16. Deargán
DEARGáN
Ihadn’t meant for her to wake.
I’d come to look in on her, to confirm she was safe now that the boy had finally gone.
But now she was staring at me, her eyes rimmed with pity.
The mask was supposed to prevent this. The coat. The shadows. The distance. All of it worn like a shadow to hide me.
I felt suddenly flayed open beneath her eyes.
She saw too much. She always saw too much.
“Go on,” I said. “Scream.” Bitterness rose fast enough to choke on. “Run away. It’s what people do when they see me now.”
Her breath stuttered. “Deargán… w-what happened to you?”
I dragged my gaze away, the heat of her question clawing up the ruined side of my face beneath the mask.
“The fire took more of me than it should have.” My voice scraped flat, staring anywhere except for her. “Part of me died in it. The good part. The part you would have wanted.”
Her features softened as she moved toward me, her hands lifting slow, palms up, the way a person approaches an animal they mean to soothe. “I won’t hurt you.”
As if she were the dangerous one. As if I was the one who needed protecting from her.
Maybe I did need protecting. I had no defense against her.
Fear I understood. Horror and hatred I understood. But the emotions softening her beautiful face… Grief, mercy, compassion. These things had nowhere to go inside me.
I backed up out of instinct until the stone wall hit me between the shoulder blades, cold seeping through my cloak, my heart slamming against my ribs. The predator pinned by his own retreat.
She stopped a foot from me. Her eyes moved over the mask, then back to my eyes, then back to the mask.
Her hand lifted toward my face.
I flinched, the scars on my ruined cheek pulled with phantom pain, the ghost of the fire that still haunted me.
“I won’t take your mask off. I promise.” She held her hand a few inches from my face and waited, as if giving me a chance to say no.
Her fingertips brushed the edge of the mask, along the line of my forehead and over the bridge of my nose.
The breath punched out of my chest, an ache racking through me hard enough to buckle my knees. I would have dropped if not for the wall behind me.
Weeks without her touch, without anyone’s touch, had hollowed me out. Now every nerve fired at once. My fingernails scraped the stone behind me as I held myself back.
She kept traveling along the seam, her fingertip brushing across the corner of my lips where the porcelain met what was left of me.
A groan rumbled through me before I could stop it, a searing heat flaring in my chest.
She would unmake me if I let her.
I caught her wrist before she could touch any further. For a moment, I just reveled in the feel of her pulse like a hummingbird against my fingers.
Her weight rocked onto the balls of her feet, the smallest lean of her body toward mine.
She wasn’t unaffected.
“Come with me,” I whispered.
Liath blinked hard. “What?”
“We could leave tonight.”
She tugged at her hand. “Leave where?”
I let go of her wrist, already feeling her pull away.
I would not give up so easily. “Far from here,” I argued. “Somewhere Alistair can’t reach you. Where I can keep you safe.”
Liath crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not going anywhere. We have a plan. Me and Lorcan.”
Lorcan.
His name sat in her mouth like she owned it. Her possession of him was like a blade slid between my ribs. I bled around it for half a breath before I staunched it.
“A plan,” I scoffed.
“He’s infiltrating the Sons so we can break it apart from the inside. That is how we take them down.”
“Infiltrating them?” My mouth twisted. “Or becoming one of them?”
She stiffened. That was my opening. It was just a crack but all a crack needed was a wedge driven in hard enough.
“Lorcan Lasair.” I spat out his name. “You think you can trust him?”
Her spine straightened. “I do.”
I barked out a mirthless laugh as I circled her. “I know his darkness better than you ever will. I watched it grow. I saw what Alistair carved him into.”
Her breath hitched but she didn’t turn to face me.
“You are soft where he is concerned.” I reached out a hand to her hair, brushing the soft strands lightly, not enough for her to feel it. My throat closed for a breath. “You trust him in ways you should not. That makes you blind.”
I leaned my face into that crook of her neck and inhaled, letting her scent of black violets fill my lungs and heat up my blood. “How can you be so sure he will not turn around and hand you to them once he is inside? Once they fill him with power and offer him the crown?”
