6. Liath
LIATH
Isat up and had the rotten, disorienting jolt of remembering I now slept in a room that was basically a shrine to my enemy.
Damn Rua and her obsession with him.
Lorcan’s face was everywhere, staring back at me from every wall until the room felt smaller for it. I was trapped inside someone else’s fixation, and I could feel my thoughts snagging on him every time I tried to focus. I needed my head clear, and Rua’s obsession was making that impossible.
Something hot and stubborn moved through my chest.
I had to walk around in her skin all day. But I did not have to lie here all night staring at his annoyingly beautiful face.
I got up, throwing the covers off me, and pulled the first canvas off the wall, leaning it face down against the back of the wardrobe.
Then the next one.
I worked quickly and without ceremony, lifting each painting or sketch of Lorcan from its hook and carrying it to the wardrobe, packing them in efficiently, not looking at his accusing face as I went.
The last canvas went in and I closed the wardrobe door.
The room looked strange without them, the walls dotted with empty hooks, darker squares where the wallpaper had been protected from the light.
But I stood in the middle of it and felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn’t realized had been tight.
Right then. Better. I was done being passive. I needed to know the shape of this house, its rhythms, its weak points, who moved through it and when. Information was the only currency I had, and I was spending it faster than I was earning it.
I tied a robe on over my pj’s and slipped out of Rua’s room before the manor woke.
The corridors were dim, the kind of gray predawn light that made everything look like a photograph of itself. I moved quietly, barefoot on the worn runner, taking turns I hadn’t taken before, trying to build a map I could trust.
I wandered into a different wing of the manor, the runner beneath my feet giving way to something thicker. The walls turned darker, the proportions of the hallway widened, the cornices becoming even more elaborate, like this was a more important part of the house.
Portraits lined both walls now like an art gallery, oil paintings in heavy gilt frames, generations of Lasair men staring out with the same strong jaw and stern eyes.
I moved past them slowly, reading their names on the small brass titles, feeling like I was being watched.
Between the individual portraits, family paintings filled the gaps.
Each generation of Lasair men rendered with their wives and children, formal and unsmiling, the compositions all following the same logic: patriarch at the center, family arranged around him.
The wives were beautiful but none of them were smiling.
The children stood straight-backed, arms clasped against their sides like toy soldiers.
I slowed as I moved through the generations, a suffocating weight pressing against my ribs. This wasn’t just one cruel man and the son he was molding in his image.
It was a lineage. A structure. Generation after generation of men raised to power. How was I supposed to fight something that ancient, that ingrained, that thoroughly bred into the bones of this house?
I found Alistair’s family portrait, hung at the corridor’s midpoint. He’d had himself painted in what looked like a trophy room, stuffed animal heads looming out of the background in their glass-eyed rows, antlers and open mouths framing the composition.
Alistair sat proud in a high-backed chair that stopped just short of being a throne, one hand resting on the armrest. He was looking directly at the painter with an air of entitled arrogance.
Lorcan stood at his right side. He was already too tall for about eight, shoulders rigid, hands clasped hard in front of him, knuckles almost bloodless.
But it was his eyes that held me. They looked wrong in a face that young. Too hollow. Too watchful. Like whatever should have still been boyish in him had already been cut out of him.
I stared at the boy in the painting for longer than I should have.
Wait. Where was his mother? Where was Mrs. Lasair?
I took a step back and stared at the painting as a whole.
The border cut in tight on Alistair’s left side, closer than any of the others, the gilt edge sitting almost flush against the arm of Alistair’s chair. It was the kind of framing that didn’t happen by accident.
I leaned in.
On the back of the chair, just where the frame bit into the canvas, was a hand. A woman’s hand, pale and long-fingered, resting lightly on the dark wood of the chair back.
Lorcan’s mother.
That was all that remained of her. One hand on her husband’s chair, cropped out of her own family portrait with such precision that if you weren’t looking for it, you’d never know she’d been there at all.
He hadn’t destroyed her. He’d had her removed and reframed and made it look like she’d never existed.
I stood there longer than I should have, my mind tumbling over the mystery of Lorcan’s mother.
A clock ringing out like a warning somewhere in the house got me moving again.
At the end of the corridor was a door. Heavy oak, brass fittings, a hound’s head knocker that matched the cane. I stopped in front of it and stood there in the half-dark and felt the pull of it.
My hand moved to the handle before Rua’s memories splashed me like cold water.
This was Alistair’s private wing. His bedroom, his private library, his bathroom, his study, all of it behind this door and the ones that flanked it, all of it entirely off-limits.
The memory came with a rule that had never needed to be spoken aloud, the consequences of breaking it were understood by everyone in the house.
Unless invited, this wing is forbidden to anyone but the Master.
I yanked my hand away and stumbled back.
I imagined Alistair opening this door from the other side, finding me here, barefoot and trespassing in the darkness of the gray morning. I didn’t want to find out what kind of punishment awaited me if I were caught here.
I turned on my heel, walking fast, then practically jogging back the way I’d come, out this wing and down the corridors back to the main part of the house.
I took the next corner at something close to a run.
