39. Liath
LIATH
Iwoke up with Maeve in my head before I’d opened my eyes properly. Her doe eyes. Her mouth slightly open. The metal of the slab under her. The wrong wrist split open.
I shoved her down before she could open me up again. Not now.
The light through the heavy red drapes was a faded gray. It was early. My eyes ached. My throat was raw. I’d cried until my body had given up and dropped me.
I dragged my hand across the other side of the mattress, finding it cold. The duvet was smooth and undented, the pillow flat.
I sat up.
Last night.
The way I’d rolled my hips down onto him. The way I’d kissed up his throat.
The way he’d pulled away. Not like this.
A hot wash of humiliation came up through my chest and lodged at the base of my throat.
I had begged.
I had begged and he had said no.
I had begged and he hadn’t stayed.
Never again.
I would never beg him for anything ever again.
I flung the sheets off me, my limbs itchy with movement.
I threw on one of Rua’s black dresses like armor, drew the eyeliner along my lash line like war paint, and painted my mouth in her dark-plum color.
The girl in the mirror looked back at me, blank and steady.
I am Rua.
Last night had happened to a girl I’d buried.
I picked up my college bag and opened my door.
I froze.
Lorcan was sitting on the floor in the corridor outside, his back against the opposite wall, his long legs sprawled out.
His head was tilted back against the paneling, his eyes shadowed, his jaw rough with stubble that had come in overnight.
His charcoal sweater was the same one he’d worn yesterday.
He had not gone to bed. He had slept by my door.
His ice-pale eyes locked on mine, the softness in them threatening to undo me.
I locked it down and stepped over his legs.
“Gray.” His voice was low and roughened.
I didn’t answer. I just started down the corridor.
Before I knew what was happening, he’d caught up to me and was dragging me back into my bedroom.
The door shut behind him, trapping us both in here. In this room. Back at the scene of my shame.
“I’d like you to leave,” I said, dumping my bag to the floor and crossing my arms over my chest. I refused to look at him.
“No.”
“Get out of my room.”
“Gray.” His voice had dropped, gone careful. “Look at me.”
He closed the distance between us, stopping close enough that the toes of his boots almost touched mine. His hand came up under my jaw, and he turned my face to his, forcing me to face him.
He stared right into me. Seeing me. Being seen like this felt too raw.
“You think I rejected you,” he said.
The shame came up so hard my face heated under his fingers. I tried to pull back.
He didn’t let me. He grabbed my shoulders, holding me in place.
“Don’t,” I said, my voice cracking, tears already stinging the backs of my eyes, the armor I’d so carefully layered on, shattering like brittle glass.
“You think I didn’t want you.”
“I don’t think anything. I think I’d like to go to class. I think I’d like to forget yesterday ever happened and so would you, so let’s both just—”
“Goddammit, Gray, I didn’t say no because I didn’t want you,” he blurted out, his voice rising. “I said no because you were not asking me.”
I went very still as his confession continued.
“I have wanted you since the first minute and I have wanted you every minute since. I wanted you so badly last night that I forced myself to stay outside this door because if I had gotten into that bed with you, I would not have been able to hold back. So don’t stand here and tell me I don’t want you. I want you so bad it hurts.”
His features cracked, the hard lines of his face splitting around something raw.
My heart kicked once, hard, then started beating too fast.
“I am terrified of you.” His voice had gone quiet again. “I am terrified of what you are doing to me. Of what you make me want. Of what it would mean to choose you in this house, in front of him, and not be able to take it back.”
His jaw worked.
“I have spent every hour of my life learning that the things I want get used against me. There is not a soft place in me my father has not put a finger on and pressed until it bled. I have spent my whole adult life refusing to want anything, because to want a thing in this house is to hand him the knife.” He swallowed. “And then you walked in.”
His eyes burned into mine.
And I couldn’t breathe.
“God help me, Gray, even knowing what it costs…” He stepped in even closer, his hands coming up to cup my face, his fingers trembling. “…I am choosing you anyway.”
He stood there watching me, waiting for my move.
I should not choose him.
Choosing him made me easier to hurt. Choosing him gave Alistair leverage. Choosing him put the mission, Dervla, and every girl trapped in that ward at risk.
I chose him anyway.
I stepped into him, crushing my lips onto him.
He went still under my hand for half a second. Then his arms came around me and his mouth opened under mine. His hand fisted in the back of my hair, and the kiss went from mine to ours in one beat, and from ours to his in the next.
He turned us. My back hit the door.
“Wait.” It came out of him low and broken. “Gray. Wait.”
“No.”
“But it’ll—”
“I don’t care.”
“Gray.” His forehead dropped against mine. His breath was jagged, his hand still tangled in my hair. “I have spent the night talking myself out of this. If you do this with me right now, we are damning us both.”
“Okay.”
His pupils blew wider.
“I’m not asking you the way I asked last night.” I tightened my hand in the front of his sweater. “I’m taking what’s mine.”
He made a sound low in his throat.
I kissed him again.
His hand in my hair tightened, his other hand braced on the door beside my head, his forearm caging me, his mouth against mine but not yet open. Still trying to hold back. Still trying to save us.
