40. Deargán
DEARGáN
Isat in my chair grinding my teeth as I watched their two bodies colliding on the screen.
I had sat in this chair almost daily since I’d planted it in her room. Surveying my soldier. Watching her dress for college in the morning. Watching her sleep.
A man checks on his own asset.
I had known the boy was a threat. I had known she’d gotten under his skin. I had not expected him to get under hers.
Her bedroom was rendered in the soft pixel grain. But the audio was clear.
“Say my name,” she whispered to him in a voice I’d never heard before. In a voice that she’d never used on me.
“Gray.”
She kept her eyes on his as they moved together. “My real name.”
I stilled. No. She wouldn’t have given him that.
“Liath.”
She broke open under him. They both climaxed together. Clinging to each other.
My hand tightened around my cognac glass as I threw it back, the burn doing nothing to soothe me.
Stupid, stupid girl.
I had spent months training her to answer to Rua in her sleep, and she had handed her real name to that boy like a trinket.
She had betrayed me.
Suddenly the glass was being hurled from my hand.
It shattered against the screen, cognac warping their naked bodies as if drowning them in amber, glass raining down in pieces on the floor.
A feminine tsk cut through their heavy breaths.
“Look at the mess you made.”
I turned.
Pie distended from the shadows in the corner of the room.
Silence stretched as I cursed her for intruding. I wanted to be left alone with my fury.
She drifted to the screen where they lay together in her bed afterward, naked limbs tangled together.
“He’s grown up to be very handsome,” she murmured as her fingertips brushed his face. “Devastatingly so. I can see why she chose him.”
I stiffened, jealousy curdling my blood. I turned my back on her under the pretense of lighting another cigarette, the zip and flare of the flame giving me something to do with my hands, hands that wouldn’t stop trembling.
She already saw too much. She always had.
“She’s just using him,” I spat out along with bitter smoke.
Pie laughed. “You’re jealous.”
“I’m not jealous.” I spun toward her. “He’s just a fucking boy.”
She tilted her head. “Sure. This deranged shrine you’ve built of her is perfectly normal.” Pie waved a hand at my wall covered in dozens of photos of her.
Her. Her. Her. Always fucking her.
She pulled a photo off the wall, one of Liath with Rua’s shorter hair, but wearing a vintage purple dress. She folded it slowly, then dropped it into the ashtray. A smoldering cigarette butt caught the corner.
“What happened to your plan?” she asked as Liath caught fire. “Your rules?”
“I’m protecting her,” I said, a little too quickly, the edge in my voice betraying the guilt curling low in my gut. “She doesn’t see how dangerous the boy is. I do.”
“You’re watching her like a dog watches its bone.”
“She’s mine,” I snapped. “I saved her.”
“You broke her.”
“She owes me.”
“She doesn’t owe you her heart.”
“We’ll see about that.” I turned toward the screen.
To Liath staring right into the camera.
Looking at me without seeing me.
“You’ll understand,” I whispered to her, my fingers brushing her face. “You’ll thank me. We’ll build a life together out of their ashes.”
My plans had been too careful. Too clean. I had tried to move pieces around as if this could still be won without blood on my hands.
But she had chosen wrong, and now careful would get her killed.
If saving her meant becoming the thing she feared, then I would become it.
“If she wants monsters… I’ll show her one.”
My gaze narrowed on the boy’s face.
“When I’m finished,” I vowed, “there’ll be no one left to mourn him.”
I snatched the knife off the side table and stabbed it into his face. The screen sparked before going black.
“Alistair’s bloodline ends with him.”