Page 170 of Twisting Beauty

I paused at the door. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to take care of him.” He smiled and it chilled me to the bone. “Once and for all.”

I stood outside her bedroom door.

She had asked for space. I should give it to her. I should walk away.

I did not.

Alistair’s words kept moving in my head. Once and for all.

Alistair did not say once and for all about a man he meant to leave standing. He did not need a location for the Garda. He needed it for an execution.

A dark part of me reveled in the thought of Deargán, gone. The man who had dared to put his hands on her, gone. The threat to her, gone. The promise she made to him, gone.

But a bigger part of me had gone cold.

She would not forgive me.

Whatever Deargán was to her, she would grieve him. She would grieve him in front of me. She would look at me and know I had been the one to send my father to his door.

The thought sat in my chest like a stone.

No, I’d make her forgive me. I would not stop until she did. I would wait. I would grovel. I would do whatever it took.

But first I needed to put my eyes on her. I needed to be near her. To know she was safe behind her door, far from what I had just set in motion. I needed to be the thing standing between her and what was coming.

I knocked. “Gray?”

But there was no answer.

An icy dread wrapped its fingers around my throat.

I knocked again as I opened her door. “Gray?”

The bed was made. Her coat was gone from the back of the chair. The lamp was off.

Her room was empty.

A cold certainty struck me like a physical blow to the chest.

That’s why she was being distant. She needed to get out from under my nose.

She had gone to Deargán.

And I had just told my father where to find him.

I had sent my father’s path straight into hers.

47

LIATH

Idropped through the half-open carriage house window and landed in a crouch on the floorboards, the dusk behind me going purple at the edges.

I shouldn’t be here.

But after what Deargán had proposed we do to Lorcan, I had to know what kind of man he really was. I needed proof. Of his truth. Or his lies. To find out what he hadn’t told me. Now. Before I made one more decision.