45. Liath
LIATH
For a moment I just stared at Lorcan.
Hurt cut through his face before he buried it in fury.
Fuck the deed. Fuck the kiss. Fuck every man in my life thinking he got to decide for me.
I cut sideways into the trees, away from him, cold air stinging my face, cognac still under my tongue.
Behind me, a branch snapped under his boot. “Why would you go behind my back?”
I didn’t look at him, even as he caught up. “Because I’m sick of both you and him deciding what I’m allowed to know.”
“Liath.”
“I needed the truth, okay?” I snapped a branch out of my way. “And I needed it without you there blowing it up.”
He fell into step beside me, close enough that his whiskey and cellos pressed in on me. “Go on, then. What did the fucking murderer put in your head this time?”
I whirled on him, causing us both to halt. “He loved your mother. And she loved him.”
He went very still.
I knew the words on my tongue would hurt him. I said them anyway. “She never chose your father. He forced her into marrying him.”
“Lies,” he snapped, too fast, even as something moved across his face.
“No, your father has been drowning you in lies since before you were born. You just can’t see it because it’s all you know.”
He worried the inside of his cheek, his eyes searching my face.
The deed sat in my chest. Did you know? Have you known? Are you one of them?
The questions were burning on my tongue. I almost said it. Almost accused him of it.
But I bit them back. I didn’t know how he’d answer. I wasn’t sure I’d survive the truth. I hated myself for not wanting to know.
“So that’s all it takes, huh?” His voice had gone quiet and cruel. “One fucking kiss from him and you’re swallowing his lies.”
I stomped past him.
If I stayed, I’d either tell him everything or hurt him worse. I was angry at Deargán. At Lorcan. At myself.
“You don’t get to walk away from me,” he called out, his voice cracking, like it was the one thing he couldn’t survive.
I turned back on him before he reached me.
He came in fast, his body colliding with mine.
My back hit the tree, the bark of it pressing through my coat into my shoulder blades, his body pinning me there.
His hand came up around my throat, his fingers curving around the sides of my neck, his thumb under my jaw, firm and possessive, his voice hard. “I don’t give a shite what you think you owe him. You chose me and you can’t take it back.”
His mouth came down on mine, kissing me hard and bruising, like he was claiming back territory. His teeth caught my lower lip and his tongue swept in. Whiskey flooded over the cognac that had been sitting on my mouth.
My hands came up to shove him off. Instead, they hit his chest and curled into the front of his coat, pulling him in closer, kissing him back with a matching violent need.
His hand tightened on my throat, just enough that every pulse hammered against his palm.
My fingers dragged through his hair. His other hand was up under my coat.
Mine were yanking at his belt. We were tearing at each other like we were both trying to reach something inside the other before it got away.
“Ownership isn’t trust,” I hissed into his mouth as I ground against him.
He pulled back half an inch, his eyes almost all black, his breath coming hard.
“Then what is it going to take, Gray?” The question landed like a demand as he cupped my breast and rubbed my nipple through my top with his thumb. “What is it going to take for you to trust me?”
The answer was sitting in my throat even as he stole moans from me.
Choose me over your father.
Fuck. I couldn’t say it. If I asked him for the choice and he didn’t give me the answer, I’d never come back from that. I wasn’t strong enough to bear his hesitation.
He kissed me again, like he was trying to pull the answer out of me with his mouth.
I yanked his belt open. His hand pushed up under my skirt, finding me bare from this morning. His fingers slid through me. I was already wet, already arched into his palm.
“Christ. Gray.”
I didn’t answer with my mouth. I unzipped him and freed his cock and wrapped my hand around the heat of it, making his eyes roll back into his head.
He hauled me up against the tree. My legs came up around his waist. The bark scraped my back where my clothes had ridden up, biting into my skin in lines I’d carry tomorrow. I wanted to carry them. I wanted the proof of this on my body.
“Wait.” He tore his mouth away from mine. “Condom.”
“Implant. Clean.”
“Fuck. Me, too.” He thrust into me roughly, all the way.
I cried out and he caught the sound in his mouth as he fucked me against the tree.
It didn’t answer anything. It only gave us both something to do with the pain.
Lorcan’s broken-symphony violins, raw and ragged at the edges, crescendoed with every thrust.
God, I was coming apart already.
His hands hard on my hips. His mouth on my neck, my throat, my breast. His teeth in the meat of my shoulder, on my bottom lip, hard on my nipple.
And under all of it—the taste of cognac. Faint, bitter, still there.
