19. Liath
LIATH
Iwoke with the scent of Lorcan in my nose, musk and woodsmoke and that low, mournful violin curling behind my eyes like something that had been there for years.
He’d been in my bedroom while I slept.
The room was still dark, the kind of thick gray dark that meant early morning, the hour before the house stirred.
My pulse thudded against my throat. My skin felt strange, a prickling at the nape of my neck like someone had just passed very close, like the air had been disturbed and hadn’t quite settled.
I lay very still and made myself breathe and tried not to think about what it meant that he’d stood here in the dark and watched me and I hadn’t woken up. Hadn’t felt it. Or had felt it, somewhere beneath consciousness, and simply hadn’t been able to make myself surface.
I searched Rua’s room. Every shadow, every corner, looking for evidence of his nighttime visit. Something he moved, something left behind, or something taken.
Nothing seemed out of place.
Until I spotted the wall panel behind my bed sitting askew.
That wasn’t like that yesterday.
I crossed to it and curled my fingers around the edge of the panel, pulling. It resisted at first, swollen in its frame, and then came loose with a soft crack that seemed very loud in the empty room. I set it aside against the wall and crouched down to peer into the gap.
I chewed my lip and reached in.
Sharp pain shot through my fingertip. I jerked my hand back and watched a single bead of blood well up, dark and slow.
More carefully this time, I reached in again, holding my phone flashlight up.
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.”
I moved before I decided to.
He saw me coming and dodged, springing back off the bench with a laugh.
I lunged again, reckless now, shame burning through my chest and behind my eyes.
We collided and went down hard onto the grass.
We rolled, his laughter pressing close against my ear, and I ended up on top of him with my thighs bracketing his hips and my breath coming in ragged pulls and the whole school watching.
His eyes met mine from underneath me. He wasn’t laughing anymore.
For one suspended, terrible second, the performance dropped completely. There was nothing in his expression but something raw and unguarded, something that looked almost like hunger stripped of cruelty, and it was directed entirely at me.
I forgot, for that second, that the whole school was watching. It was just my body on top of his.
I think he did too. Then it was gone, buried so fast under the smirk that I almost doubted I’d seen it, and he kept reading.
He flipped us.
One smooth, practiced movement and suddenly he was above me, his hips pinning mine to the cold ground, one hand holding the page out of my reach while the other pressed flat against my wrist.
He lowered his head slowly, deliberately, until his lips brushed the shell of my ear. “You don’t get to pretend you don’t want me.”
He pulled back just enough to look at me, a cruel, justified look in his eyes.
Then realization hit, cold and clear underneath all the shame and the heat and the noise of the crowd.
This wasn’t just hatred. Wasn’t just cruelty.
This was punishment for the courtyard. For walking past him with my chin up and my eyes forward while his friends laughed. For making him look like someone a girl could ignore.
“I imagine what his perfect cock would taste like.”
I fought him. I kept fighting him. My face blazed and my thighs were pressed together and shame sang through my bloodstream like something poisonous, but underneath it, underneath all of it, an unwanted heat burned low in my belly and I hated it, hated him, hated the way my body had apparently decided to have its own opinion about this entirely separate from my own.
The crowd had gone quiet, everyone holding their breath.
“What it would feel like stretching my needy—”
I got a hand free and seized the page.
Lorcan let me have it, which told me everything.
I shoved him off and rolled upright and scrambled to my feet, grass stains on my dress and my hair falling loose and my cheeks burning so hot I thought the air around me might scorch. I crushed the page in both fists.
“That’s a photocopy, sis.”
He was still on the grass, propped back on his elbows, completely at ease, watching me with those pale eyes that gave nothing away and took everything in. Then, slowly, deliberately, he grabbed himself through his trousers and thrust his hips up at the empty air.
“Oh, Lorcan,” he moaned, and the impression of my voice, of Rua’s voice, was close enough to make my stomach heave. “Harder, big brother, harder—”
The laughter that erupted was the loud, ugly kind. It crashed over me in a wave. Someone was pointing at me. Someone else had their phone out.
My legs moved on their own.
I turned and broke into a run, the laughter chasing me across the courtyard and through the archway and out into the corridor beyond, and I told myself as I ran that he was cruel.
That any softness I’d glimpsed in him was a mask he put on and took off at will.
That the heat in my belly was just biology, just the body’s stupid animal response to proximity and danger and it meant nothing.
I told myself all of that. My eyes were burning. I kept running.
I locked my bedroom door that night. Wedged a chair under the handle. Lay in the dark and listened to the silence until I was sure of it.
I still woke to his scent.
Musk and woodsmoke and that low, mournful violin threading through the dark behind my eyes. I knew before I opened them that he’d been here again. That the locked door and the chair had meant nothing to him. That whatever walls I built, he already knew the way through them.
The journal page was pinned to the pillow beside me.
The original, edges jagged and torn from a diary. Across it, in red ink, was his handwriting:
Never ignore me again.
Or I’ll ruin you.
I lay there in the gray morning light with his words an inch from my face and his scent still warm in the room around me, and I understood with a settling coldness that I was not dealing with wounded pride or a boy throwing his weight around.
I was dealing with someone who had decided I belonged to him.