12. Liath
LIATH
Something cold slid into my lungs. I could hear myself breathing, shallow and uneven, as if I had run up the stone stairs instead of sitting in a library full of dust and secrets.
What if I had told him?
The thought lodged under my ribs and would not move.
I searched my own memory the way you search a dark room with your hands out in front of you, expecting to hit a wall, and found nothing but blank air.
“Hallo?” a female voice called out, breaking the tension before it could tighten further. A young nurse stepped into the alcove carrying a tray, her cheeks flushed and her smile too bright.
I jerked back in my seat, as if I had been caught kissing him, even though he had not touched me.
She slid the tea tray onto the side table, her bright eyes fixed on him. “There ye go, Dr. Deargán.”
To my shock, his mouth curved into a smile that could almost be called warm. “Thank you, Helena.”
He normally looked carved from stone, but Christ, when he smiled, it stunned me, too beautiful for a place like this, like something made to worship.
The sight of him smiling at someone else scraped across me in a way I didn’t expect. And the way she beamed back at him, hopeful and a little breathless, made something tight and ugly twist low in my stomach.
She glanced at me, quick and assessing, then back to him, as if trying to place who I was to him. Then her worried look softened. Like I meant nothing. No threat.
I looked away, teeth grit together, arms jammed across my chest as I was forced to endure listening to them exchange stupid little pleasantries about their weekends.
Actually, he asked her pointed questions about hers. She answered between fits of giggles as if she were soft in the head.
He said absolutely nothing about himself.
Only after she left did I feel like I could breathe properly, although my shoulders remained tense. The quiet poured in again between us, thicker than before.
Deargán poured tea into cups without haste, the soft sound of falling water accompanying the steam curling up between us. Then he lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb slowly across his lower lip.
The sensation hit me so abruptly I nearly cried out.
A tingling pressure brushed over my own bottom lip, light at first, then sharper when his thumb passed there again, as if my mouth had become aware of being touched without anyone touching it.
I froze.
What the fuck?
My gaze snapped to his hand. Then to his mouth. Then away again, too fast, because I did not want him seeing the exact second my composure fractured.
It had to be in my head. A stress response. Some fresh malfunction in a mind already frayed thin.
Except when he let his hand fall, the phantom sensation vanished with it.
My pulse kicked hard.
The nurse’s giggle still scraped at me. His smile at her still sat under my ribs like something acidic. Shame flooded in right behind it, because whatever was happening to my synesthesia seemed worse when I was emotional, as though my body lost the ability to keep its edges intact around him.
He held the cup out to me, and when I reached for it, our fingers brushed.
The real contact was brief, accidental, but my pulse still leaped as if he had taken me into his arms.
I hated it.
I took the cup and set it down at my elbow before he could see my hand tremble.
“I guess you do that often,” I said, the accusation sharper than I intended.
“Do what?”
I leaned in. “Make girls feel like you’re the only person who can see them.”
I don’t know whether it was anger or humiliation or the need to prove I was still steering something, anything, but my hand slid toward his knee before I could think better of it.
My palm rested there, testing, and I braced for a reaction.
He didn’t protest.
He didn’t even flinch.
He just peered down at my hand, then back at me as if it disappointed him.
“Look at you,” he said softly. “Reaching for the only kind of power they let you keep.”
Shame flooded me so fast my skin went hot. I hated that I needed him to react, that some ugly part of me wanted proof he wasn’t untouched by me. Wanted proof that my body wasn’t the only one betraying them.
I slid my hand higher up his strong thigh. I would force a reaction out of him.
“Is this what you do,” I said, my voice lower than I meant it to be. “Make lonely girls think you’re the cure.”
His gaze narrowed, cool and steady. “Careful, Rua.”
“Or what?”
I slid my hand farther up, my mind growing dizzy at my recklessness.
The library seemed to tilt, just slightly.
I blinked.
The room felt wrong, as if I had stood up and sat back down without knowing it.
My heart was racing so hard I could hear it in my ears. My hands were folded in my lap, fingers laced so tightly my knuckles ached.
I did not remember moving them.
My wrist throbbed faintly, as if someone had held it too firmly, though I could not recall when.
My tea had gone cold, half-gone, a thin brown ring drying on the saucer where it must have spilled.
I did not remember drinking it.
Deargán was sitting back in his chair, composed, his legs angled away from mine.
“There you are,” he said.
The words made my stomach drop.
“W-what just happened?” The question came out small despite my effort to steady my voice.
“You dissociate,” he replied, “when you are overwhelmed.”
