Page 132 of Twisting Beauty

“I k-know…”

My throat closed over.

I knew her.

Maeve, pale and slack. Her doe eyes open because nobody had cared enough to close them.

Lorcan cursed under his breath as he shifted further, this time moving between me and her. “Don’t look at her, Gray.”

But I couldn’t hear him properly. I was looking past his arm, at her wrist.

A clean vertical line, dark, scabbed dry around the edges.

Suicide.

She’d killed herself because I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save her and she couldn’t take it anymore.

The world went quiet inside my head.

Except… one detail refused to fit.

I stared at the cut on her wrist. At the cut down the inside of her left wrist. A cut that she would’ve made with her right hand.

But Maeve was left-handed.

Not suicide.

Not suicide.

Made to look like suicide.

A sick certainty rose up through me. They’d killed her.

Because she was a threat to them?

Or a warning to me? Did they leave her here for me to find?

The grief came up so fast it knocked the air out of me, the world blurring behind hot tears, a scream coming up behind it, gathering somewhere low and rising.

A hand clamped over my mouth.

Lorcan’s palm. His other arm came around me, locking me against his front, pinning my arms in the crook of his elbow, his body braced like a barrier between me and the rest of the lab.

He lifted me off my feet and carried me out of class. No one questioned him. Not the professor. Not the students. No one dared to stop him.

The rest was a blur.

It was only when he kicked a door shut behind him and the familiar smell of black violets came over me that I realized where we were.

My room. Rua’s room.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled me into his lap, my knees falling down around his muscular thighs. His arms closed around me.

The scream that had crawled back down somewhere, curled back up now. What came out was a sound I didn’t recognize as having come from me, broken and raw, splitting the air like a wounded animal.

All I could see was Maeve.

Maeve’s doe eyes over that mug. Maeve’s pleading glassy eyes. Maeve eyes frosted over and open as she lay on the slab.