11. Lorcan
LORCAN
The abandoned Ravenwood tower had been ours for years, mine and my three best mates’, all crumbling stone and forgotten glory. Ivy crawled through cracks in the walls, nature slowly reclaiming it.
The room we used in the middle of the tower still held our smoke and laughter from too many afternoons spent hiding above the rest of the school.
Old rugs had been thrown over the worst of the icy stone, and a sagging couch faced an armchair that had become mine by unspoken agreement. Empty bottles, crisp packets, and matchbooks littered the side table, while the leather punching bag in the corner swayed faintly in the draft.
I sat in the tufted armchair by the arched window, the king seat, Rafe called it when he thought I wasn’t listening.
The main courtyard spread below in a sprawl of pavement stones and clipped grass. From this height the students looked small and repetitive, drifting between buildings like ants. Ravenwood liked to pretend it made men unpredictable, but most people walked exactly where they were trained to.
I took a small toke of the joint that was making the rounds, then passed it on to Breezy, flat on his back on the thick Persian rug, nursing his ribs and groaning like he was dying.
“Didn’t know we were letting geriatrics on the pitch now,” Rafe said around a mouthful of cheese and onion crisps, the bag torn open between him and Finn on the couch.
“I’m conserving energy, lads.” Breezy’s voice was muffled by the smoke billowing out his mouth.
“The rookies outran you during drills,” Rafe shot back as he took the joint off Breezy.
Our new hurling coach was a culchie bastard who believed pain built character. Practice earlier had apparently been brutal. I’d made an excuse just to give my back a chance to recover.
Breezy groaned and covered his face with both hands. “It’s my dick, alright? I haven’t been laid in…” He started counting on his fingers, brows furrowed in genuine concentration. “Three weeks, four days, seven hours and”—he checked his watch—“fifty-nine minutes.”
Rafe snorted, nearly choking on his crisps. “That’s specific, you creep. You keeping a fucking diary?”
“No.” Breezy’s delivery was deadpan perfection. “I log it on my Fitbit.”
“Dickbit.” Rafe chuckled, and even I cracked up at that.
“My dick’s important to me,” Breezy said with wounded dignity.
I shook my head. “You’re disturbed.”
Rafe frowned, leaning forward. “Wait—why haven’t you been laid in three weeks?”
Breezy groaned louder, dragging a hand down his face. “It’s this lass. Shite. She’s making me…” He trailed off, suddenly bashful.
Rafe pounced like a predator scenting weakness. “Making you what? Wear a cockring?”
“Shave your balls to a heart shape?” I added, genuinely curious now.
Finn’s eyes lit up. “Wait—I got it. She’s got your bollocks on a leash. Walks you every morning before school?”
“No…” Breezy’s voice cracked with exasperation. “She’s making me wait.”
That earned him a collective groan.
“Jaysus. Celibacy by coercion. Tragic.” Rafe shook his head mournfully.
“Your poor balls,” Finn said with mock solemnity. “They didn’t sign up for this, lad.”
I studied Breezy’s face, noting the flush creeping up his neck. “Can’t decide if that’s romantic or pathetic.”
“It’s a slow burn romance!” Breezy protested. “She said we’re building tension.”
“Building tension?” Finn’s eyebrows shot up. “She’s building your prostate pressure, mate.”
Rafe threw a handful of crisps at him. “No ride is worth blue balls, Breez.”
But Breezy’s expression turned reverent, almost religious. “You haven’t seen her. I’d do a goddamn pilgrimage barefoot for a taste.”
Finn crossed himself with mock piety. “God rest your balls.”
“Amen,” I muttered, because some situations were beyond salvation.
Rafe squinted at him like he was solving a puzzle. “Wait. Is this the acting college girl?”
Breezy’s silence was answer enough.
Rafe pointed triumphantly. “It is! Jaysus, Breez. You never go full drama girl.”
“They’re beautiful, but mad,” Finn said, shuddering, no doubt remembering his own hard-earned personal experience.
“Like shagging the entire cast of a Greek tragedy,” Rafe said with a chuckle.
“They cry, they come, they cry again,” Finn added. “It’s a fucking one-woman dark comedy show.”
“It’s always ‘method acting’ until they’re method kicking you in the balls,” Rafe finished.
“She’s hot, alright?” Breezy’s voice held a desperate edge that made me wince.
“So’s the sun,” Finn shot back. “Doesn’t mean I want it in my lap.”
Rafe grinned, sensing victory. “Golden rule, lads?”
“Don’t stick your dick in crazy,” they chorused.
I laughed with them because that was easier than admitting my head had barely been in the room for the last ten minutes. Every joke landed somewhere far away, dulled by the fact that all I could really see was Rua with her hand around that acid vial, chin up and eyes hard.
Makeup shades could change. Food preferences could change. A stint in Magdalene might harden a girl around the edges. But Rua did not go in a skittish little wallflower and come back with that kind of heat in her spine and that look in her eyes, like she would sooner burn than bend.
Cracking her open was going to be interesting.
That should have been enough to leave it at suspicion and wait for proof. Instead, the thought of her only dug in deeper, until curiosity sharpened into something meaner and far more personal.
A familiar figure crossed the courtyard below, and the tower dropped back a step around me. The lads, the smoke, the bag in the corner, all of it thinned into background noise the second my attention locked on her.
