Page 72 of Beautiful Liar

“What?”

“Your father. Dead. Daniel. Dead.”

My knees trembled but I managed to remain on my feet.

“Driver dead. Your mother…” he let the word hang. Dead.

“My mother what?”

“Dead,” he answered dryly.

My mother dead. I processed that information through pain, and I didn’t know how to feel. She was dead. “How?”

“OD’d.”

That was always her fate. Like Jack’s mother. “Did you do it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes! It matters to me. Did you?”

“No. I was here.”

I didn’t know why it mattered that it hadn’t been Luca. He’d been here this whole time, watching me, torturing me. But I found that better than him being the one to kill my mother.

“You’ve erased me.”

“Not all of you.”

Nick. My brother Nick was still alive. Still the best out of all of us.

Everything I’d ever held back, every racking pain I’d felt throughout the years. Anger and shame rushed through me in a dark wave of hatred. Something inside of me snapped. I slammed into Luca. I wanted to kill him. To see his blood. My shoulder landed perfectly under his sternum as I lifted with all the strength I had and slammed him into the ground. The knife still in his hand. He lifted it, but I had the advantage being over him. I used my body to push the tip down into his thick vest. His hands trembled, keeping me from becoming a murderer.

I wanted to dig the knife through his cold, black heart. Everyone I’d ever loved had hurt me. Mom sold me. Daniel and Dad knew. They fucking knew. Dad had bought protection with my heart, my body. Tears ran down my face. My mother was dead.

Luca grunted. Lips peeled back. My eyes cleared. The top of the knife had disappeared into his flesh, blood pooled around the tip, darkening his shirt. A sharp realization seized me, clamped around my chest. Luca’s wide eyes the only thing I saw as I killed him. I unclamped my fingers from the hilt of the blade and scrambled back, sucking in a sob. Panic crawled under my skin. I hit the ground hard, and crawled back as far as I could go as Luca sat up breathing hard. His expression a mixture of anger and pain. He pulled out the tip of the knife from his shoulder.

“You are going to pay for that,” he growled out with murder in his eyes.

I jumped to my feet and ran. With no other direction I could go, I headed into the one place Kieran warned us not to go through.

The catacombs.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Kieran

The door led to a winding staircase going deeper underground. It shuddered under my weight. Blood pulsed in my ears as I took it down to the belly of the earth. The dirt landing preceded the entrance to the cave. Just a narrow opening. I moved slow, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. I hadn’t brought a light with me, and I soon regretted it. A storage bench sat just at the entrance, and I knew it would hold supplies. At least a fucking working flashlight. All I had to do was brave the darkness within it.

I lifted the seat sending spiders scurrying. The trill sound of bugs echoed in the dark space. Fucking bugs. I hated bugs. I shoved my hand inside feeling my skin crawl. Sweat beaded my brow, my heart raced inside my chest. The bugs climbed on me, crawled along my exposed skin, burrowed underneath. I couldn’t breathe. Finally, I grazed the small flashlight and yanked it out, letting the bench slam closed. It echoed in the dark chamber. My heart pounding in my ears, I rubbed my hand along my clothes. There was nothing there. Nothing. It’d been my imagination. I was fine. Fucking fine.

I didn’t believe it until I turned on the light and inspected my hands, my arms. Nothing. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with my sleeve and aimed the small beam of light into the cave. The light it emitted did nothing to stem the claustrophobic feeling pulsing inside of me with a warning to run. Darkness swallowed everything outside the narrow beam of light. The cave was stifling. Making it hard not to think of the tons of rock above me. A slight shift would send it all on top of my head.

The guys and I had learned of the catacombs from the journals left at Arcas House. It was one of the secrets we were afforded by being bastards of one of the Four. Information.

So long as I remained on the painted path, I’d be fine. It’d lead me out. Luca knew this too. The path ran on a downward arc for the first hundred yards before it evened out. The sound of my breath was jarring in the silence.

Cillian had hidden me in cellars when he’d first taken me from my grandmother. We’d moved from cellar to cellar. I kept thinking it was a cave, like this one. With no way out. But the bugs were the worst of it. I felt them burrowing under my skin, in my ears, my nose. Their sounds like wailing ghosts wanting my soul. I had killed to make that feeling stop. To keep myself from being buried alive. For my own safety, I had become the assassin my grandfather wanted just so he wouldn’t put me back in that damn cellar.

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