Page 131 of Twisting Beauty

The Ravenwood lab smelled of formalin and the rubber of fresh gloves. I drifted to my usual bench, a white sheet covering the small frame of the cadaver in front of me.

Bridgit’s screaming was still echoing in my head, the ghost of Nuala’s cold hand still in mine before Finn took her home. I hoped she was holding herself together.

I hoped Bridgit could hold on. Long enough for me to figure out how to bring the whole rotten place down.

The lab door opened.

Lorcan walked in, moving stiffly. Not enough that anyone else clocked it.

He paused in the doorway, hand on the doorframe, scanning the benches.

His icy eyes found mine across the lab and held.

I braced for the rejection, for his gaze to slide past me like I didn’t exist.

Instead, he walked the length of the lab toward me.

The whiskey and woodsmoke caught at the back of my throat and the low broken violins dropped behind my eyes as he took the place beside me at the bench.

Something warm moved in my chest before I could stop it.

I glanced sideways at him.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at me. He lowered his bag to the shelving underneath and pushed the sleeves of his charcoal sweater up to his elbows.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” Powell called from the front of the class.

I reached out and pulled the sheet back, revealing the body underneath.

The world stopped as I stared at her.

I was hallucinating. It couldn’t be. What…? How…?

I blinked. The horrible image didn’t change.

It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. A face that just resembled hers under the bad light, that’s all. That’s all it was.

I blinked again.

It remained Maeve.

Her face was the wrong color. Her mouth had fallen slightly open, the way a sleeping mouth falls open, except no breath was moving through it. Her hair had been combed back from her forehead. Her eyes were open. Her doe eyes. They were staring up at the ceiling tiles, wide and brown and gone.

I forgot how to breathe.

The lab kept moving cruelly around me, students bent over their own bodies, arguing over who was going to get to cut into them first. Laughter sounded like an echo. Powell said something about scalpel angles, his voice arriving as if from a long way off. The clock’s small arthritic tick sounded like guns being cocked.

Nobody seemed to understand that she had been someone.

The wide-eyed girl who hid behind a too large mug at the dining hall. Who’d slipped sugar into my tea. Who held my hand when I was scared.

No one understood. No one saw.

Except Lorcan.

He shifted between me and the room, shielding me from them, standing close enough that the front of his sweater grazed my arm. I could feel his gaze on me.

“Gray?” Concern laced his tone.