Page 154 of Twisting Beauty

“He tried to kill me as a baby.”

For a moment, Lorcan’s words didn’t sink in. How could they? They were impossible.

But then my eyes caught on a heading. Local Man Charged with Attempted Murder.

Bron Deargán, twenty-three, son of the Blackwood’s gardener. Charged with the attempted murder of Alistair Lasair’s wife and her unborn baby. Apprehended on the Lasair grounds. The baby and mother survived.

The unborn baby.

Lorcan.

The clipping next to it was longer. Deargán Sentenced to Five Years.

Then another. Defendant Showed No Remorse, Court Hears.

The clippings blurred together as the blood drained from my head. A sickening, cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck as the room spun.

I couldn’t breathe. My lungs forgot how to pull in air.

I had trusted him.

I had built the man in my head out of grief. I had taken the blame he laid at the Lasairs and called it justified. I had worn my dead sister’s face and walked into a den of wolves because he told me it was justice.

The floor tilted underneath me. I would have collapsed to the floor if Lorcan’s arm hadn’t come around me, holding me up. I clutched on to him to stop myself from falling off the earth entirely, the horrifying truth vibrating in my very bones.

Deargán had tried to kill an unborn baby.

He had broken into this house and tried to put his hands on a woman and the child in her belly and end them both.

There was no justification for that.

The next set of clippings was newer, the paper less yellow.

Lasair’s Monster Released on Parole.

Then below it was a photo taken at a distance. A man in a long dark coat being led out of the gates of Lasair Manor in cuffs. The same set to his shoulders. Older.

Aging Lasair Patriarch Found Dead — Throat Cut in Library.

Then another booking photo. Older Deargán. Salt at his temples. The same flat dark eyes.

Fifteen Years for Murder.

He had come back.

He had served his sentence and walked out and come straight back to this house and cut the old man’s throat.

I had walked past Lorcan’s grandfather’s portrait in the hall. The stern face. The high collar. The mouth that did not soften.

Deargán killing the old patriarch I could maybe make fit. A man who had loved a woman and lost her, blaming the family that had committed her, taking the head of it years too late. Ugly, but legible.

But Lorcan’s mother. Her baby. I couldn’t make that sit right.

The clippings told me what he had done. Not one of them told me why.

Unless…

I glanced at the pillow on the bed. To Lena, in faded silk thread.