Page 28 of Broken Shadows

Lorcan looks around to ensure we’re alone, then lowers his mask. It’s either to show me I can trust him, or to trick me into believing he cares so I lower my defenses. “I do care.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Yes, but not about what you think.”

“You were going to lock me in the Shadow Realm,” I state. “You were going to use me to get out and have me take your place.”

“I changed my mind,” he said simply.

I scoff a laugh. “You don’t even deny it.”

“No,” he admits, but quickly adds, “but I did change my mind. That night, in the library. Maybe even before then.” He pauses briefly, as if he’s catching his breath. He’s a good actor, I’ll give him that. Although, he’s a demon so what can I expect? He continues in that heartbreak, bullshit tone, “I’m not good at this and maybe it took me a minute to realize what I was feeling was more than lust—”

“Oh Hell no. Don’t go there.” I shake my head and squeeze my eyes shut. I just killed a man. This shouldn’t bother me at all. We didn’t even have anything real.It was just sex, something primal, and dark. It was nothing deep.

His expression crumples. He actually has theaudacityto look hurt. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

Damn. My thoughts were too loud. I’d pushed them through our blood bond. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

His tone is so soft it hurts. “Please.”

One word, that’s all it takes, and I freeze to the spot.

He continues. “You think I was in love with Evangeline?”

“Weren’t you?” I ask, trying to keep the desperation from my tone, but my body betrays me, and my face flushes with heat. He tilts his head, and I notice the subtle shift and the corner of his lip curves.

“No,” he replies, and my breath hitches. I want to believe him, but I can’t. Otherwise, I deserve whatever happens to me after this. He lets out a prolonged sigh. “She’d shrouded my memories in smoke, and I only remembered everything recently. Everything I thought I felt was artificial. She loved me but I never reciprocated her feelings, and she hates me for it. It’s why she wants me dead and she’s using Samuel to get to me. She must have figured out how I feel about you.”

I shake my head. “I don’t believe you.”

“You should,” he states, his voice now deep and gravelly like before. “I showed you my true name. I’m making myself vulnerable to you.”

My gaze traces his true name inked under his eye, and I’m transported back to the night he first showed me it. The music, his singing, flood into my mind, replaying the moment he pulled me closer, when my heart first beat for him. That moment in the library I was certain I’d felt it—that song captured the essence of who we were together. What we were. Separately, we were monsters, but together, well, as Rosa would say, sometimes two wrongs make a right.

The memory crashes with the lie he’d fed me.

He was in love with my great aunt and his heart had already been captivated by a Fallenmoore Witch. It just wasn’t me.

I swallow thickly, suppressing the urge to clutch the fabric at my chest. “Those grimoire entries didn’t make it seem like she was a puppet. She thought she was manipulatingyou.”

“Sheloved me, not the other way around,” he growls, and I look at him properly, deep into those green eyes that still haunt my daymares. “Ezra helped me remember everything. I was her savior, Evie, at least in her eyes. In mine, I was just trying to escape my family and found an extremely powerful witch that I could manipulate into helping me. She was alone, an outcast in her family, and I befriended her. That is all.” His breaths are uneven and all over the place. He runs a hand through his disheveled, raven locks, drawing my attention to his big, tattooed hands.

I give him an incredulous stare. “So, you’re trying to tell me it was friendship?”

“No,” Lorcan states. “I was pretending to be her friend. Like I said, she was very powerful.”

“Ah, there’s the true manipulative bastard behind the mask of niceties.”

“I’m glad you haven’t lost your fierceness.” He flashes me a boyish smile that makes him look more angel than demon. “Look, Samuel has wanted to get rid of me for centuries, and Ezra and Lazarus locked me in a fucking cage. All of it was under my father’s orders, or at least so I thought until now. Samuel has been behind everything. He always was a jealous little cunt. So, I asked Eva to help me make a prison to trap my siblings.”

Hearing him call her by a nickname makes it all the more real. “The Shadow Realm,” I state.

“Yes. She created it, masterfully, by manipulating purgatory into this.” He looks around him. “I’ve never met a witch so powerful, until you.”

“Those grimoire pages made it seem like she created it to trap you. That she was manipulating you!” I shout, holding onto the threads of my sanity, because he can’t be telling the truth.

If he is, then I have to confront something far worse than heartbreak and betrayal, admitting that I feel something for a demon who can’t ever love me back. My brows furrow when I recall the words he once whispered.‘Demons cannot love.’

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