Her breath stalled, a hairline of doubt crossing her face before she could lock it down.
She thought she had hidden it. She had not.
“He wouldn’t.”
“He has Alistair’s blood,” I whispered into her ear. “He was raised by a monster to be a monster. He walks into that order, in the throne they built for him, with their hands on his shoulders and their dark whispers in his ear, and you think he will choose you over the power he was born into?”
She turned toward me, her features hardening as she met my eye. “I know he will.”
Certainty rang clear in her voice. She was not bluffing.
Something inside me cracked.
For weeks I’d been working a picture of her in my head. That she was getting close to Lorcan because he had been her only option. Because he had isolated her and she was too soft to bend. That she was waiting for a way out.
But she was not the girl I had come to save.
She was the woman running this operation.
She was a woman who had chosen. Chosen to stay. Chosen to fight.
Chosen him.
In the stillness of this realization, grief surfaced, grief I had been refusing since the fire.
I’d been left behind by the only person alive I still cared about.
Grief detonated under the rage tearing through my chest. My pulse slammed hard enough to blur the edges of the room while something ugly and possessive snapped loose inside me.
I surged forward before the last shred of restraint could catch up with me, shoving her against the wall. My hand slammed against the stone beside her head while my body crowded hers.
The impact of her back against the wall rattled through her breath. Heat rolled off her skin in waves beneath the cold damp air, and the gasp she made when my chest pinned closer nearly snapped the last clean thread holding me together.
My pulse battered violently against my ribs while every inch of me fixated on the softness trapped under my hands, the warmth of her mouth only inches from mine, the way her pupils widened when I pressed her fully against the stone.
God, I hated her and wanted her so badly it hollowed me out.
“I see what this is,” I growled into her face. “You prefer his cock. His lips on your cunt. Does he make you come harder than I do? Huh?”
She sucked in a breath, her eyes going wide, her back rigid against the stone.
Fuck her. She didn’t want to come with me. But I could just take her. She was small and soft and she could not fight me hard enough. I could capture her. Take her away. Keep her.
Then I would lose her completely.
Her pulse jumped at her throat. Her mouth was parted, her breath heaving in and out so hard that her breasts pressed against my chest. She just looked so open, so inviting.
I leaned in to kiss her.
“Stop.” Her voice cracked between us.
I paused an inch from her mouth.
She placed a hand on my chest and pressed at me, asking for space.
Her hand was shaking. I’d frightened her. I had crossed a line. The man she had reached out to comfort had just bared his teeth, showing her the animal that he’d become.
I stumbled back, the distance between us feeling like a canyon I would never be able to cross.
She took in a steadying breath. “Help us, Deargán.”
That was not what I had braced for.
“Fight with us,” she said, peering at me in earnest. “You want Alistair to pay. So do we. Work with us.”
The offer hung between us.
For one bright second I let myself see it.
A version of this where I stayed. Where I fought beside her. Beside the boy. Where the three of us moved through Alistair and the asylum and the Sons and came out the other side of it together.
The image was unbearable.
A coalition meant the boy in my sightline forever. It meant watching her at his side. It meant being second place in a story I wanted to be the first in.
“No.” The word came out flat.
“Why not?” Her voice climbed. “Why fight him alone when you could—”
“I don’t share, Liath.” I stepped back from her, the cold rushing in between our bodies. “I don’t fight beside Sons. And there’s no room beside me for him. My war ends with one of us in the ground.”
Her face went still, as if I had slapped her.
Then she found her voice again. “This is bigger than me and you and him,” she said. “Bigger than our heartbreak and our wants. Bigger than us.”
I staggered back as if she had hit me.
The woman in front of me was not the girl I had slipped into the asylum.
She was stronger. Braver. Harder than anyone she had been with me.
He had changed her. Irrevocably.
But what she didn’t realize was that she had changed me.
“I won’t give up on you, Liath,” I vowed. “I will make you see that your only place is with me.”
My final vow remained unsaid.
I will rid you of that boy.