4. Lorcan
LORCAN
The damage wasn’t bad.
I stripped off my shirt in front of my bathroom mirror, the black marble cold under my palms where I’d braced against the sink. Moving carefully, already feeling the stiffness setting in, I worked in the silver-framed mirror without looking at my own face. There was nothing useful in that.
Shoulders first. A long welt was already purpling, the skin raised but intact. The cut along my right shoulder blade was shallow. I pressed a cloth to it until it stopped bleeding, before I cleaned it with antiseptic and bandaged it. The bruising across my ribs would take care of itself.
There was another open graze oozing out in the center of my back.
But I couldn’t reach it.
I stood there with the cloth in one hand, then the other, my arm cranked at the wrong angle as it sat frustratingly out of reach. I had no one in this house that I trusted to ask for help.
For a moment I just stood there as it stung.
Then I threw the cloth into the sink and walked out.
My bedroom was dark and quiet, the navy walls and the familiar tidiness of it settling around me. Decanter on the chest. Books stacked on the nightstand, four of them, spines aligned. Everything in its place. He’d taught me that much, at least.
My eyes went straight to the violin case in the corner, my ma’s violin, dark leather worn soft at the corners, brass catches tarnished.
My hand had actually lifted before I registered the movement.
I pulled it back at the familiar spike of disgust. Wanting comfort was a sign of weakness.
I turned my back on the case and crossed to the wardrobe for a clean shirt.
The girl came back to mind while I was shrugging the shirt on, lips pressing together at the useless flares of pain from my back. She was not a deliberate thought. She was just suddenly there, the way a splinter makes itself known even after you thought you’d dealt with it.
Her face, a breath from mine in the hallway. The feel of her soft body under my fingers. The way she’d met my eyes without lowering her lashes the way Rua did, half invitation, half self-protection.
That’s enough, Lorcan.
I fixed the collar in the mirror and neatly folded up the sleeves to my elbows.
She’d looked at me like she was studying me. Not the way Rua had looked at me, that helpless hunger that used to make my skin crawl. This girl had looked at me like she saw right through me and took pity on what she found.
Nobody meeting me for the first time looked at me like that.
They looked at me the way people looked at a Lasair. At Alistair Lasair’s son. Calculation, wariness, eager deference. All of it about what I represented.
Either Rua had changed in some fundamental way that no experimental therapy adequately explained. Or this girl wasn’t Rua at all.
She’d dared to stand in front of me and bank on the fact that I was too distracted or too stupid to look closely enough.
My gaze caught on the vent high on the wall, covered with a square of dark cardboard I’d taped over it last year when I’d finally worked out what Rua was doing with her camera up on her desk at three in the morning. I dragged my own chair across and stepped up.
Standing at eye level with the covered vent, I felt a spike of self-contempt. I was aware of exactly what this looked like. Rua’s compulsion and my current position were nothing alike. This was about proof. Not curiosity. I was gathering information, and that was not the same thing.
I didn’t disturb the cover; I just placed my ear at the grate.
There were floorboards creaking. A slow movement around the room. The soft displacement of fabric.
No voice, no phone call, no muttered conversation with whoever had sent her here. Nothing useful.
The knock on my door jerked me off the thought.
I stepped down too fast. My back registered its objection. Shame came with it, as if I’d been caught.
The door opened and Mervyn stepped in.
“Master Lorcan.” He gave me a slight incline of the head. “Your father is waiting downstairs.”
Waiting. Not asking.
I flexed my hands. “Thank you, Mervyn. I’ll be right down.”
He withdrew and the door clicked shut.
I glared once more at the vent, then straightened the chair. Then I buttoned up my shirt over the marks my father had left.
Before I left the safety of my room, I checked my reflection in the dark glass of the window, the Irish twilight purple against the trees beyond.
The face looking back at me had been arranged into something that passed for composure.
Downstairs, my father would be waiting at the head of the table with something dark in his glass and his mind already made up about the evening. Across from me, the girl who called herself Rua would sit and decide how much of herself to give away.
One of them I already knew how to survive.
The other one I intended to take apart before dessert.
The dining room was already lit when I arrived.
