14. Liath
LIATH
The door to Rua’s bedroom swung shut behind me and my shoulders dropped for the first time since morning.
No Lorcan in the hallway. No Lorcan on the stairs. No Lorcan at the dinner table lying in wait with that stillness of his that made rooms feel smaller. The manor had been quiet all the way from the ground floor up, and for once in this godforsaken house, quiet actually meant quiet.
The door slammed behind me.
My heart went off like a starting pistol and I spun.
Lorcan was leaning against the door with his arms folded and his pale eyes already on me, watching with patient attention.
“What are you—”
He pushed off the wall and my brain stalled on the useless fact of how large he was, how fast, how little of the room was left between us.
His hands found my shoulders. His palms settled there, warm and steady through the fabric, and he walked me backward with slow, even pressure, almost coaxing, the way you’d guide someone you didn’t want to startle.
His woodsmoke scent reached me before I’d finished processing the hands, and underneath it that low orchestra of violins rose up through my skull.
The backs of my thighs found the edge of the bed.
He kept pushing until I’d fallen back. A gasp tore out of me as I landed, and my mind kept spinning uselessly, still trying to catch up even then, still trying to make sense of what was happening while he crawled over me, his warmth and weight of his body over mine.
His fingers moved to my hips with a lightness that felt obscenely misplaced, large hands adjusting my position farther into the middle of the bed as if this were ordinary, as if he weren’t six feet four of threat lowering himself over me, as if the careful way he was handling me made any kind of sense at all.
I couldn’t form a single word.
His eyes came up to mine, steady and deliberate, and held there for one second. One second of looking at me with that pale, unreadable attention while something hot began its slow slide down into my lower belly.
His hand appeared between us with a knife.
Sweet mother of God.
My brain un-fucked itself.
“What are you doing?” My hands shoved at him. “Get off—”
“Hold still.”
He caught both wrists in one hand, his grip like iron, and he pinned them flat above my head with brisk efficiency.
The blade went to the waistband of my trousers.
My lungs seized up and refused to draw air. A cold, sick clamp seized the base of my spine and spread fast, locking my limbs, tightening my stomach, turning every muscle under his weight into a rigid useless mess while dread rushed hot and metallic through my mouth.
The fabric split with a dry, vicious rip. Then the other side gave way and cold air skimmed over the bared skin of my thighs as I lay there, pinned down by him in just my panties.
My lungs seized. My stomach pulled tight enough to hurt. Heat rushed up my chest while my feet turned numb, and the switchblade flashed in his hand, bright and steady, before it disappeared again.
Deargán had taken everything from me, but never like this. Never with steel at my skin.
Lorcan had already opened my throat once in a hallway and barely blinked after.
If I screamed, who in this house would come fast enough to matter?
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. My chest kept jerking for air but never filling enough. Beneath him, my body went dead rigid, every muscle pulled tight and useless.
His hand clamped down on my thigh.
Oh God. This was it.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Every breath landed too loud in my own ears as I waited to be violated.
Seconds passed.
The hand on my thigh hadn’t moved. He hadn’t moved. Not to rip off my panties. Not to touch me.
I opened my eyes.
He was looking at the tattoo, at the Medusa staring up from my skin in the low light. Lorcan’s thumb moved to the edge of the design, tracing it without quite touching, his brow pulling in by a fraction.
I could only imagine what Lorcan was seeing. What he was thinking.
There was no way Deargán could have copied Rua’s tattoo perfectly. Good enough to pass if you’d just glimpsed at it. But it would not stand up to Lorcan’s scrutiny.
Perhaps the eyes were wrong, not realistic enough the way the original had been. The original artist’s linework in the scales was beyond what he could replicate cleanly.
And the lines along the thinner skin near the inner edge, the ink had bled out, softening what should have been sharp. Something a seasoned artist knew how to avoid.
The tattoo was too fresh. Rua’s original had years in her skin, that slight fading, the way old ink settles and loses its edge. This one was raised and vivid and new in a way that no amount of Rua’s old clothes or her careful handwriting copies or her hollow smile could account for.
Lorcan’s thumb stopped.
His silence tipped into something heavier. His grip on my wrists above my head didn’t loosen. But something behind his eyes moved, a shift so small yet so complete.
He knew I wasn’t Rua. He’d found the proof. Now he was deciding what to do with it.
My whole body waited for the cold sting of the blade at my throat again to finish off what he’d started the day we’d met. For him to haul me upright and take the whole confrontation somewhere I wouldn’t come back from. For him to toss me in front of Alistair so they could devour me together.
He straightened instead, slow and deliberate, releasing my wrists and stepping back from the bed, his gaze staying on me.
Cold rushed in where his body had been a second before, skimming over my skin. Shame burned through me because some ruined part of me felt the loss of his warmth and wanted it back.
“Lorcan—”
He turned and walked out.
The door clicked shut behind him, and the silence rushed in to deafen me.
