21. Deargán
DEARGáN
“Move.”
The boy’s shoulder came within an inch of mine as he passed. He barely looked at me, like I was furniture to him and he did not look back.
Alistair’s son. Here.
On a Tuesday afternoon with no warning and no appointment and no conceivable legitimate reason, which meant his reasons were not legitimate.
I stood in the corridor and watched him go.
I had looked at photographs for years, read his files, including his college entry assessment. I’d constructed a profile of him that was manageable. After all, he wasn’t Alistair. Not yet.
They had not prepared me for his forceful presence. He moved through the space as if he owned it. Owned everything. There was almost an inhuman determination and focus in the hard set of his mouth and the unwavering line of his gaze. He was a man who wasn’t used to hearing no.
What, exactly, was he doing here?
I followed, keeping my distance, staying far enough back that if he glanced back, he would find an empty corridor.
The receptionist led him to the RMS’s door, but he barged past her and opened it himself.
I pressed back against the far wall and waited.
The RMS came out forty seconds later, moving at a pace that was close to a jog, tugging his collar straight with both hands. His face was the color of old chalk. He turned in the opposite direction without looking up and disappeared around the corner.
Lorcan Lasair had cleared the room in under a minute. The economy of it was almost admirable.
I waited.
Exactly eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds later, he came back out.
I turned to face the medical board on the wall, hands clasped at my back, and kept my eyes on a laminated infection protocol. His footsteps passed behind me without slowing and he disappeared back out into reception.
Only then did I slip into the office.
The RMS kept a tidy room. Files squared to the desk edge, book spines flush on the shelves, nothing out of place. I had been in here enough times to know the particular neatness of a man who needed his environment to do the work his mind couldn’t.
Which was why the file on his desk drew my eye, sitting askew at an angle.
I stepped around to read it.
Rua Lasair.
He’d pulled out his sister’s file.
I didn’t need to see it to know he had read every word of it.
I sank into the chair.
Christ.
The calculation had shifted. I had built it on the assumption that the son was a blunter instrument than the father, too self-centered, more impatient, too impulsive, not a real threat.
I had been wrong. Somehow, he’d figured out that there was something wrong with the sister who returned from Magdalene.
He’d read her file. Now he had Liath’s name.
Fuck. I needed to pull her out.
“No.”
Pie was suddenly standing in front of me, arms crossed, her pale-blue eyes narrowed as her brows pressed together.
I sucked in a breath. “It’s too dangerous. He has her name.”
“He has a name in a file that the institution has treated as delusional fixation.” Her voice was certain, stripped of everything except the logic. “What else does he have? Nothing actionable. Nothing that doesn’t look, on its face, exactly like what you wrote it to look like.”
“Yet.”
“Her cover isn’t blown.”
I said nothing. The file sat closed under my hands.
“Pull her out now and it’s finished.” She let that land before she continued. “Every year. Every piece of it. Every position you took, every sacrifice you made.” The pause was calibrated, as her pauses always were. “Bron, we are too close.”
The logic of Pie’s argument was sound. Pulling Liath on the basis of a name in a file attributed to psychosis would be a panic move. Panic moves left traces, and traces led back.
I sat with it for a moment anyway, jaw locked, fighting this ridiculous urge to ignore reason and drag Liath out before the whole thing collapsed around her.
The only reason I was even considering pulling her out was…
Something tightened in my chest.
I ignored it.
Pie was right. Liath had to stay.
But things had changed. The timeline had changed.
“She’s running out of time,” I said.
Pie’s expression shifted, just fractionally. Then her frown softened into something closer to acknowledgment. “That we can agree on.”
I stood and aimed for the exit.
I needed to get to her before he did.