Candles down the length of the table, silver catching their light, the polished wood floors so dark it looked like the impenetrable surface of a black pool. The chandelier above it all cast everything in a glow that should have felt warm but didn’t.
I paused at the threshold, my back pulling tight across the shoulders as I straightened. Entering wrong would be noticed.
Alistair sat at the head of the table, one hand resting on the stem of his wineglass, shoulders relaxed. No trace of the afternoon in his face.
The sight of it turned my gut.
I crossed to my chair and sat. The movement sent pain flaring white across my back, and I hid it behind a reach for my napkin, smoothing it across my lap while I waited for my face to settle. I set my hands on my knees under the table and kept them still.
“You’re moving carefully this evening.” Alistair lifted his wineglass and took a slow sip. “I trust you’re not coming down with something.”
“I’m fine.” I reached for the water glass. “Thank you.”
He watched me for a moment. Then he set his empty glass down and waved at the decanter.
“Pour.”
It was not a question. I took the decanter and leaned across the table, the movement pulling the damaged skin taut across my ribs, and filled his glass with the steadiness I’d spent years practicing.
Then I filled my own glass before setting the decanter back down without a sound.
Dinner arrived. Mervyn and the kitchen girl moved around the table in practiced silence, setting plates, adjusting silverware. Alistair waited until they withdrew before he spoke again.
“I’ll be leaving for Moscow after dinner.” He gestured toward the lamb at the center of the table. “Carve.”
I picked up the carving knife and fork and leaned across the table. My back registered the reach with a sharp hot protest and I breathed through it, keeping my knife strokes steady and even while he talked.
“I expect the usual standard in my absence. Lessons, appointments, meals at the correct hours.”
“Of course.” I set a plate in front of him, portions arranged the way he preferred.
“I’ve given Mervyn his instructions.” He studied the plate briefly, then looked up. “I would prefer not to return to the kind of disruption this household tends to generate when left to its own devices.”
I kept my head down. “Yes, Father.”
“Butter my roll.”
I reached for it. My knife caught the edge of the plate as I lifted it, a slight rattle, and the pain across my ribs flared sharp enough that I had to breathe through it.
Alistair watched me, no doubt filing away every flinch as yet another sign that his only son was weak. A complete disappointment.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said while I buttered, “about the gift of clarity. The way direct feedback sharpens a man’s focus considerably.” He took a slow sip of wine. “I find that to be true in business. Equally true at home.”
The butter knife was steady in my hand as I set the roll down on his side plate, a thin and level layer of butter on each side.
“I imagine you’ve found this afternoon’s lesson clarifying.”
“Yes, sir.” Nothing more. Anything else would invite another correction.
He studied me, like he was checking his work. Making sure his adjustment held.
Humiliation burned through me but I buried it. I made myself blank and unreadable until he nodded slightly and reached for his glass again.
“Good,” he said. “Then we understand each other.”
We sat in silence for a moment, deliberate and unhurried. Then, without altering his tone at all, he said, “Rua will be joining us shortly.”
My attention sharpened.
I kept my voice even. “I didn’t know she was coming home.”
Alistair lifted up his wineglass and paused. The kind of pause Alistair made when he was selecting an answer.
“Her return was always planned,” he said and took a slow sip.
I picked up my glass and said nothing, but I filed it away. Rua’s return had surprised him too.
Suspicion coiled in me and my focus was pulled toward the door. My fingers curled tight around my glass stem.
She was becoming an unwanted, irritating nuisance. I would have to deal with it.
My back throbbed with every breath. My father sat six feet to my left, his face showing nothing of the afternoon. And somewhere on the other side of the door, the girl claiming to be my sister was about to walk in and sit across from me.
I set my jaw and took a controlled breath.
The door opened.
My attention snapped to her as she entered, not a trace of hesitation on her face.
The clothes were Rua’s. The fit wasn’t. The black top stretched tight across her chest in a way that it never did on Rua. The fabric strained at the buttons not because she’d planned it, but because the body beneath the clothes was suddenly impossible to ignore.
She wore no thick liner. No dark-red mouth. No brittle effort to look harder than she was. Without all that makeup, she looked younger, fresher, more alive.
The difference unsettled me because it made her look less like the ghost of the sister I remembered and more like a stranger wearing her face.