The adrenaline holding my spine rigid suddenly snapped. I collapsed back as tremors racked my limbs. I curled my legs up to huddle in a ball on my side and clutched my ruined pants against my chest, my skin freezing everywhere his heat had just been.
He knew.
And he wasn’t done with me.
He was just done asking.
Whatever he did next would be crueler, calculated, and impossible to stop.
“Do you know that guy?”
Nuala’s voice was casual, her chin lifting toward the colonnade running along the south side of the quad. She wasn’t looking at me when she said it.
But at him.
The wind had picked up since we’d come outside the main Ravenwood building between classes, stripping the last of the leaves off the old oaks along the grounds and sending them skidding across the flagstones in pale dry clusters.
Gray clouds had settled over the spires, heavy and low, pressing the warmth out of the air.
Students were pulling their coats tighter, hunching into scarves, cutting across the quad at a clip.
Everyone moving except the man against the far pillar.
Deargán stood at the colonnade’s edge with his hands in the pockets of his dark double-breasted coat hanging open over a charcoal turtleneck, still in a way that made the moving crowd look frantic. He wasn’t watching the quad.
He was watching me.
God help me.
I’d almost forgotten how criminally good-looking he was.
Leaning against the old Ravenwood stone in the gray afternoon light with his hair pushed loose across his forehead by the wind, he looked like he’d stepped out of a Bronte novel.
He looked like something a more foolish version of myself might have invented.
My stomach flipped despite myself.
What in the actual hell was he thinking, showing up here in the middle of the Ravenwood quad in broad daylight? Did he think he was the kind of man who could move through life invisible?
He hadn’t gone unnoticed. A cluster of girls near the fountain had been watching him for several minutes, two of them with their heads together, one with her hand pressed over her mouth, another craning openly.
Something one of them said sent the whole group into fresh whispers.
Someone else said “TILF” loud enough to carry on the wind. Teacher I’d like to fuck.
Deargán wasn’t paying any of them the slightest attention.
He was looking at me.
“No,” I lied to Nuala. “I don’t know him.”
“You sure? He’s been low-key staring at you for like five, ten minutes.” Nuala’s voice had shifted into something more careful. She tilted her head. “He’s a total ride, though. Nothing low-key about that.”
“Just some weirdo,” I said.
But my body had already betrayed me. My shoulders angled toward him, my weight following, the rest of me beginning to orient to him. My jaw tightened at that instinctive pull, the part of me drawn to Deargán because he’d conditioned me that way.
“I’ll tell him to scram,” I said, too quick, already moving.
I hadn’t taken two steps toward him when something sharp and cold landed between my shoulder blades.
Across the quad, near the arched entrance to the east building, Lorcan sat among the wood picnic tables with Rafe and Breezy on either side and a loose orbit of others around them, the usual mix of actual friends and people who’d positioned themselves close enough to bask.
A man who’d never asked for a court and had acquired one anyway.
He wasn’t paying attention to any of them.
His pale eyes moved from my face to Deargán and back to my face. His expression hadn’t changed. Something hardened behind his eyes.
Shit. He’d followed my gaze. He’d seen who I’d been walking toward.
My feet stopped.
Deargán stood at the far pillar, expectation bleeding out of his tightened posture. Lorcan stood at the east archway, very still now, making a decision I couldn’t read. The wind scraped another shower of leaves across the flagstones between us all.
I had nowhere good to put my next step.
“Forget it,” I said, turning back to Nuala. “Let’s just go.”
Nuala’s eyes moved from me to the colonnade and back. “That’s not just some weirdo.”
She was too observant by half, and one of these days I was going to have to actually answer one of her questions. Not today.
“Coffee before the bell. My treat.” I grabbed her arm and steered her toward the kiosk, keeping my voice light and my smile in place. Twenty years of Michael Byrne’s fundraising circuit had to be worth something.
She let herself be steered, but the look she shot me said she wasn’t buying it, only shelving it for later.
Don’t look back.
My head turned anyway.
Deargán hadn’t moved. He remained by the pillar, patient and composed, as if he knew I would come to him in the end.
Lorcan’s eyes were on me now, something dark and violent in his gaze.
I turned away with my pulse hammering, feeling the noose starting to close in around us all.
That night, back at Lasair Manor, there was a note on my pillow.
A square of folded paper sitting in the center of the black silk, precise as a full stop.
He hadn’t bothered with a signature, but I didn’t need one to know who this was from.
Stop hesitating.
Do what you were sent to do.
My jaw tightened until it ached.
Deargán had been in this room. He was watching me.
He’d watched me lose days as I oriented myself as Rua and was now tightening the slack.
Lorcan had enough evidence from the tattoo to make a move against me. After today, he would. Soon.
If I wanted any control left at all, I had to move first.
I repressed a shiver as my heart slammed against my ribs.
I knew what I had to do next, and it terrified me. Because if I got caught, I was worse than dead.