37. Lorcan
LORCAN
Ihad my eye to the vent again.
I’d told myself it was surveillance. She was a known threat using my sister’s name, a fake tattoo on her thigh, and a mission I had not yet figured out.
The chair beneath the vent was a strategic position.
The hours I’d stood on it watching her were operational diligence and not the most pathetic thing I had ever done.
The lies were getting thinner.
Tonight, she was asleep on her side with one hand curled under her chin and her hair fanned out across the pillow.
Awake, she was the imposter who’d walked into my house wearing my sister’s face and lying through her teeth.
Asleep, she was just a girl. A tired girl with a small frown between her brows and one bare foot escaping the blanket, and I had been watching her for forty minutes without moving.
I had a small filthy thought about the way her hair would feel in my fist, and I shoved it down hard. It came back.
I had ignored her for a week, used her intrusion into my ma’s room as an excuse. Detach. Withdraw. Refuse. Watch the unwanted feeling starve until it died. It had always been reliable before.
It hadn’t worked with her.
It had gotten worse.
Every day she’d been more in my head, not less.
And the silence between us was the worst of it.
The absence of her was a sound I could not stop listening for.
A door not opening. A footstep not crossing a room.
A voice not arriving. Every minute of the day was now organized around where she was and where she was not.
I hadn’t had a thought in seven days that hadn’t routed through her first.
So I stood on the chair, watching her sleep.
But tonight, unlike any other night, her bedroom door opened, the sound loud against the midnight silence.
I went still.
Measured footsteps sounded across her room, a wrongness climbing up the back of my neck even before he stepped into view.
My father.
He sat on the edge of her bed like he owned the space, the mattress dipping under his weight. He hadn’t told anyone he was back.
Something cold moved through me.
I watched her wake. The flutter of her lashes. The slow surface from sleep. Then the moment she registered who was sitting on her bed, a small jolt traveled the length of her body before she locked it down.
But it was their conversation that made my fingers curl against the grate. She was deflecting. He was batting her excuses aside. A verbal chess match with her as the pawn.
Then he said something that made my blood curdle in my veins. “You’ll have to keep quiet so your brother doesn’t get jealous.”
The chair under my feet felt like it tipped out from under me. Bile climbed the back of my throat.
All this time, he’d been doing this to Rua.
And I had not seen it.
I’d been so jealous of her. Daddy’s girl who never disappointed him. Who’d never known the end of his rage and his cane.
Christ. The shame and the rage came up together so fast I couldn’t tell them apart.
Her gaze moved to the vent.
To me.
Help. Her whole face begged me, and her left hand shifted on the blanket in a gesture I recognized the moment I saw it, the universal signal for help.
I did not move.
I could not move. My body had locked itself the way it locked itself the moment the cane came down, the trained stillness Alistair had built into me bone by bone.
Move. Move, you fucking coward.
But still I could not move.
Alistair leaned forward. His hand moved to her knee. His fingers slid up, the hem of her nightgown rising with them.
Something coiled and restless inside me snapped.
I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t fucking stand it.
I couldn’t do nothing.
I jumped down off the chair, crossed to the bedside in three strides, and flipped the catches on my ma’s violin case.
I crossed back to stand under the vent and lifted the bow. I lifted the violin and pressed the instrument to my shoulder.
I knew what this would cost me before the first note left the strings. I did it anyway.
I did not decide to play “The Parting Glass.” It was simply the song that came. My ma’s favorite. The song Alistair had banned from this house the day she died.
The first note was raw. The strings bit at my fingers. The bow trembled on the second draw and steadied on the third. Loud enough to carry. Deliberate enough to be unmistakable.
Through the vent I heard the bedsprings shift.
I kept playing.
I heard her bedroom door open and close. Then his heavy footsteps in the corridor. Coming closer. Coming for me.
I did not stop playing even as my fingers trembled and my lungs seized because stopping would send Alistair back to her.
My door hit the wall hard enough to crack the plaster.
Alistair filled the frame.
I looked at my father across the dark room with the violin still at my shoulder. I made him wait for the final note, forcing him to stand there and listen to the memory of the woman he had tried to erase.
Only when I finished did I lower the bow.
“My study.” His voice was quiet. “Now.”
His eyes flicked once toward the vent in my wall. Just once. Just long enough to make sure I’d seen him do it.
The message was clear. She is still there. She is still in reach. Do not test me.
I set the violin down on the bed.
“Bring it.”
I froze.
At first I didn’t understand. Not fully.
Then the weight of it hit me, slow and heavy, crushing the air from my lungs, my pulse thudding hard enough to blur my vision.
I’d learned the hard way that begging only made it worse. Please stop just made him grin. Please don’t lit something wicked in his eyes, made him draw it out.
But I couldn’t help myself.
Please. No. The words moved behind my teeth and I hated myself for them.
His stare didn’t waver.
“You choose,” he said. “Your violin. Or her.”
The air thickened. The choice was a trap.
Pick the instrument and I exposed the truth, showed how far under my skin she had gotten. Pick her and he’d hurt her; the small tilt of his jaw told me so.
