35. Lorcan
LORCAN
With Liath tucked against my side and the knife hidden back under my jacket, I felt steadier than I had all evening. The room was still wrong, still crawling under my skin, but with her close, my chest swelled with purpose.
Then she shattered the moment.
“You don’t get to play protector now, Lorcan.” She put a hand flat against my chest and pushed, hard enough to make a point. “Not after last night. Save it for someone stupid enough to believe you mean it.”
My grasp on her faltered as she turned and walked away.
Something felt like it cracked inside me.
But that strange feeling turned to suspicion when moments later, she slipped out of a servers’ entrance.
I pushed through the crowd after her.
A man stepped back, his shoulder bumping into me. He turned. “My apologies, I—”
His face fell when he saw me.
The gold and red mask covered the top half of his face, but I knew the eyes through the slits. Finn’s eyes.
This was Finn Senior.
Finn’s father.
“Sir.” I lowered my voice. “What are you doing here?”
“Lorcan.” The hand went to the knot of his tie, his gold ring flashing as he adjusted it. “Good to see you, son.”
He clapped my shoulder, not meeting my eyes, before he moved past me.
Around me the room seemed to transform.
In the corner, Aoife’s father held a girl with a cracked smile too closely, his hand low on her hip.
The man with a girl slumped across his lap was Elias’s father.
Shit, that was Dean Bewley in the corner pressed up against a half-slumped girl.
Faces from fundraisers, rugby clubhouses, board dinners.
All of them here. All of them with the same hungry look on their faces.
Something cold moved up my spine.
A glass clinked and the room quieted as they turned toward the fireplace.
My father stood in front of the hearth with a fresh absinthe raised in his hand.
“Friends.” He smiled the warm smile. “New friends. Old friends.”
Where had she gone? She had been gone four minutes. Maybe five. Long enough. I glanced back to the side door, still frustratingly closed and much too far away.
“I have spent the evening looking around this room and feeling something I have not felt in a long time. Trust.”
Alistair’s eyes found me over the rim of his glass.
“Trust is the rarest commodity in our line of work, gentlemen. Tonight, I look around this room and I see men I trust. Men I am proud to call partners.”
If I went after her now, he’d notice. He would disapprove. He was already furious at me for my reaction earlier. His voice might have exuded charm when he brushed my behavior off, but I’d caught the look in his eye.
I would be punished.
“A toast… to the partnerships ahead of us.”
Glasses lifted.
Fuck it. I did not look back at my father as I crossed to the door.
“To our collective growth. To a very, very profitable year and…”
I slipped out into the servants’ hallway, following it along until I came to the staircase that lead up through the servants’ entrance to the bedrooms. I took the stairs two at a time, drawn toward the distant murmur.
As I moved down the landing, voices came low from up ahead. Hers and a man’s, both pitched too low for the words to carry.
I moved toward them, keeping my steps slow and measured, avoiding the floorboards that creaked as I neared the corner.
“…is your enemy. Not your fucking lover.”
I stepped out into the corridor.
She was staring up at one of the guests, the one wearing the plague doctor’s mask. He was standing close to her. Too close.
The sight of it hit me like a punch, hot and immediate, my temper flaring at once with the ugly certainty that I had arrived late to something I was never meant to see.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
Both of them turned.
For a split second, I thought I saw panic flash across her face. But it was gone so quickly I couldn’t be sure.
“Oh.” She straightened and took half a step away from him. “Mr. Mikhailov got lost looking for the gentlemen’s room.”
She was lying. She was fucking lying to me.
Mikhailov’s accent wasn’t Russian at all two seconds ago. He was Irish.
He wasn’t who he said he was. Who was he? What did he want in my house?
I glared at the imposter, my knuckles cracking as they tightened to fists. “Take off your mask.”
“Lorcan.” She stepped between us. “He’s a guest. You can’t talk to him like that.”
She was protecting him.
Something bright and ugly turned through me.
She knew him. No, not just knew him.
He meant something to her.
The thought went through me mean and feral, jealousy twisting hard. Suddenly my knife was back in my hand.
“Rude boy.” The man behind the mask said, his fake Russian accent returned. “In Russia, we have ways of putting rude boys back in their place.”
