Page 158 of Twisting Beauty

A wave of nausea moved through me so fast I almost collapsed, grabbing for the back of the nearest chair as he kept talking.

“They spun the whole thing into me trying to murder the love of my life. Turned me into the jealous spurned ex.”

I wanted it to be true. Because if it was, I hadn’t been wrong.

“Then they killed her parents, framed her, made her look insane, all to steal her inheritance, while I was rotting in Skellig Mór, unable to do a fucking thing.”

Deargán sank into a chair, his free hand running through his hair, the prison tattoo number flashing on the inside of his wrist.

God, I felt his pain. I didn’t want to. But I felt it. The helplessness. The rage. The grief.

“So, yes, when I was released, I was savage with rage. I killed Lasair Senior for what he did to her.” He looked up at me for the first time since he’d started speaking. “But I never tried to kill her. I was trying to rescue her. Her and her… son.”

His voice turned bitter on the last word.

He’d hated Lorcan since before Lorcan had a name. He’d hated him for being made the way he’d been made. And he would still have raised him.

For her.

I believed all of it. I hated that I believed all of it.

He drank the last of his cognac and set the glass down. He stood, the torment falling off him like a cloak as he placed his mask on again.

“Alistair’s father was a monster. He made Alistair a monster. If I’d gotten her and the boy out when he was a child, he might have been saved.”

Deargán held my eyes.

“But it’s too late. He’s one of them. Alistair’s grooming him into something irreversible. Not just to take over the asylum, but to expand it into the twisted empire Alistair is making it.”

For a moment I was back in the drawing room. Candlelight. The smell of cigar smoke and absinthe. A masked man’s hand pushing up my skirt, fingers tightening when I tried to get away. The girl draped across the laps of laughing men with her dress askew, her head lolling, her eyes wide and empty.

I came back into the carriage house with a shudder.

It felt too close to the truth.

“Lorcan is not beyond saving,” I said, needing to believe it.

Deargán crossed to the bookshelf, slid a sheaf of papers from between two books, and dropped them onto the small table between us.

“Don’t believe me? Don’t take my word for any of it.” He tapped the top page with one finger. “This proves your pretty little lover is as corrupt as his father.”

I picked up the papers, noticing they appeared to be a photocopy.

Deed of Conveyance.

It was written across the top, a solicitor’s stamp in the upper corner, witness signatures at the bottom in two different hands.

It was the property deed to Magdalene. All of it. The land, the buildings, the holdings.

And there was the owner’s name.

Lorcan Lasair.

“He is one of them,” Deargán said.

The deed papers slipped out of my fingers and scattered to the floor.

If Lorcan owned the place, he had the power to close it. To open the wards. To let every girl walk out the front gates.