2. Liath
LIATH
“Who the fuck are you?”
I faltered. My practiced response dissolved on my tongue, the whole careful architecture of my disguise collapsing for one raw second.
His eyes stayed fixed on my face and his grip around me tightened as if he already knew.
I pulled Rua back around me like armor and rolled my eyes. “Did you forget your own sister, Lorcan?”
His mouth stilled, hard and flat. His gaze narrowed with cold, immediate focus.
I didn’t see the blade until it was already at my throat.
The cold flat of it pressed into the hollow under my jaw.
My whole body locked, every muscle seizing at once in a helpless instinct.
“Lie to me again,” he said, “and I’ll open your vein.”
The edge pressed in. The sting was immediate and sharp and warmth began to track down my throat.
Oh my God. He cut me.
My breath went shallow. Every instinct screamed to push him away and every functioning part of my brain screamed back that I absolutely could not.
Deargán had stripped my mind back, manipulated me and lied to me. But he had never once put a blade to my skin. He never once hurt me.
Lorcan would open my throat in this hallway and step over me on his way to dinner. The certainty of it was immediate and animal and total.
I had no one who could save me from this. Not Deargán. Not anyone.
He leaned in closer.
“Who. Are. You?”
My mouth opened. Closed.
Tell the truth and Deargán’s plan collapsed. I’d be dead by morning in a way that looked like an accident.
Lie again and this blade would nick my artery faster than I could scream. I’d be dead in the next ten seconds.
Warm blood tracked down the front of my neck as I fought to find a way out.
The study door opened.
The blade disappeared in one motion. Between one breath and the next, his hand was empty and his face had rearranged itself into something that gave absolutely nothing away. The only proof the knife had existed was the thin sting under my jaw and the warmth still moving underneath my collar.
A man filled the doorway.
His scent of wormwood and green anise hit me first, my synesthesia answering it immediately with a pipe organ, one note, low and resonant, pressing down through my chest.
He was almost as tall as Lorcan, broad through the shoulders, silver-haired and immaculate, not a strand out of place.
His face was deeply lined, the frown lines so carved in they looked structural, and his eyes were black and lightless.
He took up the doorway and the temperature in the hallway felt like it dropped by a few degrees.
His gaze moved over my face, his recognition calm and unsurprised.
“Rua.”
Beside me, Lorcan said nothing. His hands were loose at his sides, his face blanked out, and the quality of his stillness had shifted entirely. It was no longer predatory. It was contained.
Lorcan was dangerous. Alistair was the only thing that could put a leash on him.
Alistair gave Lorcan a brief look before his gaze returned to me.
He stepped aside. “Come inside.”
I had no choice.
I stepped inside his lair, glancing back over my shoulder.
Lorcan was in the narrowing gap before the door shut. His stare was fixed on me, dark and flat, the knife back in his hand. He dragged his tongue slowly along the stain of my blood on the blade’s handle, tasting me, leaving a red smear on his bottom lip, his eyes never leaving mine.
Something hot and sick rolled through me at once.
The Persian rug swallowed footsteps whole as I walked farther into Alistair’s study, large, dark-paneled, the air smelling of old paper and leather underneath his inescapable medicinal smell, soaked into the wood and the curtains and the very grain of the walls.
The organ note deepened with it, pressing harder against my sternum, no longer a single note but a sustained minor chord that never resolved.
The stuffed animal heads began at eye level and climbed the walls in rows above the shelving. Stags mostly, antlers spread wide, glass eyes catching the low firelight. Between them, smaller things: a fox, a hare, a bird with its wings pinned mid-spread, frozen in the middle of flight.
All of them watching.
Rua’s memory hit before I could brace for it, behind my eyes and under my sternum, already inside me before I knew it was coming.
A field. Late afternoon, the light going flat and gold. The smell of wet grass and something iron underneath it. A deer on the ground, its legs still moving like he was still trying to run, blood soaking through its soft fur.
His hand on my shoulder was heavy. His voice in my ear.
“Finish it, Rua.”
His hand stayed on my shoulder as I lifted the rifle back to it, even as my hands trembled, even as I screamed for it to stop in my head.
The memory let go.
I slammed back into my own body and found Alistair watching me with mild paternal warmth.
He was standing between me and the door, blocking my exit, inspecting me, his gaze moving over my face, my shoulders, the way I held myself.
I pulled Rua’s coldness over myself and stood still and let him look.
His eyes dropped to my throat, lingered there, then came back to my face unchanged.
He knew. He said nothing.
Whatever Lorcan did to me in this house wasn’t just known, it was permitted.
The cut throbbed.
He opened his arms and smiled.
Everything in me recoiled. My stomach turned over so hard it made my knees feel hollow, and a cold slick of dread broke under my skin.
But there was no room for that here, no room for instinct or disgust or the desperate urge to step back.
I dragged a smile over my mouth, false and brittle, and walked into his arms.
I counted the seconds by the throb under my jaw. I kept my spine straight and my hands loose at my sides. I breathed through my mouth, but the herbal bitterness still got in. Wormwood coated the back of my throat until it suffocated me.
His arms came around me and held me too close, his chest pressing into mine with a certainty that allowed no distance. He kept me there too long, long enough for my pulse to start knocking in my throat, long enough for each second to turn wrong.
His hand settled at the small of my back.
Too low.
It settled with the ease of long habit, with the certainty of a gesture that had never once been successfully resisted, and after a moment his thumb moved in one slow, deliberate arc.
Another memory slammed into me, pure sensation, full-body and immediate, the echo of being crushed against her adopted father, his hands moving across her body, her non-consent never spoken aloud because the body learns, eventually, not to protest.
The wrongness hit first. It crawled under my skin and turned my stomach. Underneath it sat a soft, numb terror, the kind that taught a girl to go still and call herself willing because naming the truth was worse.
Tangled up with both was something even sicker. Relief. The shameful easing of a body that had learned that it was safer if she just let him.
Oh God. Rua had learned to crave his notice, his approval, the small mercies of his hand lingering instead of striking. Something in her had begun turning toward him even while the rest of her recoiled, and the split between those truths made my throat burn.
Alistair’s body shifted, just slightly, and his hips pressed against me. I could not tell, could not let myself decide, whether it was accidental.
Disgust hit hot and immediate, clean where Rua’s memory had been sick and split. I wanted to shove him off me.
I caught the instinct before it showed and turned it into something smaller, a careful shift of posture, a slight adjustment of weight. I edged my hips back just enough to keep my body from meeting his groin, as if I were only settling into his hold.
Finally, he stepped back, held me at arm’s length as his gaze crawled all over me, his voice too low and intimate.
“Welcome home, my unlucky girl.”