Page 138 of Twisting Beauty

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.

40

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.