“I do not dissociate.”
“You do,” he said. “Fact. It is one of your protection mechanisms.”
The idea that he knew things about my mind that I didn’t understand, that he was cataloging them, made my throat close.
God, what else was I hiding from myself? What was lurking in the depths of my own head that he’d already found and I hadn’t even touched yet?
He stood, smoothing his coat with precise hands. “We will continue another time.”
“Don’t walk away from me.” I stood too quickly, my chair scraping back, the sound sharp in my ears. “What the hell just happened?”
He paused at the edge of the alcove and looked back over his shoulder at me. “There’s a book you liked…”
“I don’t like anything here,” I snapped, my voice cracking.
His gaze sharpened almost imperceptibly. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
I froze.
He added, quieter, “You always stopped reading before the transformation.”
The implication hung there, heavy and deliberate.
“Perhaps,” he added, “it is time you face what you keep refusing to see.”
He left without another word.
The absence of him was louder than his presence had been.
I sank back into the chair, breathing too fast, trying to trace the missing seconds and finding only a blur where something should have been.
It set something jangling in me that I couldn’t shake. If I could lose time like that in front of him, in a room full of light and books, then what had I already lost that I didn’t know I’d lost?
Had I done this before, long before I ever came to this place, and just called it stress, exhaustion, or being a bit dramatic? Had I ever stood in a room at home and realized I’d crossed it without remembering the steps?
Had I ever read a paragraph twice because the first time hadn’t landed and decided I was just tired?
The thought made my body prickle with a dirty, hollow kind of dread, and for a moment I tasted metal on my tongue.
Maybe I had blocked out pieces of my past before, on purpose, because they hurt too much. Maybe I had split parts of myself off and hidden them somewhere I couldn’t reach. And he was drawing them out one by one, calling it facts, calling it treatment, calling it Rua.
Or maybe he’d done something to me.
I pressed my nails into the cushions, trying to anchor myself.
These thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone, because it felt too close to the truth to ignore.
God, what else was I hiding from myself, and how much of it had he already found?
My fingers brushed against something lodged in the cushion. I frowned, digging around until they closed around it. I drew it out slowly.
It was a bracelet, the charms catching the dim light.
A tiny paintbrush with curled bristles dipped in red paint.
A red spider in its web, delicate and exact.
A red rose, petals dark as dried blood.
A small vial with a crimson stain of something long evaporated at the bottom.
And one charm engraved with three red letters.
Rua.
My pulse stumbled.
This was Rua’s bracelet.
This was Rua’s seat.
My stomach turned.
For a moment I imagined sliding it over my wrist, just to see how it fit.
No. This was not my bracelet.
I closed my fingers around the offending jewelry, ready to hurl it, but a faint, treacherous tug held me back.
I should’ve left it there. Should’ve thrown it away.
Instead, I shoved it into my pocket.
I stood because sitting in that chair felt dangerous, because the air in the alcove was too thin. I began to wander through the shelves, my fingers tracing the ornate wood, drawn deeper into Magdalene’s library.
I didn’t know where I’d been walking, only that the shelves seemed to part for me in a slow, hazy drift, my fingers trailing along cracked leather spines and carved wood as if following a thread I couldn’t see, my thoughts dulled and distant.
Until, without quite deciding to, my hand came to rest on a worn spine, my palm flattening against it with the strange, sinking certainty of someone who had reached for the same book before.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I pulled my fingers back as if the book had burned me.
No. It couldn’t be. I didn’t…
My hand reached out for the book again as if my limbs didn’t belong to me. I pulled it out, noting that the dust was disturbed in front of the spine as if someone had pulled that book out recently.
The pages rasped softly when I opened it.
Red ink slashed through the text, underlines and circles marking sentences with a familiarity that made my stomach turn.
My eyes snagged on one passage.
“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth… that man is not truly one, but truly two.”
The words seemed to tilt on the page.
“No,” I whispered.
Did I do that? Did Rua? Or was there even a difference?
Anger flared in me. No. I have never been in this library before, never seen this book before. I did not make these marks.
This was just Deargán trying to fuck with me.
Before I could snap the book closed and return it to its dusty home, papers slipped free from between the pages and fluttered to the floor.
I crouched quickly and gathered the loose sheets before they could scatter.
The papers were lighter than the rest of the book, a brighter white, newer and lined. They were loose journal pages. Handwriting curved across the pages in purple ink.
My throat closed up.
My handwriting.
No. It had to be forged. It had to be.
My heart hammered as my eyes moved down to the first line.
I am Rua…