6. Liath
LIATH
My question still rang in my ears and the second it left my mouth I wanted to swallow it back down. My cheeks heated with the humiliation of having been the one to break first.
Deargán didn’t answer. He just sat there, watching me.
He leaned forward and lifted a dark metal teapot off a side table, moving with that slow, deliberate calm, the ceramic clicking softly against the saucer as he poured. Steam curled up between us.
He slid the cup across the table and stopped it short of me. It sat there, waiting, like bait.
My eyes snagged on the painting behind his head. A red inkblot, symmetrical and wrong, like a mask soaked through with blood. Something about it made my stomach tighten.
His gaze flicked to my face and then to the painting.
“What do you see?” he asked mildly.
I looked away as if I could physically refuse it, crossed my arms over my chest, and stared at the edge of his desk instead. “I’m not answering.”
“Avoidance is an answer.”
He didn’t raise his voice. He made a single note on his pad, the scratch of the pen slow and deliberate, and the sound went straight under my skin.
My fingers curled hard enough to ache. I wanted to demand to know what he was writing, to snap the pen in half, to grab that pad and rip the paper until there was nothing left to record me.
But I kept my mouth shut because that would mean he’d gotten to me.
“I can see you’re angry,” he said.
I laughed, short and bitter, and it came out harsher than I meant it to. “Angry? You only drugged me. Kidnapped me. Locked me in this godforsaken place.”
I stood so fast the chair legs scraped. My body needed movement, needed a target, needed anything that wasn’t his calm face and slow blinking eyes.
I crossed to the window and grabbed the frame, testing it once, twice. It didn’t budge. I rattled the bars and the sound was dull, contained, like the room swallowed even that.
I turned back to him, pulse skipping, and he was still just sitting there, watching, and it made me feel even more unstable.
“I’m going to expose you,” I said. “I will find proof. You’ll go to prison.”
He didn’t flinch. “And who would believe you?”
He flipped a page in the file on his lap.
“You were admitted under psychiatric recommendation,” he said. “Signed by Dr. Kelleher.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Your father co-signed. There were concerns about escalating paranoia, dissociative episodes, and a fixation on being followed.”
My skin went cold. “I don’t have paranoia. I was followed.”
“You reported that staff at Ravenwood were conspiring against you,” he continued, as if I had not spoken. “You accused a lecturer of planting listening devices.”
Ravenwood? I was enrolled at Darkmoor.
“I never said that. I don’t even go to Ravenwood.”
He glanced down again. “Your words were, and I quote, ‘He’s watching me. I can feel him coming for me.’”
The air in my lungs thinned. I could hear myself saying something like that, could almost taste the panic that had driven it, but not in the way he framed it.
“You also described a man who ‘moves in the shadows’ and ‘smells like spice and smoke.’” His eyes lifted to mine. “Do you remember that, Rua?”
My stomach dropped hard. The alleyway flickered behind my eyes, but it slipped when I tried to hold it.
“You’re twisting it,” I said, and my voice sounded smaller than I meant it to.
“I’m reading your file,” he replied calmly. “If you intend to accuse me of kidnapping, you’ll need something stronger than fragmented memory and a documented history of perceptual distortion.”
I hated how reasonable he sounded.
I’d never said those things. I knew it. But the way he delivered it made it sound official, documented, sealed in ink.
A flicker of doubt tried to rise, quick and hot, and I crushed it immediately. He was lying. He had to be.
In one sickening flash I understood that the locked door was the least dangerous part of the room.
The file in his lap was worse. The story he could tell about me was lethal.
“You sick bastard.” The words came out raw. “I’m not crazy.”
“No one here is crazy,” he said softly.
The softness made something in me snap.
I grabbed the lamp from the side table and knocked it to the floor.
It shattered.
Silence flooded in after the crash, heavy and dead.
Deargán didn’t flinch.
“You need me to lose control,” he said calmly. “It would make this simpler for you.”
He didn’t even look at the broken lamp. He looked only at me.
I went cold because he was right. I wanted him to react. I wanted proof he was human. Instead, even my violence was anticipated.
“Destruction outside, destruction within, Rua,” he said, tapping his notepad.
“Stop calling me that,” I hissed.
My eyes cut to the shelves. My body moved before my mind caught up, snatching a vintage metal medical instrument shaped like a long spike from where it sat displayed like a museum piece.
I realized too late what it was.
A lobotomy pick.
I held it up like a blade, but my fingers kept slipping against the metal, slick and unsteady. I tightened my grip, willing the shaking to stop, but it only made the tremor worse, running up my wrist and giving me away.
“Unlock the door,” I said. “Now.”
Deargán slowly rose to his feet, and for one reckless second, I thought I’d done it. Thought I’d pushed hard enough that he’d unlock the door, step aside, let me bolt.
The hope hit so fast it made me sick.
He walked toward me instead.
My grip tightened around the pick, but my hand betrayed me again, the tremor getting worse the closer he came. I lifted the metal higher, forcing it between us, but the movement was slow and clumsy.
He didn’t even glance at it. He looked only at my face.
“If you wanted to hurt me,” he said quietly, “you’d have to mean it.”
I pressed the tip to his shirt anyway, right over his chest, hard enough to wrinkle the fabric.
A sharp phantom point answered against my own.
I froze.
It was not pain. Not exactly. Just the precise, impossible sensation of pressure at the center of my chest, as if my body had mistaken his for mine for one sick second.
Shite. My mind was already hijacked by his scent and his sound, but this was new. This was worse.
My grip on the pick faltered. My breath stuttered, and I saw the smallest shift in his gaze, like he’d noticed the exact moment my body gave me away.
Like he’d been waiting for it.
Heat climbed my neck, humiliation and alarm tangling together.
I hated that my body seemed to answer him even when he hadn’t laid a finger on me, as though something inside me was overreacting to him specifically, turning every look, every shift, every tiny movement into a live wire under my skin.
The phantom pressure lingered on my breastbone, as if the boundary between his body and mine was dissolving the longer we stood in the same room.
We stared at each other and the room narrowed to the space between us, a quiet game of wills where he held all the cards and had all the time in the world.
“This violence,” he said gently, “your disorientation, your need to assign blame, it’s a protection mechanism, Rua.”
“Don’t gaslight me,” I snapped. “I remember the alleyway. The needle. I remember you.”
I pressed the pick even firmer against his heart to make a point, the mirroring press against mine unnerving me.
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t move back. Didn’t give me the satisfaction of fear.
The pick felt ridiculous in my shaking hand.
Oh, fuck. He wasn’t afraid of me at all.
“Do you?” He tilted his head slightly. “Tell me one detail. What color was the brick? Which side of your neck did the needle go in?”
Dark brown, no, red brick? The left side. Wait… did it go in my neck? It was like trying to grab smoke. The ground shifted under my certainty, subtle and terrifying, and I hated him for seeing it.
“Tell me what you remember,” he said. “Exactly.”
I opened my mouth to answer.
The alleyway, a face, shadowed and blurry, then…
The memory cut off like someone had yanked a plug.
My voice trailed off mid-sentence, my words going slippery.
I blinked.
I was seated.
I didn’t remember sitting down.
My hands were empty. The lobotomy pick was sitting on the shelf as if I’d never touched it.
The tea in my cup was half drunk and cold.
My sleeve sat rolled slightly higher than before. There was a faint indentation on my forearm, a pinker line in the skin, and my breath hitched because I didn’t remember him touching me.
I didn’t remember anyone touching me.
Deargán was back in his chair as if he’d never moved, watching me expectantly.
My pulse spiked. A flicker of terror rose in me, sharp and physical.
“What did you do to me?”