I bit his lower lip, then sucked on it.
He made a low sound that wasn’t quite a word, and his mouth opened, his tongue sweeping in, his body crushing up against mine, his cock hard between us.
I moaned into his mouth and ground against him, needing him so much it hurt.
His hands slipped around my ass, lifting me clean off the floor and he carried me to the bed.
He threw me down onto the mattress and I bounced back onto my elbows with a yelp.
“Last chance.” He stripped his sweater off with one hand, revealing his beautiful body and the fury of ravens across his chest. Deep into that darkness peering. He stared at me, ice-blue eyes blown black.
I yanked the dress over my head and tossed it aside, sitting back in just my panties and boots.
He sucked in a breath as his gaze slid over me, my nipples hardening against his stare.
“No turning back,” I whispered, and I let my knees fall apart.
He lunged for me.
The rest of our clothes came off in a desperate clash of hands and teeth.
His weight came down over me, the length of his hard naked body pressing against mine making my head spin.
He reached his hand between my legs, his palm broad and calloused and his fingers uncertain at first, as if he was afraid I might break.
His thumb found me, sliding up, through, and over, slick and hot.
“Christ,” he hissed under his breath. “You’re soaked.”
“You’re not the only one who’s been wanting.” I bit his shoulder, not gentle, a warning not to stop.
He made that same low-throated sound and slid two fingers inside, slow and deep and careful, but I wanted none of his care.
“Fuck me, Lorcan.” I yanked his head back by his hair.
He barely got the condom on in time, and when he pushed his thick cock into me, I felt the stretch, the sharp drag of him, and I gasped, my head thrown back and my arms tight around his neck.
It was a shock and a relief all at once, the ache of it edged by the way his whole body shuddered above me, the noise he made somewhere between a growl and a plea.
He pulled out almost all the way, then thrust back in, again and again, each time harder, less controlled, pounding the air from my lungs.
The bed frame groaned with each thrust, but nothing could drown out the obscene slick sounds of us together, or the low, desperate noises he made every time he bottomed out inside me.
My hands were in his hair, then dragging up his wounded back.
God, every movement must hurt him, every touch.
He did not flinch. He did not pull back. He pinned my wrists above my head and his mouth was on my throat, biting, sucking as he fucked me hard.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and I used the leverage to flip us, straddling him, grinning down into his startled face. He looked even more beautiful like this—out of control, flushed, hair wild, eyes wide and wanting.
I grabbed both his wrists and forced them down by his ears, grinding down on him, feeling every inch of him, the heat and hardness of him so close to unbearable I could barely breathe.
He let me have half a second of it, and then he flipped me onto my back again and took control.
We fought for it. The whole of it. Every inch of it.
He’d push and I’d push back. I’d reach for control and he’d let me hold it for a moment, and then his hand would be at my throat and we’d be turning over again.
One of our limbs knocked the bedside table. The crash was sharp and far away, somewhere outside the sole existence of the two of us.
My wrists were pinned above my head, my thighs trembling on either side of his hips.
His weight was a furnace holding me down, the length of him thrusting into me, relentless, perfectly brutal.
I was nothing but nerve endings and need.
I bucked against him, trying to force him deeper, and he braced harder, his hand clamping tighter over my wrists, the stretch of my arms burning so good.
He was saying something low in my ear, something filthy, but I couldn’t make out the words over the blood pounding in my skull. Each thrust bent the world around it, sensation compressing into a sharp dangerous singularity, the dark room tipping and spinning around those piercing blue eyes.
“Say my name,” I heard myself beg.
“Gray.”
“My real name.”
His jaw worked.
“Liath.”
My name in his mouth slammed through my body like electricity, every muscle in me tightening, a raw, perfect ache shattering from the base of my spine, wild and inevitable.
I came apart.
He followed a beat later, his face buried against my throat, his arms locked around me, his whole body bracing through it like a man going under.
The room came back in pieces.
His weight was on me. His heaving chest against mine. His breath against my collarbone, slowing.
The gray light through the red drapes. The satisfied ache in between my legs. The cool of the air against my skin. The faint scent of crushed black violets.
The pot lay on its side in a half-circle of dark soil. The plant had gone over with it, its roots exposed, the small dark flowers tangled in the broken clay.
Nestled within the wreckage was something dark and small; the impact had knocked it loose from where it had been hidden among the violets.
I went cold all over.
It had a black plastic body the size of a thumbnail and a round glass eye.
A camera.
A hidden camera in the wreckage of my flowers, lens still pointed at us.
My breath stopped.
Lorcan’s head came up. His eyes searched my face for half a second, then followed my gaze down to the floor.
His arms tensed around me and he went very still, staring silently at the camera for one long beat.
I lay there under his weight with my mind running ahead of me into the only question that mattered.
Who?
Who had planted it in this room? Who had watched me? Watched us? Who had stolen our private moment?
Who had been listening when he’d called me Liath?
Oh God.
Either Deargán had planted a camera in this room to keep tabs on me.
Or Alistair now knew everything.