I tried to swallow it down under Lorcan’s whiskey, to drown it in the heat of him.
But the cognac stayed.
I swore I saw movement at the edge of my vision. A figure, dark against the trees. Watching.
Lorcan’s hand came up to my throat and turned my face back to his, his eyes hard and the figure was lost to the trees.
“You’re mine.” He thrust deeper, harder, claiming me. “Say it, Gray.”
Pleasure tore through me as I came, feeling like surrender and betrayal at the same time.
My head fell into his neck.
“Yours,” I whispered.
Unsure which man I was talking to.
The stone corridors of Ravenwood narrowed with every passing second as Lorcan and Deargán turned them into hunting grounds.
Lorcan’s hand shot out as I passed an alcove, clamping my wrist, dragging me into the shadows.
My back slammed against the cold stone. His eyes burned into mine. Heat flooded low in my belly.
I shouldn’t be feeling this. Not with the deed sitting in my chest. Not with the things I hadn’t told him.
The lie sat between us like a blade I kept palming, and still my body arched toward him, hungry for the hand I should have been pushing away.
His breath scorched my cheek as he bent close. “Fuck, I missed you.”
A sound broke in my throat. I caught it before it could become a moan. “It’s been one period.”
“Too long.” His hiss was raw against my ear. He nudged my scarf down and smirked at the hickey he’d given me against the tree. “Fuck, I like marking you.”
I should have pushed him off. I didn’t.
My pulse hammered as his hand came up under my sweater, cupping my breast.
“Maybe I leave another mark on you.” He scraped his teeth against my pulse as his thumb dragged across my nipple, stealing a groan out of me.
“Miss Lasair.” Deargán’s voice rolled slow and deliberate from down the corridor like the tightening of a noose. “I need you for a moment.”
Lorcan stiffened, his body blocking mine, pressing me harder into the wall, his breath savage in my ear. “You’ll talk to me. Not him.”
“Of course, Professor,” I forced out.
I pushed at Lorcan’s chest.
His fingers trailed down my wrist as I slipped free.
I brushed down my sweater and fixed my scarf, trying to erase the heat of his hands and teeth, before walking out toward Deargán at the end of the corridor.
Deargán’s hand met my back as I reached him.
He guided me down a skinny corridor that emptied of people the farther we went. The ambient chatter of the main hall faded, replaced by the hollow, echoing drip of an old pipe and the hum of the wall sconces. He was walking me somewhere there were no witnesses.
He blocked the narrow passage, pressing me into a row of dented metal lockers with one hand braced against the rusted metal. “Finally. I thought I’d never get you away from him.”
The cognac taste flickered up under my tongue at the sound of his voice.
My body answered the way he had trained it to, and I hated that. I hated that my pulse climbed under his gaze. I hated knowing exactly how easily I could fall into his weight and let him take over.
His hand slipped around the outside of my thigh, brushing the hem of my skirt. “Has he explained the deed?”
I shoved his hand away. “I haven’t asked him.”
“Liath.”
“I’m not going to until I know more.”
He pressed in closer, his breath at my cheek. “This isn’t a game. He is the enemy.”
“There you are.” Lorcan’s voice cracked sharp through the corridor. “We’ll be late for class.”
Deargán’s lips brushed my ear. “I don’t know what he’s told you, but he’s got blood on his hands. You can’t trust him.”
Lorcan stopped beside me, his gaze locked on Deargán’s hand caging me in. “I’d back off, sir. Wouldn’t want anyone reporting a teacher’s hands on a student.”
Deargán’s grip tightened. “Run along, boy. I’m not finished with her.”
Lorcan seized my other arm, his grip bruising as his glare cut into Deargán. “Let her go. Now. Or I’ll have your criminal record pulled in front of the whole faculty.”
Deargán’s jaw ticked once before his hand opened, releasing me.
I was forced to walk to class between them. Neither stepped away. Two men who had each decided I belonged to them.
Aoife was at the lecture hall door when we got there, her eyes going to Lorcan’s hand on my arm. Then to Deargán at my other side. Then to my face. Then back to Lorcan.
In class, Lorcan sprawled in the seat beside me so I was pressed against him, his thigh flush to mine, his arm slung across the back of my chair, his notes and books spread across both our desks like he was staking his claim.
Deargán glared at us as he started his lecture, his gaze never leaving me.
“Today we turn to the neuroscience of forbidden desire,” he said, his tone smooth and clinical, yet edged with something darker.
“Why does the human brain ache for what it is told it cannot have? Why do taboos inflame, rather than extinguish hunger?”