And collided with a wall of heat and muscle.
The impact knocked the breath out of me.
My hands flew up and landed flat against bare skin, warm and damp, and for one lurching second, all I registered in my vision was the tattoo ink under my palms, the hard solidity of him, and the sharp smell of sweat and woodsmoke and underneath it, rising fast and unwanted, the low sweep of violins.
I looked up and found Lorcan glaring down at me.
He’d caught me by the arm without thinking, steadying us both, and we stood there in the narrow corridor closer than was necessary.
His chest was still rising and falling hard from his workout, sweat beading his skin, gray sweatpants sitting low on his hips and nothing else.
Ink running down his arms, geometric and architectural, wolves tearing through a realistic heart on his right forearm.
The Celtic knotwork across his chest and throat resolving itself into ravens as my eyes adjusted, dark birds mid-flight, and below them, scrolled across a banner held in curved talons with a quote written across it.
Deep into that darkness peering.
There was an angel rendered in fine lines down his left rib cage, softer than anything else on him, a woman’s face barely visible at the wing’s edge.
The heat coming off his skin went straight through me in a wave. It slid low and hard through my body, tightening my stomach, turning my knees into jelly, sending a hot pulse between my legs so sudden and intense it made my breath catch. My nipples tightened under the thin cotton of my robe.
Damn it. Damn him. I couldn’t even pretend that this was all Rua. This was my body reacting to him in a way I could not excuse.
He turned slightly. Just a fraction. An angling of his shoulders toward the wall as if he were trying to hide something directly behind him.
“Sorry,” I heard myself say, my voice breathless and utterly mortifying. “I didn’t— I wasn’t—”
I spotted the mirror behind him, long glass set into the corridor wall, old and foxed at the edges, wide enough to catch us both.
His back was reflected in it.
It was covered in a crisscross of old scars, silvered and flat. Overlaying those were newer ones, still raised and angry. And then there were the newest ones from yesterday, a long welt across his shoulders, purpling at the edges. And a raw and angry gash across the center of his back.
I gasped.
Lorcan’s head turned and he clocked the mirror. Saw what I was seeing. Saw his own back reflected in the old glass.
He went very still.
Then he turned his back square to the mirror. Slowly. Deliberately. Giving me the full view, shoulders square, chin level, eyes on my face like he was daring me to keep looking.
I couldn’t tear my eyes off his back, at the scars crossed and recrossed over each other in layers, years of hurt laid down, one over the next like the rings of a twisted tree. My throat tightened so hard it hurt.
How could anyone do this to another human? How could Alistair do it to his own son?
The backs of my eyes were already stinging, disbelief and pity and sadness aching through me so hard it would have brought me to my knees if Lorcan wasn’t still holding me up.
The fingertips of my free hand grazed the edge of a scar where it wrapped around his ribs.
Fuck. What was I doing? I snatched my hand back so fast I nearly stumbled.
His gaze dropped to my hand, then came back up to my face. His eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong, Rua?”
The words were light. His voice was not.
“N-nothing.” I tugged my arm from his grip and stepped to the side to go around him.
He blocked my path, backing me up and bracing his left forearm against the wall beside me, caging me in, close enough that the heat from his skin smothered me. His scent thickened around me, masculine sweat and woodsmoke, and his orchestra of violins flared in my mind, making it hard to think.
Inside his forearm in smaller font was another tattoo.
I have not loved the world, nor the world me.
“Funny.” His gaze slid across my face. “You’re looking at me like you’ve never seen them before.”
Heat drained out of me just as quickly, leaving my skin cold and tight.
Rua would not have done that. Rua would not have looked at him like that, would not have touched him like that, would not have been shocked at the sight of scars that she’d seen for years.
Panic scrambled through me and my pulse spiked. I hadn’t just made a mistake. I’d made the kind of mistake that a predator like him fixated on.
I had to do damage control. Fast.
I rolled my eyes.
“Hard not to notice when there’s a new set,” I said, already hearing the strain in my cover-up. “What did you do to piss him off this time?”
Even as I said it, I hated myself for it. The words were cruel enough that I half expected him to turn on me for them.
Instead, he smirked and leaned closer and dropped his gaze between us, from his half-naked body to mine, fully clothed.
“Well, this feels unfair, doesn’t it?” His voice had dropped, unhurried and warm, his liquid tone setting off alarm bells in my head. “The least you could do is show me yours.”
“What?” The word came out as a squeak, and I pulled my robe tighter around me with both hands. “I’m not taking my top off for you.”
“Really?” He leaned in until his lips brushed my cheek. “Not even if I begged?”
The word begged, in his mouth, in that tone, made wetness trickle into my panties.
Fuck, I had to get away from him.
He’d given me very little space, forcing me to drag the length of my body against his, his damp skin hot through the thin fabric of my robe, his breath close enough to feel against my face as I pushed through.
Heat flared through me. Along with a stupid need to turn back around, untie my robe, and play along as Rua.
But I kept walking away, my cheeks burning, shaking hands clutching my robe around me like armor.
He called out after me.
“The real Rua would have begged me to ruin her.”