18. Liath #2
“No,” she said, and the word snagged in her throat like it had caught on something sharp. Her gaze moved, just for a moment, barely a flicker, past my shoulder. Small enough that I might have missed it if I hadn’t been watching her so closely.
I followed her gaze toward the far end of the courtyard where Finn sat among Lorcan’s usual crowd.
My breath caught.
Lorcan was already watching me. He always seemed to be lately.
There was nothing soft in the way he looked at me, only that hard, knowing stillness.
I tore my eyes away and fixed them on the path, telling myself whatever had sparked between us before was nothing. Nothing I couldn’t smother.
I had managed to avoid him since the party, getting lifts with Nuala instead of the Lasair town car. Eating dinner in my room. I just had to keep avoiding him until I’d completed my mission.
By the archway, a cluster of girls had gone quiet to watch us pass, their whispers not even making a pretense of discretion anymore.
Nuala’s expression sharpened. “Take a picture,” she snapped. “It’ll last longer.”
The cluster of girls pulled back like a tide going out, their whispers dying mid-breath, two of them suddenly finding something very interesting to look at on the ground. One had the grace to look faintly ashamed.
I stared at Nuala, something unexpected and warm moving through me. Nobody had done that for me in a long time. I’d forgotten what it felt like.
She bumped her shoulder lightly against mine, and when she looked back at me, her face had softened into something else entirely. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not leaving you to deal with those vultures alone.”
Something in my chest unknotted. Just a little.
We moved through an archway, the neighboring courtyard opening up.
Elias was up ahead, which was already enough to make me slow. But it was the girl beside him that stopped me completely.
She was clinging to the front of his blazer with both fists, her pale hair, almost white in the flat morning light, falling loose around a face that was still pretty under the wreckage of it, despite her mascara tracking down past her cheekbones in dark smudges.
Her mouth was shaking. Her voice kept pitching too loud and then dropping, snagging on whatever she was trying to say, and there was something in the whiteness of her knuckles, the desperate twist of her fingers in the fabric, that made my stomach pull tight and keep pulling.
I didn’t know her. But I knew what she looked like. She looked like someone begging out of desperation.
Nuala went rigid. The color left her face so fast it looked like something had reached inside her and wrung it out by hand. Her gaze locked on the girl and for one unguarded moment, something raw and terrified moved through her eyes before she pulled it back under.
I leaned closer. “Who is she?”
“Bridgit.” The words scraped out of her, thin and horrified. “Jesus Christ. My sister.”
I looked again. Now that I knew, I could see the resemblance, the same pale skin, the same almost-white hair, though Bridgit’s face still held the soft roundness of someone a year or two younger.
Pretty in a rounder, less finished way than Nuala.
Cute-pretty rather than the clean severity of Nuala’s beauty.
Elias had one hand clamped around her elbow. Not steadying, but restraining, the way you’d grip a problem you were trying to manage rather than a person you were trying to hold. His face barely moved when he said flatly, “Don’t make a scene.”
The coldness of it turned my stomach.
Bridgit went still so abruptly it felt wrong. Like panic had reached inside her and locked every joint.
“Fuck,” Nuala breathed. She was already moving, crossing the grass at something close to a run.
“Hey, asshole.” Her voice cracked across the courtyard. “Get away from my sister.”
She shouldered herself between Elias and Bridgit in one clean movement and gathered her sister against her side with a fierce protectiveness.
“Come on, B,” she murmured to her sister. “You don’t need him.”
Bridgit sagged into her, her desperation breaking apart into sobs.
Nuala shot Elias one look, saturated with disgust. Then she turned and steered her sister away without another word.
Elias watched them go, rolling his shoulders like he was brushing them off like dirt. He didn’t look embarrassed. He didn’t look like he cared at all that he’d made someone cry.
“Bitches be hysterical,” he said to no one in particular.
“I’ve got to take her home,” Nuala said to me as they passed, her expression caught somewhere between fierce and apologetic. “Sorry.”
I nodded and watched her walk away, my throat tightening.
Because I was left standing there alone.
Nearby, a few students were still watching Elias. “Another notch on his bedpost,” someone said, and someone else laughed, low and ugly.
For once, they weren’t looking at me.
Until Elias saw me, and the whispers sharpened.
The grin on his face came first, slow and deliberate. He pushed back his floppy hair, brushed down his front, and started toward me with that particular loose-limbed stride of his.
I looked behind me.
Lorcan was still there, holding court at the far end of the courtyard, his three friends and a small group of hangers-on arranged around him like a small kingdom. The distance between us felt suddenly very thin.
I was stuck between the two boys I needed to avoid. But it wasn’t a difficult calculation.
I turned on my heel and walked back the way I’d come, straight toward Lorcan’s end of the courtyard, because for some stupid reason, he felt safer. I kept my pace even, my chin level, and I only glanced back once.
Elias had rounded the archway between courtyards. He’d stopped at the edge of it, one hand braced on the stone, and he wasn’t looking at me anymore. His eyes had gone to Lorcan, and something had shifted in his expression that made me glad I’d put distance between us.
For the moment, I was safe from him.
I faced forward.
Lorcan and his friends were all looking at me.
Shit. Head down. Walk faster. I pulled my bag tight against my chest, both arms crossed over it like that might do something useful, and I fixed my eyes on the path and willed myself invisible. There were maybe twenty feet between us. Fifteen. Ten.
“Rua,” Lorcan called out, his deep voice making my tummy flip.
It surprised me, the way he said it. Not sharp. Not mocking. Just my name in his mouth.
I didn’t pause to acknowledge him. I didn’t look up. I counted the cobblestones instead.
“Rua. Wait.”
I won’t. I can’t. Every time I looked at him, I could feel his fingers inside me and my stupid body ached.
My nerves were already scraped raw, too much exposure, too many eyes, and I was supposed to be keeping my head down.
I was supposed to be the girl nobody looked at twice, and instead, I had spent the last few days being the girl everybody looked at, and I did not have anything left for whatever this was.
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.