35. Rua
RUA
They dared to turn me away from the hospital. Well, I wouldn’t leave. I told them I wouldn’t.
I crossed the courtyard and slipped into the hospital wing that faced his. Nobody paid me any attention. I was just a girl huddled in her jacket, steps sure and brisk, obviously here visiting someone.
I found an empty room and locked the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed.
I walked across to the window, the glass cold against my fingertips.
I knew exactly which room was his. Room 417. Fourth floor. Third from the left.
The light still burned behind the window, lighting up his room.
I searched for a glimpse of him. I just needed to see with my own eyes that he was okay. That he was alive.
For a second my brain refused to make sense of what I was seeing, like the image itself had twisted into something impossible.
Her. Curled against him in his hospital bed. In my fucking place.
Her head rested on his chest.
His arm wrapped around her waist like it belonged there, his gaze soft and open as he smiled down at her, his fingers moving against her back while she tucked herself closer into him.
Like she had always belonged there.
Like I was nobody.
Like I never existed at all.
Cold spread through my body so fast it made my breath snag halfway into my lungs. Pain sliced my chest; I had to brace a hand against the sill. My jaw locked and my nails bit crescent moons into my palms while something ugly and raw clawed upward beneath my ribs.
How dare she look so comfortable there? How dare she lean into him like that, like she belonged to him?
I had spent weeks waiting for her to leave. Waiting for her to go back wherever the fuck she came from so this nightmare could finally end and everything could slide back into place.
But since the fire, he kept sneaking out of the manor, leaving me behind.
To go to her.
And she didn’t leave. She stayed. Clinging on to the pieces she’d stolen off me.
That was my place beside him.
My name.
My life.
He had been mine.
He and I were the same. We had nothing else, nowhere else to go. We only had each other.
Lorcan always came back eventually. Even after the fire he came back. He would come back from this, too.
He just needed her gone first.
Later, I trailed her through Ravenwood grounds. I was good at following without being noticed. Good at being invisible.
She climbed the short set of steps to the abandoned tower near the lake, looming black against the night sky, and disappeared inside.
I stayed hidden between trees while rain dripped steadily from branches overhead.
A few moments later, light flickered on in the upstairs window through the curtains.
I stared up at it through the rain.
So this was where she’d been hiding.
She had taken everything. My name. My place. Him. Everything I had survived for, everything I had endured, and she had simply walked in and claimed it like it had always been hers.
She didn’t even know what it had cost me. What it still cost me, every single day.
If she were gone, everything would go back to the way it was meant to be.
Alistair has been rougher with me since the fire. Since I told him that Liath survived. His hands gripped my hips too hard, the bruises hidden beneath my clothes aching just thinking about him.
A strange calm spread through me. If I told Alistair where Liath was hiding…
He would take care of her.
He would forgive me. I would become his good girl again.
And Lorcan would finally come home.