My fingers curled in on themselves as I squeezed my eyes shut, pressure burning behind them, the threat of tears I could not let fall.
There was no right answer. Only one that hurt less.
I reached for my violin. My arm ached with the effort not to tremble. I cradled her like a limb I was about to lose. The varnish was warm from my touch, and I pressed my thumb into the spot where the wood was worn from years of playing, the spot where my ma’s thumb used to rest, too.
My throat burned. I didn’t cry. I couldn’t.
But something inside me howled. Something inside me broke.
I glanced once at the vent. I locked eyes with her as she clung to the other side of grate, her eyes already shimmering with tears.
Then I tore my eyes away. I walked out, my back bracing. My fate was already ringing through the silence, as loud as any scream.
I don’t know how but I made it back to my room. The door clicked shut behind me and my legs gave out three steps in.
I sank onto the floor with the shards of my ma’s violin clutched against my chest, the splintered wood piercing into my palms where I would loosen my grip.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror. My shirt was wet through, splinters of pale wood poking up through the material from my back, blood working its way down the cotton in slow crimson lines.
I turned my face away.
The wood needed to come out. The blood needed staunching. The shirt needed cutting off before it scabbed into the wounds. But letting go of the violin would mean accepting that it was gone.
My door opened with a soft click.
I didn’t have to look to know it was her.
“Couldn’t stay away, huh?” I said with a sneer. “Knew you’d come crawling back.”
She didn’t answer. She crossed the room, her footsteps soft and measured, as if I were a wild animal that she was approaching.
Get out. You can’t see me like this.
“Did you enjoy the show?” I made my voice as ugly as it would go, hiding the growing panic underneath. “Watching from your nice safe vent. Have you come to gloat?”
She crouched down beside me on the floor, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her.
My insides twisted and my grip on myself faltered. I needed her gone, but God help me, I wanted her near.
“I should have let him have you,” I spat, even as I hated myself for the words coming out of my mouth. “He and I could have compared notes.”
She didn’t even flinch. She absorbed my hateful words, and her features softened.
She stood and walked away.
For one second I thought I’d won. Disappointment slammed through me hard enough to hurt. I hated her and hated myself in the same breath.
But the door didn’t open. Her footsteps had gone the other way. Toward my adjoining bathroom.
I heard a drawer open. Then another. And the shuffle of her rummaging through.
She came back with my first aid kit in her hands. Scissors. The brown bottle of antiseptic. A folded square of clean cloth.
“Get out,” I tried. “I don’t want you here.”
“Hold still.” She crouched again, behind me this time, and lifted the hem of my shirt away from the worst of it and started cutting, separating cotton from the broken skin underneath.
I went still.
She pulled the splinters out one at a time, moving slowly and carefully across my back. God, her hands were so soft. Too soft. Too gentle. No one had ever handled my pain as if it mattered.
“He’ll punish you for this.” My voice came out flat. “If he finds out you kept me weak.”
She just kept working.
I glanced at the door, waiting for the sound of his footsteps in the corridor. The handle turning. His silhouette in the frame.
The door stayed shut. She kept working, focusing only on my back. She didn’t even look up once to check the door.
“This might sting a little.” She pressed the antiseptic-soaked cloth to my back.
I flinched at the bite, a hiss escaping me before I could stop it.
She paused. Just long enough to let me find my breath. Then she went back to it.
She would not pity me. She also would not let me pretend it didn’t hurt.
She didn’t talk. She seemed to sense that silence was the only way this was survivable for me.
Just her hands on my back. Careful. Steady. Doing what needed doing.
I don’t know how long it took. Long enough for my hands to ache from how hard I was holding the shattered violin. Long enough for the blood on the floor between my knees to start drying at the edges. Long enough for my shoulders, against my will, to drop.
When she was done bandaging me, she sat on the floor beside me.
I felt her gaze on me, but it didn’t burn the way judgment did.
She had seen me broken and I kept waiting for her to use it against me. But she didn’t. Why didn’t she?
Why was she still here? I had not earned her kindness. I had not earned any of it.
She stood up and crossed to the bed where the violin case lay open. She picked it up carefully. She came back and knelt in front of me with the case held out between us.
I looked at the case.
I looked at the pieces in my hands.
Then, slowly, I began to put the violin back in. The neck first. Then the body in pieces. Then the splintered fragments, the broken strings, every piece I had carried back through the corridors. I fitted each one to the velvet where it had lived.
Then I closed the lid the way I would close a coffin, saying my silent goodbyes.
After a long time, she whispered, “Thank you. I know what it cost you.”
I didn’t answer.
Admitting I had chosen her would give her too much. I would not survive it.
She stood and turned to leave, as if she knew I needed to be alone. “I’ll check in on you later.”
Something lurched inside me. I couldn’t let her leave. Not without…
“Liath.”
She stopped at the door. I could feel her gaze on me like a warm hand.
Thank you.
But this was too far out of my grasp. My tongue could not form the words. I didn’t know how.
“Don’t,” I said, not raising my head, “tell anyone you were in here.”
“I promise.”
The door clicked shut behind her.
I sat alone on the floor with one trembling hand resting on the closed case.