Rua.
Except… not Rua.
The wrongness hit again the second I fixed on her properly.
My fingers tightened on the windowsill as I watched her tug Nuala beside her onto a stone bench, their heads bent together in whispered confidence. Every so often Rua would glance around her as if she knew she was being watched before leaning even farther in.
I frowned, my mind going back to the hallway earlier when she’d come to me with that pathetic excuse of needing to borrow notes.
She hadn’t wanted notes. She had used me as cover to avoid Nuala.
Whatever passed between them had rattled her badly enough to make her choose me of all people as a shield. The realization sat there, needling.
So why this complete turnaround? How did she go from avoiding Nuala to becoming fast friends?
The reasons why anyone did anything were boring and obvious. So this answer should have obvious. But I was left grasping.
Every time I looked at her, she only gave me another contradiction. Every time I thought I had hold of one clean truth, she handed me three more questions.
The laughter of the lads behind me faded to white noise. Every instinct I had narrowed on the girl below and started measuring the differences all over again, not because I needed more proof, but because I could not seem to stop.
She moved like she belonged to her own body now.
Rua used to curl inward without meaning to, as if she expected the world to strike first. This girl held herself straight, turned her face up when she listened, her expression curious instead of wary.
The sound of her voice drifting up on the breeze, close enough to familiar to unsettle and wrong enough to grate.
It caused a strange pull in my chest, an unwanted instinct to go down and get closer.
My hand tightened on the stone ledge until the old grit bit into my palm. Irrelevant.
“You good, Lorc?” Finn’s voice seemed to come from very far away.
I didn’t answer, couldn’t tear my attention from the theater unfolding in the courtyard.
Footsteps scraped over stone behind me, and then Rafe, the nosy bollocks, was at my shoulder, following my line of sight out into the courtyard. “What’s got your attention, lad?”
“Is she hot?” Breezy came up to my other side, dragging in a lungful of smoke. He leaned an elbow on the windowsill and nudged me with his shoulder.
Even Finn dragged himself off the couch a second later. They crowded the window without asking, all of them peering down at her now, and the fact that they had noticed her, too, set my teeth on edge before a single word left their mouths.
Rafe let out a low whistle. “She was unreal in chem today. Standing up to Aoife like that.”
Breezy launched into an exaggerated falsetto and pretended to clutch at his pearls. “My Birkin! It’s melting!”
“Proper savage,” Finn said, shaking his head slowly, his tone laced with awe as a grin pulled at the corners of his mouth.
“I nearly proposed,” Rafe added.
“I may have come a little in my pants,” Breezy said with a hand on his cock and a groan.
The line earned him the oohs and aahs he wanted from the lads, but the image of them all looking at her that way made my jaw lock hard.
“Shut it,” I bit out through clenched teeth.
I hated that they were looking. I hated that they noticed her at all.
Breezy, the dolt, kept grinning like he had not heard the warning in my voice at all. “What? It was hot, mate. You have to admit it was hot.”
“Don’t talk about her like that.” The words came out low and hard.
Silence settled over the room in one heavy drop. The lads went still. Even the bag in the corner seemed to stop moving.
It should have embarrassed me, how quickly it happened, how completely. One minute they were talking shite, and the next I was standing there, ready to belt the shite out of them for putting her in their mouths. I wasn’t sure I could explain it.
The boys exchanged glances.
Finn kept his voice careful when he said, “Don’t think she needs you fighting her battles for her, lad.”
He was trying to bring the room back down, and that only made the truth of it sting more.
She did not need me.
For some reason, I still wanted the right to decide who looked at her and how.
Rafe cleared his throat. “Yeah, she’s got enough fight in her now.”
“Yeah,” Breezy added, still looking out the window. “Rua never had the stones to stand up for herself before.”
That landed closer to the truth than the rest of their shite, and it made something settle in me with cold certainty.
I glared down at the girl masquerading as my sister. “That’s not Rua.”
The laughter faded, replaced by a tension I could feel rather than see. The silence that followed pressed the air out of the room, stifling the rustle of crisp packets and freezing the joint mid-pass.
“Christ,” Rafe said, unease clear in his voice, “no more weed for you, my friend.”
Breezy laughed, but it sounded forced. “You do realize Body Snatchers is just a movie, lad.”
Only Finn remained quiet, turning back to study the girl in the courtyard with narrowed eyes, like he was actually contemplating the impossible. For a moment I thought I might have an ally in this.
Then his nose wrinkled, a signal of dismissal. He saw but did not see.
I hated even more that none of them seemed to understand the one thing that mattered.
She was not Rua.
I glared down at her as she laughed at something Nuala said as they stood and walked away. The sound drifted up on the fall breeze, and every note of it felt wrong. A beautiful forgery.
She was an irritation. A lie in my house. A problem to solve.
But I knew exactly how to handle irritations.
I kept watching her with my teeth grinding together and my thoughts already moving ahead to how I was going to corner her next.
I tracked her retreat, the gaze snagging on the defiant swing of her hips under all that black.
Inside me, something dark stirred awake, pacing behind my ribs.
She was in my house. She had Rua’s face. She had the nerve to stand in front of me, lie to me.
Whatever she was hiding had become mine to uncover.
Let’s see how long you last, imposter.