10. Liath
LIATH
Istared around the ballroom floor, imagining figures, vacant eyes open in shock, lying among the rust, and shuddered.
God. So much blood.
The metallic scent irritated the insides of my nostrils again, and the screeching in my head heightened until it hurt.
Dervla continued. “No one would live here after that. So they turned it into an asylum. With her as patient number one.”
“And they named it after her,” Bláthnaid added, taking the naggin and lifting it in a kind of toast.
My skin prickled.
Maggie.
Magdalene.
The name throbbed in my chest like a bruise.
For a breath, no one spoke. A sharp wind fluttered the candle flames, and I rubbed my arms as a shiver ran across my skin.
“Is she,” I started, and my throat closed around the words. “Is she still here?”
Fiona stepped behind me and put her hands on my shoulders, positioning me to face out. “Look.”
Out the ballroom window, an abandoned manor among the trees was silhouetted against the dying light. The tower had collapsed, leaving a jagged spire sticking out of the roof like a broken tooth.
Fiona’s voice came soft beside my ear. “Her parents built that carriage house for her and her future husband.”
“But she never got to use it,” Bláthnaid said, almost wistful.
“She used it,” Dervla said, her tone dark. “Once.”
Goosebumps ran over my arms.
“That tower is where she fell,” Fiona said, her breath tickling my neck.
“Or jumped,” Bláthnaid murmured.
“Or was pushed,” Dervla said.
For a moment, I was up there, standing that high with the wind at my back and stone under bare feet, the ground so far away it felt like a different world.
Fiona’s voice brought me back out of my thoughts. “They say her ghost still haunts these walls.”
“Some say,” Dervla added, “she’s waiting for her husband to return to her.”
“Or for her next victim,” Fiona whispered, her hands wrapping around her own throat.
“But everyone agrees…” Bláthnaid’s gaze slid back to me. “She only shows herself to the ones who are losing their minds.”
Heat rose in my face, quick and humiliating.
“Enough,” Maeve snapped.
The metallic scent in my throat sharpened, and the screeching sound in my head went tight.
I turned away from the window, away from them, not wanting to face their insinuations anymore.
Candlelight fractured across the mirrors, catching in cracks and dark patches across my reflection.
For a split second, I saw six figures.
Six girls.
Six standing in the ballroom instead of five.
My breath caught. My lungs forgot how to work for a beat.
I blinked.
There were only five reflections.
Five girls.
My lungs loosened. Just a trick of the light. Right?
I tore my eyes from the mirror and stared at the spot where the sixth figure had been standing, right on the largest rust-colored stain. A shiver ran down my spine.
Maeve’s voice cut in close and low. “You alright?”
“Grand,” I said too quickly.
My mouth tasted like dried blood.
My pulse hammered behind my ribs.
And I couldn’t tell if I was the kind of broken that belonged to Maggie or if there was something in this asylum that I was never meant to see.
I slipped into Deargán’s office the way you slipped into a confessional, fast and guilty.
His scent hit stronger here than in his therapy room, cloves and musk, edged with something darker, saturating the air like incense. My synesthesia didn’t sing so much as thrum, low, seductive music that curled under my skin and into my bones.
His office was exactly what I expected and yet even more terrifying. The light was dim, casting sharp shadows off everything.
Heavy wood shelves lined the walls, stacked with leather-bound volumes and ancient instruments I didn’t recognize.
Medical relics, sharp and gleaming, a vintage ECT headpiece glinted in a glass box, like a crown for the insane.
A brain floating in a glass bottle. What looked like a real skeleton standing in the corner, glaring at me with hollow eyes and a toothy grin.
Leaning against one wall like a morbid sculpture was a cracked wooden table set with metal cuffs that would have held down a human body. A vintage surgery table.
The door clicked softly behind me.
My whole body went still.
I reached for the handle again, wanting out, wanting to pretend I’d never crossed the threshold, but the latch didn’t give. It sat there stubborn and jammed.
I tried again, slower this time, controlled, because panic was loud and loud got you noticed.
Footsteps passed in the corridor outside, close enough that I could hear the rubber soles whisper against stone. A murmur of Murphy’s voice followed, low and matter-of-fact, but getting louder. Closer.
Shite. I backed away from the door and stared at it like it might suddenly decide to open.
I forced my breathing steady and counted in my head, not because I believed in counting, but because it gave me something to hold. His group therapy session usually ran a certain length. Or did he have a late lunch at this time?
How long before someone noticed I wasn’t where I was meant to be? How long before he came back here and found me in his office?
If he caught me, it wouldn’t be framed as curiosity. It wouldn’t be framed as instability.
Proof of my insanity.
He’d use it against me.
The thought lit a cold sweat under my arms.
Fuck it. I was trapped in here. In for a penny. In for a pound.
I wiped my palms on my dress and went for his desk.
The huge mahogany desk looked like the rest of him did: controlled, clean, and heavy with intention. A single notepad positioned dead center. Files stacked in a perfect alignment. Exactly four Mont Blanc fountain pens in his penholder.
Nothing left out by accident. Not a single speck of dust or stray pencil shaving.
I tried the top drawer first.
It opened.
My stomach gave a stupid, hopeful twist, like I’d won something. Like he’d been careless.
Inside was a neat row of files in alphabetical order, their tabs aligned like soldiers.
