The Impostor's Twisted Beauty

1. Lorcan

LORCAN

Ikept my head down as I stood in the center of my father’s study, disgust curling hot in my gut. Stupid. I’d let him catch me. Whatever punishment coming was my own fault.

“You are so close,” Alistair said, his voice low and cold. “So close to being exactly what this family needs.”

Even the stuffed animal heads staring down from the walls seemed to judge me.

“Then you reach for that damned instrument.” He stepped closer. “Your mother was weak, but I won’t tolerate that in my heir.”

I flinched at his comment about her. But I forced myself to remain still. I knew better than to defend her. To defend myself.

I kept my face blank and fixated on the small details in the room to hold myself steady. The smell of cigar smoke and absinthe. The ornate pattern in the Persian rug beneath my shoes.

The wicked glint of the silver-handled cane that he held in his hand.

“Stand properly.” He jabbed my shoulder with the cane tip, engraved in the shape of a hound’s head, dark stains soaked into the depths of its fur. “If you insist on disappointing me, you’ll do it without slouching.”

He circled me slowly, a sneer on his face as if he were inspecting something defective.

The hair on the back of my neck lifted as I tracked his footfalls as he positioned himself behind me.

I braced without appearing to brace.

The first strike landed across my back.

One.

Pain flashed hot and sharp, and I swallowed my cry, my knees locking to keep me upright, arm muscles straining against the urge to defend myself.

Two.

The knobs of the hound’s head caught my ribs with brutal precision.

I let part of myself step away from the pain. That was the only way through it. The green and wood-paneled walls dulled at the edges. The text on the spines of his book collection of first editions blurred.

Three.

Alistair kept talking between blows, his voice cold and disgusted. “Scraping at the air like a soft little eejit. Do you know how ridiculous you looked?”

I thought I was being smart by fingering the strings without using the bow. But the music resonating in my head was so lovely I lost myself in it.

Four.

A black shirt would be safest tomorrow, something thick enough that no one would notice if my bandages bled through.

The grandfather clock ticked from its corner. The smell of smoke and absinthe turned nauseating. Sweat gathered under my shirt. I kept my eyes on a fixed point ahead and clamped my jaw shut.

“I should’ve thrown your mother down the stairs when we found out she was pregnant. You’re a fucking embarrassment.”

Five.

Only when he returned the cane to its resting place did I allow myself to breathe, shallow gasps that tasted of copper and shame. I tried to contain the humiliation crawling up my spine, but it spread anyway, seeping through the cracks in my armor, mixing with the rage burning under my skin.

He turned and glared at me expectantly. “I’m losing patience, Lorcan. Purge any remaining weakness if you want to become my heir.”

I knew exactly what he wanted from me.

He wanted a son who could look beauty in the face and feel nothing. A son who could cut tenderness out of himself before anyone else noticed it had ever been there. A son who would inherit cruelty as cleanly as money, estate, and name.

There was already too much of that in me to pretend innocence.

I hated that there was a part of me that was still… too sensitive.

“Yes, sir.”

In the heavy silence, I took stock. My back burned. The skin had split in at least two places. But no ribs were broken. A tame punishment, thank God.

“Get out, boy. The sight of you disgusts me.”

The final insult skimmed over the surface, and I felt it, briefly, like a stone breaking water, but I let it sink, buried beneath the stillness I’d mastered.

“Thank you, sir.”

I turned and strode toward the door, moving as if nothing hurt. Not too fast. He hated when I fled. But I didn’t linger either.

I flung open the door of his study with his disappointment still ringing louder than the throb in my back.

I didn’t see her until I slammed right into her.

The impact knocked the wind from us both, her breath catching in a soft gasp as she stumbled back.

I smelled her before I registered who she was, black violets and sweet skin that cut clean through the absinthe and humiliation still clinging to me.

My hand closed around her waist on instinct and I hauled her back against me before she could fall.

Her body hit mine hard, all soft heat and startled breath, and suddenly there was nowhere to look that was not her. Our faces hovered a breath apart, close enough that her exhale brushed my mouth.

Her hand landed flat on my chest, right over my heartbeat, and the contact sent a hard kick through me that had no business being there.

For one jagged second, I thought Rua was back. The memory of her hit hard and wrong, all her pathetic desperation and grabbing hands, all her frantic need that used to crawl over my skin and leave me feeling dirtied by it.

But the girl in my arms held herself still. Watching me.

A hard, ugly tightness drew low in my gut. My hand stayed at her waist longer than it should have.

Her gaze slid past my shoulder to the closed study door behind me, and something in her expression softened in a way that made my skin pull tight. Her eyes traveled back to my face and held me there.

This girl looked at me as if she understood exactly what had happened in that room.

She looked at me as if she could see the bruises beneath my clothes.

She looked at me as if I were breakable.

Worse, she looked at me as if she wanted to soothe it.

My whole body locked. Shame flared hot and vicious through my chest. I would have taken contempt, fear, even disgust over that.

She pitied me.

Rua had never looked at me with pity.

She had looked at me as if I were the only one in that house who understood what it meant to be trapped in it. Like I knew the shape of her suffering because I carried my own version of it under my skin.

There had always been something feverish in the way Rua watched me, something needy and warped and far too intimate for what we were.

I studied this girl’s face.

The resemblance hit hard enough to jar me for a second. The same plump mouth. The same general shape to her features. Enough of Rua to unsettle me. More than enough of someone else to hold me there.

Rua’s gray eyes had always looked washed out, glassy and half-lost even when she was staring straight at me.

These eyes were sharp, alert, and far too alive.

Her skin held a faint warmth under it, a soft rosiness through her cheeks that made her look like she spent time with her face turned to the sun.

Rua had always looked as if she belonged to ghosts and lived in shadows. This girl looked like she’d fight the dark on principle.

My gaze kept going, slow and deliberate, to the hand she still had flattened on my chest, then over the lines of her body pressed against mine.

She was all wrong for Rua and somehow even worse for me.

She was wearing Rua’s dreary black clothes, as if she were on her way to a Victorian funeral. But the material hugged this girl’s curves rather than hanging off her.

My fingers dug into her hip, the feeling of her flesh, softer than Rua’s, making something tighten in my lower belly.

My heart kicked hard against her palm. She must have felt it, and the thought made something hot and violent twist low in my gut.

My eyes snapped back to her face.

This is not Rua.

Shame burned off fast. Curiosity moved in after it, colder and meaner. If someone had put a stranger in Rua’s skin and sent her into my house, I wanted to know why.

I tightened my hold on her in case she decided to run.

“Who the fuck are you?”