36. Liath #2
He reached out a hand and brushed back a strand of hair from my face, the motion making bile lurch up the back of my throat. “You look so much like your mother tonight.”
The room narrowed.
The breath in my chest went still and small.
He knew her.
I’d been a toddler when Michael Byrne adopted me so I didn’t remember her. In the adoption file I’d found, there was a date, a hastily scrawled KD and nothing else. No photograph. No story. No name.
The woman who’d abandoned me, who’d never wanted me, had been initials on a piece of paper.
This man, this man with his hand resting on his knee in my dead twin’s bedroom, had known her. Had known her well enough to know that I looked like her.
The implications branched fast. How? When? Who is she? Is she alive. Is she—
I shoved what I’d just felt down behind my ribs and locked it there. She never cared about me. Never wanted me. Left me to be raised by a monster. So I didn’t give a shite about her.
And right now, there was a monster trying to get into my bed.
I swallowed around a dry lump, but I kept my face Rua-soft.
Alistair leaned in, his eyes dragging over me, the corner of his mouth softening as if I were a meal he’d been waiting all day for.
“I’m too impatient to take this to my room tonight, pet.” His voice dropped lower. “You’ll have to keep quiet so your brother doesn’t get jealous.”
I glanced away, unable to watch him undress me with his eyes. My gaze caught on the iron vent set high in the wall.
I gulped back a gasp.
Two piercing eyes stared back at me from between the ornate grate.
Lorcan was there. Watching.
Help. The word pushed up my throat without permission. My whole face was begging him, the way I’d promised myself I’d never beg him for anything ever again. I held his gaze through the grate and let him read every word my mouth couldn’t say. Please. Help me.
I shifted my left hand slowly on top of the blanket, where the angle from where Alistair sat would hide what I was doing.
I lifted my palm flat. Tucked my thumb into the center of it.
Then I folded my four fingers down over the thumb and held the closed fist there, just long enough for him to see, just long enough for him to understand it.
The universal signal for help. I’d seen it the first time scrolling on my phone in a coffee shop in Dublin two years ago and learned it without thinking I’d ever need it.
Palm. Thumb. Fingers folded. The gesture that meant I am in danger and I cannot say it. The one that worked through a car window, across a bar, through a phone screen.
I held it for two seconds.
See me. Understand. Do something. Please.
His eyes through the grate didn’t change.
He didn’t move.
He didn’t move.
He was not going to help me.
I’d known he wouldn’t. I’d known it even as I risked signaling to him.
Lorcan would not turn on his father for me. He had a back full of scars that proved exactly what disobedience cost in this house and a lifetime of training that ensured that he never paid the price for anyone else.
And I was nothing to him.
Worse than nothing. He hated me.
My chest tightened around this fact like a fist, breath snagging as if my body had stupidly expected something else from him. Heat burned up the back of my throat and I swallowed it down hard, forcing my face to stay smooth, forcing the sting out of my eyes before it could betray me.
Something inside me went quiet.
Then the last thread snapped.
No one was coming for me. There was no one to help me. No parents that gave a shite. Not Deargán. Not Lorcan.
I was alone.
The signet ring caught the light again as Alistair tugged down the covers, the material snagging on my fingers before being yanked out. Cold air gripped my trembling body through my thin nightgown. My stomach turned over as his hand slid onto my knee.
Do not move. Do not flinch. Stay Rua. Stay Rua.
He kept his eyes on mine. He let his hand sit there, claiming the territory.
“Rua, pet, you love when I touch you like this.” His voice was almost tender, his thumb tracing a small circle on the inside of my thigh. “You always have. Don’t pretend with me tonight. We’re past that.”
I couldn’t recoil. I couldn’t let any reaction cross my face that didn’t match the daughter he’d groomed for years. One wrong twitch and I was a fraud. One wrong noise and I was dead.
Rua loves this. Rua loves this. Rua loves this.
“It’s been a long time,” I whispered. “I’m a bit out of practice.”
“That’s alright, pet. I’ll remind you.” His fingers slid up, dragging the cotton with them, the hem rising slowly over my thigh.
“This is what good girls do for their fathers,” he said as he pushed up my gown. “You know that. You’ve always known that. You owe me everything. The clothes on your back, the roof over your head, every meal in your mouth since you were small. I saved you. You belong to me.”
Mentally bury yourself. Now. Go.
I knew the trick. Find a point on the ceiling. Pick a memory. The one with the sea. Smell of salt, sound of gulls, the thin gray Irish light on a Donegal beach in September. Put yourself there. Leave your body in the bed and put yourself on the beach. Let whatever would happen, happen.
I picked the corner of the room and stared at it.
I started to step away from myself.
His fingers caught my chin and turned my face back to his. “Let’s see those pretty eyes, pet.”
Bastard. He wasn’t going to let me leave my body. He wasn’t going to let me have even that.
His thumb stroked the line of my jaw. “There she is.”
I held his gaze, even as sour bile threatened to choke me.
I have survived worse than this. I have survived worse than this. I could survive this.
I had to.