dealt with it.

Her face, a breath from mine in the hallway. The feel of her soft body under my fingers. The way she’d met my eyes without lowering her lashes the way Rua did, half invitation, half self-protection.

That’s enough, Lorcan.

I fixed the collar in the mirror and neatly folded up the sleeves to my elbows.

She’d looked at me like she was studying me. Not the way Rua had looked at me, that helpless hunger that used to make my skin crawl. This girl had looked at me like she saw right through me and took pity on what she found.

Nobody meeting me for the first time looked at me like that.

They looked at me the way people looked at a Lasair. At Alistair Lasair’s son. Calculation, wariness, eager deference. All of it about what I represented.

Either Rua had changed in some fundamental way that no experimental therapy adequately explained. Or this girl wasn’t Rua at all.

She’d dared to stand in front of me and bank on the fact that I was too distracted or too stupid to look closely enough.

My gaze caught on the vent high on the wall, covered with a square of dark cardboard I’d taped over it last year when I’d finally worked out what Rua was doing with her camera up on her desk at three in the morning. I dragged my own chair across and stepped up.

Standing at eye level with the covered vent, I felt a spike of self-contempt. I was aware of exactly what this looked like. Rua’s compulsion and my current position were nothing alike. This was about proof. Not curiosity. I was gathering information, and that was not the same thing.

I didn’t disturb the cover; I just placed my ear at the grate.

There were floorboards creaking. A slow movement around the room. The soft displacement of fabric.

No voice, no phone call, no muttered conversation with whoever had sent her here. Nothing useful.

The knock on my door jerked me off the thought.