Page 68 of Beautiful Liar

Declan sat in a throne-like chair with a girl between his legs sucking him off. Tor and Rumor stood like sentinels beside him. Not sure what they would do if she decided to bite his dick off, though. She seemed to be working too hard anyway.Give the girl a break.Out of all the Brennans, Declan was the deadbeat.

Edward Marz had his eyes on Henry. Collared and sitting on a cushion next to his sister’s feet like a fucking dog as she ran her small, delicate fingers through his hair. She must’ve forced him to wear make-up and dressed him in a tight fitted net top with leather pants. I’d never seen Henry wear anything like it. He looked beautiful if it hadn’t been for the look in his eyes. Henry had checked out the moment he’d knelt on that cushion and Tor looked ready to remove Constance’s head from her shoulders.

“You should’ve challenged her for him,” Dasher said from his spot inside a locked cage. The key to his cage dangled from a chain on my neck. He’d been pissed and I had to knock him around to get him inside, but he was safe. That had been the extent of my deal with Fox for Tomás’s safety.

The fucker was getting on my nerves.

And I needed a drink.

No students had made it to the castle yet and it’d already been seven hours. The sun had dipped to the west. Nightfall approached fast in the mountains. Jose, the bartender, was stocking up at the other side of the bar as I waited.

Luca appeared beside me at the bar like the freaky ghost he was. The fucker made the hairs on my skin crawl, and he wasn’t in his face paint. He was as tall as me, hazel-green eyes made the coloring hard to pinpoint, light brown hair combed to perfection, and sharp features that always gave men like him the advantage in getting attention. Whether he wanted it or not, the fucker was handsome. If I didn’t know what lay underneath that beautiful surface, I might have been interested way back when. Before Tomás.

“You break into my room again and I’ll break your legs,” I said dryly.

Luca’s smile widened. “I’d expect nothing less.”

The fucking weirdo.

“But do enlighten me—do you not care for your young lover? I’d think you would’ve collared him. Is he not your pet?”

I ground my teeth. I would’ve told him to fuck off. None of his fucking business, but Luca was a fucking hound dog. Once he caught a scent you just had to suffer the sniff. I’d been on the downwind of his interrogation before while we both were tasked on a job together.“Why not the close kill? Do you not like the intimacy?”

And the thing with Luca was that he wasn’t placating, hewasn’t judging, he genuinely wanted to know. As if he was so fucked up in the head, he couldn’t figure out the most benign human condition on his own. “No,” I lied. “I don’t care for him and stop calling him my lover. That’s…”

I didn’t finish because the fucker laughed.

I tapped the bar. If the bartender didn’t take my order soon, I wasn’t going to be responsible for what I did next.

Luca slid in front of me. No respect for space. And I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of making me move away from him. Our bodies so close that I felt his thigh against my dick. He shifted his leg deeper, rubbing me. “What the fuck are you doing, Luca?” I kept my voice neutral willing my dick not to react. It was a dick. And it reacted.

“Aren’t you curious how it could be with someone else?”

“Is this your way of telling me you have a crush on me?” I arched my brow, proud that my voice did not waver. That I managed to make it sound like he wasn’t tripping me up with his guileless attention.

“I can feel you, Kieran. I see.” He leaned in close, and I stiffened. Instead of kissing me, he dragged his lips against my jaw to my ear. “Do you want me?”

“No,” I said. The fucking truth. “I do want to kick your ass.”

Luca leaned back, his eyes on mine, pulling something from me into a sieve and loosening all the particles that held me together. “You do love him.”

My heart jolted inside my chest. “Fuck you.”

“Do not lie. Lies fester. They stain what could be. Even if they fall from the lips of a beautiful liar.” He cocked his head. “Tell me, Kieran. What would you do to protect your beautiful liar?”

“Anything,” I blurted without thought. The truth within the lie. “I’d do anything.”

“Remember that when the truth finds you.”

Luca slid out from his spot in front of me without so much as a graze against my body. The bartender smiled and I wanted to punch his perfect white teeth. “What can I get for you?”

“Water,” I said.

He waited a second before pouring me a glass of water. Luca was playing a fucking game. What it was and why, were answers I wasn’t getting from him. But the game included Tomás. For some fucking reason, he’d honed interest in Tomás, and I couldn’t pinpoint why, and it was killing me. Did he think Tomás knew what was in the coat tag he gave him? Why give it to Tomás and not Alessandro? Not me?

I drank the water, sating my dry throat. Time was all I had now.

I finished my water and asked for two more. I gave one to Dasher and the second one to Henry. Constance paused her petting when I reached him. I crouched down in front of him, ignoring her scowl.

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