Page 2 of Twisting Beauty

He wanted a son who could look beauty in the face and feel nothing. A son who could cut tenderness out of himself before anyone else noticed it had ever been there. A son who would inherit cruelty as cleanly as money, estate, and name.

There was already too much of that in me to pretend innocence.

I hated that there was a part of me that was still… too sensitive.

“Yes, sir.”

In the heavy silence, I took stock. My back burned. The skin had split in at least two places. But no ribs were broken. A tame punishment, thank God.

“Get out, boy. The sight of you disgusts me.”

The final insult skimmed over the surface, and I felt it, briefly, like a stone breaking water, but I let it sink, buried beneath the stillness I’d mastered.

“Thank you, sir.”

I turned and strode toward the door, moving as if nothing hurt. Not too fast. He hated when I fled. But I didn’t linger either.

I flung open the door of his study with his disappointment still ringing louder than the throb in my back.

I didn’t see her until I slammed right into her.

The impact knocked the wind from us both, her breath catching in a soft gasp as she stumbled back.

I smelled her before I registered who she was, black violets and sweet skin that cut clean through the absinthe and humiliation still clinging to me.

My hand closed around her waist on instinct and I hauled her back against me before she could fall.

Her body hit mine hard, all soft heat and startled breath, and suddenly there was nowhere to look that was not her. Our faces hovered a breath apart, close enough that her exhale brushed my mouth.

Her hand landed flat on my chest, right over my heartbeat, and the contact sent a hard kick through me that had no business being there.

For one jagged second, I thought Rua was back. The memory of her hit hard and wrong, all her pathetic desperation and grabbing hands, all her frantic need that used to crawl over my skin and leave me feeling dirtied by it.

But the girl in my arms held herself still. Watching me.

A hard, ugly tightness drew low in my gut. My hand stayed at her waist longer than it should have.

Her gaze slid past my shoulder to the closed study door behind me, and something in her expression softened in a way that made my skin pull tight. Her eyes traveled back to my face and held me there.

This girl looked at me as if she understood exactly what had happened in that room.

She looked at me as if she could see the bruises beneath my clothes.

She looked at me as if I were breakable.

Worse, she looked at me as if she wanted to soothe it.

My whole body locked. Shame flared hot and vicious through my chest. I would have taken contempt, fear, even disgust over that.

She pitied me.

Rua had never looked at me with pity.

She had looked at me as if I were the only one in that house who understood what it meant to be trapped in it. Like I knew the shape of her suffering because I carried my own version of it under my skin.

There had always been something feverish in the way Rua watched me, something needy and warped and far too intimate for what we were.

I studied this girl’s face.