I forced myself to breathe and reached for the one that said LASAIR, RUA.
The stitching on my own chest seemed to burn.
I expected the file to be thin. A handful of pages, a lie they’d scribbled down to justify what they were doing.
Instead, it was thick. Too thick. Like they’ve been documenting me for a long time. The weight of it landed in my hand like a verdict.
I checked the admission date on the cover.
Six months ago.
Not yesterday. Not last week. Six months.
The timeline the girls had said, the timeline my gut kept rejecting.
My fingertips stayed on the cover for a beat, my pulse thumping in my throat. Did I really want to know what he’d written about me?
No, I didn’t want to know. I needed to.
I opened it and an intake form stared back at me, typed and official, with my signature scrawled at the bottom.
My mouth went dry.
It was mine.
Or close enough to be.
The signature was a messy, stylized scrawl, all loops and lazy confidence.
I cursed myself for never bothering to write it properly.
I’d signed things a thousand times without looking, letting the pen swing wide and decorative at the start, then practically fading to a line.
Now I couldn’t tell if that flourish belonged to an L or an R.
And that doubt hit hard.
Just keep looking, Liath.
I turned the page and there was his name, Dr. Bron Deargán, along with his notes, his handwriting neat and elegant, the kind of script that belonged on old letters and death certificates.
My eyes caught on various sentences:
Patient presents with selective amnesia, especially around trauma.
Subject exhibits delusional insistence on alternate identity.
He’d underlined insistence. Twice.
My grip tightened until the paper creased.
I skimmed faster, looking for something that didn’t fit.
Is she a dissociative personality?
Or is Liath a protective delusion?
My breath caught so hard it hurt.
Liath was the delusion.
Not Rua.
Like I was an illness.
I whispered my name under my breath, barely letting my lips move. “Liath.”
The sound came out small and pathetic in the stillness of his office.
I tried to anchor myself on something solid, something no one could rewrite. My mind reached for my childhood bedroom the way a drowning person reached for the rocks.
High ceilings at Byrne Manor.
A stupidly oversized bed.
A Hermes stuffed bear shoved against the pillows.
The smell of her perfume.
Lavender.
The image wavered.
No.
Rose.
Mrs. Byrne wore rose perfume.
My stomach dropped, cold and heavy.
That shouldn’t be hard. That shouldn’t change.
If he could make me doubt the scent of the only mother I’d ever known, what was stopping him from erasing me completely? The walls of his office suddenly felt like they were shrinking. My mind wasn’t a fortress anymore; it was a house with all the doors left open.
I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly tight, staring down at the file open on the desk like it might explain itself.
Something niggled at me.
The drawer had been unlocked.
Why would he leave something like this where anyone could find it?
A colder answer slid in.
Because it wasn’t for anyone.
It was for them.
For the asylum.
For the orderlies who watched and reported and nodded along.
And then another thought rose, sharper and meaner.
What if it was for me?
The file read like it had been written to be read. Dates neat. Language formal. Tone restrained and clinical.
No margin notes.
No human bleed-through.
No sign of the man who leaned too close and stared long enough to make my body betray me.
It was a performance. It had to be.
There had to be something else. A separate file. A correction. A note that confirmed I existed outside this place.
I dug through the drawer again, pushing files aside, checking labels, searching for BYRNE, LIATH like it might be hiding between A and C.
Nothing. Just neatness and the quiet threat of my own missing name.
I remembered how my father had a hidden compartment in his desk that he thought I’d never find. That’s where he’d kept my adoption papers.
My fingers moved on instinct, searching past the obvious, past the front, past the things he wanted to be found.
They brushed the underside of all the drawers and then the desk.
My fingers ran over something and I froze.
There was a ridge.
I pressed and my pulse jumped.
Something shifted and a shallow panel slid open with a soft scrape.
Inside was a single folder.
There was no name on the front, no label, no date.
The edges were charred, not fully destroyed. Corners blackened. The paper brittle and darkened like it had been held too close to flame, rescued at the last second.
Someone had tried to destroy this.
Someone else had cared enough to save what they could.
My fingers trembled as I pulled it out.
The fold along the spine was deeply creased, like someone had opened it and closed it and opened it again and again.
A sticky note slipped loose, fluttering to the ground, except the residue strip was now covered in dust and had lost its stick.
On it was a single line handwritten in a heavy hand in red ink.
Locked from the outside.
My chest tightened.
Locked from the outside? What was locked? A place? A door?
Someone’s mind.
I slid the note back into the folder with shaking hands and opened the file.
The contents were damaged, singed and water-warped, sections ripped out cleanly like someone had torn away the parts that mattered. So much of the ink was faded that I could barely read the other sections.
Some pages were typed, institutional language stamped into place. Other pages were handwritten, in several different hands. One in messy scrawl, another in block font. The ink colors changed across pages, too, from black to blue, back to black.
They were all different handwriting to Deargán’s.
I stopped on a page.
One line was circled again and again, the ink digging deeper each time, as if repetition could make it true.
She uses amnesia as protection.
My throat tightened so hard I had to swallow twice. The room grew smaller. The air thicker. The cello hum in my ribs dropped lower, darker, like it knew I was standing too close to something rotten.
His voice came from behind me.
“What are you looking for?”