25. Elle
ELLE
I’ve managed four snappy comebacks to Fintan’s remark last night by the time I get in the shower. Too bad none of them will matter now. I’ve never been that quick on my feet. I like to stew and process and think about things. This doesn’t win arguments.
The hot water is bliss, and I stand under it longer than it takes to wash myself.
The steam fills the room, blurring the edges of the marble and gold, but it can’t blur the memory of Fintan’s heavy stare.
He’s the one who watches, the one who cleans, the one who waits.
It’s a different kind of trap than Lorcan’s blunt force.
I turn the handle, cutting the flow. The silence is immediate and oppressive. I wrap myself in a towel and step out into the bedroom.
My heart skips when the bedroom door opens. I clutch the towel to my chest, expecting Fintan and his quiet observations. Instead, it’s Lorcan.
He stops three feet inside the room. My breath hitches. His face is a roadmap of violence. One eye is swollen, a dark, angry purple-black. A butterfly bandage sits across his brow, and his lip is split wide. He looks like he’s been through a meat grinder.
“What happened to you?” I ask, the words out before I can stop them.
“I had a busy night,” he says.
“Since when do you allow yourself to be beaten half to death?”
“Hardly half to death. I’m fine. But since last night. I know, Elle. I know what happened to you.”
The air in my lungs vanishes, replaced by a cold, sharp panic that makes my skin prickle. My grip on the towel tightens until my knuckles ache. The world tilts, the expensive bedroom blurring because of my tears.
“You don’t know anything,” I whisper.
“Pembrooke Academy,” he says, the name landing like a gunshot. “Harry Thompson. I know the settlement, Elle. I know about the child you weren’t allowed to keep.”
I stumble back until my back hits the bathroom door.
The shame I’ve spent a decade burying rushes up, thick, suffocating.
It isn’t just a secret anymore; it’s a weapon in the hands of a man who breaks things for a living.
My parents’ faces flash in my mind—the coldness, the way they looked at me like I was a stain on their heritage.
“How?” I breathe, my eyes searching his battered face. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Because you’re mine,” he growls. “And everyone who hurt you is going to pay for it in ways they can’t imagine.”
He doesn’t look at me with pity. He looks at me with a lethal possession that is more terrifying than the truth itself.
“Please drop it,” I say, shaking my head. “I can’t do this. Not now. Not with you.”
“I’m not dropping a fucking thing,” Lorcan states.
He takes a step toward me despite the way he winces with the movement.
“I am going to burn that world down, Elle. I am going to find every person who looked the other way while you were being destroyed, and I am going to take every one of them apart, piece by piece, and I am going to do it slowly. Their houses, their reputations, their families. I am going to ruin them the way they ruined you, and I am going to make them beg me for the mercy they never gave. Then, when there’s nothing left of them to burn, there will be nothing left of them to grieve. ”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I sob, the towel slipping an inch as my hands shake. “It was years ago. I’m nobody. Please, Lorcan. Don’t make me live it again.”
“You never stopped living it.” He reaches out, his thumb dragging across my lower lip, his touch surprisingly light for a man who looks like he just crawled out of a cage fight. “You carry it in every breath. I’m not going to let you carry it alone.”
He pulls me into him, his chest hard and smelling of antiseptic and blood. I want to fight him, but my strength is gone.
I collapse against him, my forehead resting on the cool cotton of his shirt. I wait for the judgement to come, for the words that will tell me I was a stupid idiot who brought this on herself. Those words are etched into my soul, spoken by my father in a voice that held no room for mercy.
“They threw me away,” I whisper into his chest. “Like I was nothing.”
“They were wrong.” His arms wrap around me, too tight. It isn’t a soft comfort. It’s the heavy, crushing weight of a promise. “You are everything, and I’m going to make sure they never forget it.”
I pull back just enough to look at his ruined face. The purple swelling around his eye makes him look like a monster, but the way he sees me—it’s the first time in ten years I haven’t felt invisible.
“Why do you care?” I ask, my voice cracking. “I’m just the woman who walked through the wrong door.”
“It was the right door, Elle. When will you stop fighting it and see?”
His tone is too earnest, and it makes me feel like clawing his eyes out to finish the job whoever started on his face last night.
“Stop it! Just stop it! None of this makes any sense!” I beat my fists on his chest.
He takes the hits. He doesn’t grab my wrists or try to stop me. He stands there and absorbs every blow, and that makes me hit harder, because a man who fights back is easier to hate than a man who lets you fall apart against him.
“Stop letting me hit you,” I cry, my fists losing their force. “Stop it.”
“No.”
“You’re infuriating.” I press my forehead to his chest again and breathe through the worst of it, the ragged, tearing crying that has no dignity and no end in sight. His arms come back around me, that same crushing weight, and I let them.
“They paid him,” I say, my voice muffled against his shirt.