I closed the distance between us with another step, my knife tight in my grasp, every part of me braced for blood. “Take off that mask. Or I take it off for you.”
For a moment, he didn’t move.
“Lorcan.” My father’s voice cracked through the corridor behind me. “My study. Now.”
Shit. Not now. But I had already more than tested my limits with Alistair tonight. Any more would be suicide.
I did not turn immediately.
I held the man’s eyes through the mask, locking away the dark eyes, the salt-and-pepper hair, the broad build for the next time we met.
This was not over.
I braced myself and stepped into Alistair’s study, the door clicking shut behind me, the acrid smell of old absinthe stinging my nose.
A fire crackled in the hearth, too hot for the mild fall. He liked it hot. Said it made men sweat, made them confess.
His desk gleamed as he sat behind it. Not a speck of dust. Just a tumbler of scotch, a box of Cuban cigars, and a gold lighter placed beside it, as if this was just business.
He didn’t yell. Not at first. He just stared at me from behind his desk with that calculated stillness, like I was a stray mutt tracking mud onto his Persian rug.
He stood, walked around the desk, and poured a finger of absinthe over a sugar cube in a glass.
“You were quite protective of Rua,” he said as he swirled the green liquid. “Then you walked out. Right in the middle of my toast.”
My spine locked as I swallowed down my justifications. They were useless here. “I’m sorry, sir. It was wrong of me. It won’t happen again.”
“You like her, don’t you?” he asked over the rim of his glass. “I see it. The way you look at her.”
My voice came out flat. “She’s my sister. I was just looking out for her.”
“Mmm.” He took a long sip, then set the glass down with a click. “You lie like a child.”
He began to circle me, a predator circling his next meal.
I stood rooted to the spot. Running always meant the punishment hurt more when he caught me.
The back of my neck prickled when he disappeared from view behind my back.
“I heard she spent the whole night in your room while I was away. How is your sweet little sister?”
The silence pulsed. My mouth went dry. Of course Mervyn had reported to him.
“Did you hold her while she slept?” There was a long poisonous pause. “Or did she open her legs for you like a whore?”
Crack.
A flare of pain tore through me as his cane landed across my back.
“How dare you disobey me.” Spit flew out of his mouth, an unhinged look in his eye. “You humiliated me in front of my investors. In front of clients.”
Fuck, I don’t think I’d ever seen him this angry.
But I stayed silent, swallowing my cries of pain, holding my tongue, like always. That was the rule: stay silent.
But this time, the silence didn’t protect me. It strangled me.
“What are they going to think about me,” he spat, “if I can’t keep my own fucking son in check?”
Another blow. Lower. Across my ribs. The impact knocked the breath out of me, a hot burst of pain blooming across my side, sharp and nauseating. I grunted, doubling slightly, white spots pricking the edges of my vision.
“Is she making you soft?” His voice dropped, low and venomous. “You let the worthless little cunt turn you against your own blood?”
My spine locked and heat surged up my neck. I could take the beatings, the insults, the fucking cane. But not that. Not her.
Something snapped in me and I saw red.
I grabbed his cane mid-strike and twisted it out of his hand before tossing it aside. It clattered uselessly against a shelf of books.
It was like I was outside my body, watching someone else. Like this wasn’t me sizing up my own father like a raging bull ready to stampede, my breath shallow and ragged.
Alistair growled and lunged at me. “Why you little—”
I punched him. I didn’t feel it. Just heard the sound of bone on bone like a tree cracking in a storm. Felt the wetness of my knuckles splitting.
Then he was stumbling back against his desk, blood already beading on his lip.
Silence swallowed the room, thick and suspended, broken only by the rush of blood pounding in my ears. Shock pinned my limbs in place, numb and trembling.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. I just waited. Waited for death. For the snap of a hidden weapon. For the pain. For the bullet in my head.
Alistair pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, monogrammed, of course, and dabbed the blood on his lip like it was lipstick.
Then he laughed. Not a bark. A purr.
“Finally,” he said, his voice quiet. Almost proud. “You’re becoming a man.”
Then he waved the handkerchief at me, dismissing me.
I should’ve felt relieved. Should’ve felt righteous. But all I felt was the sticky blood cooling on my knuckles and his approval seeping into me like rot.
I hadn’t won.
I was becoming exactly what he’d made me.