Page 117 of Twisting Beauty

Finn’s father.

“Sir.” I lowered my voice. “What are you doing here?”

“Lorcan.” The hand went to the knot of his tie, his gold ring flashing as he adjusted it. “Good to see you, son.”

He clapped my shoulder, not meeting my eyes, before he moved past me.

Around me the room seemed to transform.

In the corner, Aoife’s father held a girl with a cracked smile too closely, his hand low on her hip. The man with a girl slumped across his lap was Elias’s father. Shit, that was Dean Bewley in the corner pressed up against a half-slumped girl. Faces from fundraisers, rugby clubhouses, board dinners. All of them here. All of them with the same hungry look on their faces.

Something cold moved up my spine.

A glass clinked and the room quieted as they turned toward the fireplace.

My father stood in front of the hearth with a fresh absinthe raised in his hand.

“Friends.” He smiled the warm smile. “New friends. Old friends.”

Where had she gone? She had been gone four minutes. Maybe five. Long enough. I glanced back to the side door, still frustratingly closed and much too far away.

“I have spent the evening looking around this room and feeling something I have not felt in a long time. Trust.”

Alistair’s eyes found me over the rim of his glass.

“Trust is the rarest commodity in our line of work, gentlemen. Tonight, I look around this room and I see men I trust. Men I am proud to call partners.”

If I went after her now, he’d notice. He would disapprove. He was already furious at me for my reaction earlier. His voice might have exuded charm when he brushed my behavior off, but I’d caught the look in his eye.

I would be punished.

“A toast… to the partnerships ahead of us.”

Glasses lifted.

Fuck it. I did not look back at my father as I crossed to the door.

“To our collective growth. To a very, very profitable year and…”

I slipped out into the servants’ hallway, following it along until I came to the staircase that lead up through the servants’ entrance to the bedrooms. I took the stairs two at a time, drawn toward the distant murmur.

As I moved down the landing, voices came low from up ahead. Hers and a man’s, both pitched too low for the words to carry.

I moved toward them, keeping my steps slow and measured, avoiding the floorboards that creaked as I neared the corner.

“…is your enemy. Not your fucking lover.”

I stepped out into the corridor.

She was staring up at one of the guests, the one wearing the plague doctor’s mask. He was standing close to her. Too close.

The sight of it hit me like a punch, hot and immediate, my temper flaring at once with the ugly certainty that I had arrived late to something I was never meant to see.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

Both of them turned.

For a split second, I thought I saw panic flash across her face. But it was gone so quickly I couldn’t be sure.