“Did you know that part? They sat across a table from the man who did what he did to me, and they wrote him a cheque and told him to go keep his mouth shut and to live his life. They told me I needed to be grateful they handled it quietly. That I needed to understand the position I’d put them in. ”
Lorcan says nothing.
“My mother held my hand in the clinic and cried. I thought she was crying for me.” I laugh.
It’s stripped bare. All the way down to my shattered soul.
“She was crying for herself. For what it would do to their reputation. For the inconvenience of having a daughter who’d been seduced by a man she was supposed to trust.”
Lorcan’s arms tighten around me.
“She never asked me if I was alright. Not once. Not in the clinic. Not on the drive home. Not in the weeks after, when I couldn’t sleep, and I’d hear them talking in low voices about damage control and discretion and whether the Johnson-Smythes had heard anything.” I breathe in. “Not once.”
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
“They threw me out. Told me I was no longer their daughter.”
Lorcan’s hand comes up to the back of my head, his palm warm and still. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Nothing!” I shriek. “Nothing! There is nothing to do! Don’t you get it? They threw me out like that fucking leftover chicken.”
“Clark ate the rest of the chicken,” he mutters.
It is the most absurd thing he could’ve said, and it shocks me out of my anger. “Oh, and the bread?”
“Also the wine you bought. He said it tasted like vinegar.”
“Lorcan…” I snort out a noise that’s half laugh, half sob. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” he asks, his voice rough around the edges, stripped of its coldness.
“Don’t make me laugh. Not right now. It isn’t fair.”
“Nothing about any of this is fair.”
I pull back and wipe my face with the back of my hand. My towel is barely hanging on. I yank it back into place and step away from him, needing the distance to remember how to breathe without him. He lets me go. He doesn’t chase the space I put between us.
I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the carpet.
Lorcan stays where he is. He doesn’t pace. He doesn’t fill the silence with threats or demands. He just stands there, battered and still, and stares at me like I’m a problem he’s already solved and is waiting for me to catch up.
“It would’ve been easier if you had told me,” he says.
“Don’t make this my fault,” I mutter.
“I’m not.” He crosses to me and kneels at my feet, his hands on my knees. “I’m sorry that I blamed you for how I felt yesterday. That was unfair, and it’s a tactic I’ve used for I can’t even remember how long now. It’s easier than dealing with my own shit.”
I stare at him, and his sincerity crushes me. I reach out and cup his cheek, careful of the damage beneath my palm. His skin is hot, bruised, but he doesn’t flinch.
“You apologised,” I say softly.
“Don’t make it weird,” he mutters.
“Lorcan Keane said sorry. I’m making it as weird as I want.”
His eyes search mine, and I let him look because I’m too tired to build walls right now. My soul aches from tearing them down.
“I can’t give you what you asked for last night,” he says, his voice careful. “I don’t know how. I’m not sure that part of me exists.”
“I know,” I say quietly. “I get it.”
“But I can give you this.” His hand comes up and covers mine against his cheek.
“I can give you the truth. I can give you the knowledge that nobody touches you without going through me first. That includes your parents, Thompson, and every spineless prick who looked the other way while you were drowning.”
“It’s not enough.”
“I know. But you didn’t let me finish.” He stays on his knees in front of me, which is a sight I don’t think I’ll ever fully process.
Lorcan Keane, battered and bleeding and still somehow the most powerful man I’ve ever known, kneeling at my feet as if it costs him nothing.
It costs him everything. I can see that in his eyes.
“I’m going to learn,” he says. “I’m not promising you something I can’t deliver.
I’m not going to tell you I’ll be good at it, or that I won’t fuck it up, because I will.
Repeatedly. Probably spectacularly.” His thumb traces a small circle on my knee.
“But I’m going to try, Elle, because of you.
You can think that I’m gaslighting you again, but it isn’t that. Not this time.”
The words settle in me like an irreversible fact.
I don’t say anything. I can’t. Not yet. My throat is too tight, and the part of me that has been waiting for someone to say something close to that is currently taking up all the available space in my body.
I look down at his hands on my knees. His knuckles are raw, the skin split and dark with bruising.
“Promise me you won’t punish yourself again if it doesn’t work out.”
“It will work out, one way or another, Elle, because whether I can get out of my own way for you or not, you are never leaving me. Do you understand that?”
“Still locked up?”
“For now.”
It’s all I’m going to get from him.
He grips my chin. “Tell me you understand.”
“I understand,” I say.
He holds my gaze for a long moment, but I drop it first. I’m too tired for that. Too hollowed out and raw to play the game of who blinks first.
He nods once, releases my chin, and stands with a pained grunt that makes me smile. “Sore?”
“I’m fine,” he grits out. “Get dressed. You have a day of doing absolutely fuck all while the world still turns around you, Elle.”
He leaves on that parting shot, but I give it to him. This time.