13. Liath
LIATH
Back in my bedroom, I sat cross-legged on my bed, the library book open on my lap, heavy as a confession, and Rua’s torn-out journal pages spread across my blanket like contraband.
The overhead light hummed faintly. The radiator clicked in the corner.
My fingers hovered before I forced myself to pick up the first page. I read silently at first, then my lips moved.
He has trapped me here. In this place. In this nightmare.
My throat tightened. The words sat too comfortably in my mouth.
I kept reading.
They say I’m confused. That I imagined everything. That I make things up.
My grip tightened on the page, the crinkling paper causing a shiver to brush across my neck.
No one will believe me when I say I don’t belong here. They refuse to let me leave.
My pulse pounded in my ears.
No. Any girl in this asylum could have written that.
That’s not proof.
But as I reread the lines, it was as if Deargán was standing behind my shoulder, calm, clinical, watching me read, his voice clear in my mind.
“You’re confused, Rua.”
My spine tightened as if he’d just breathed against my ear. I shook my head.
“I’m not Rua.”
I turned the page.
The handwriting grew messier.
I keep having flashbacks. I can feel his weight on me. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I can still feel his fingers digging into my skin.
My stomach dropped.
My bruises bloom and they tell me I did it to myself. They say I bruise easily. They say I’m hysterical.
My breath stuttered.
“That’s not—”
I forced myself to keep reading.
The next line fractured across the page.
I wake up and I can still feel him crawling around under my skin.
Can taste him on my tongue like metal.
The words—my words—slammed into me so hard my vision flickered. My lungs forgot how to work.
No, no, no.
That was my memory bleeding across this page.
I pressed my palm flat over the words as if I could shut them up.
He knew.
He knew exactly which memories to carve into this page.
This wasn’t coincidence; Deargán was crafting my breakdown.
These were my words but I was not Rua.
I remembered the fundraiser.
The ballroom. The chandeliers. The champagne glasses. Michael Byrne smiling for donors.
His hand sliding around my hip as if it belonged there. His fingers pressing too hard.
The way I flinched.
That was real.
“I flinched,” I whispered to the empty room. “I remember flinching.”
“Careful, Rua.”
Deargán’s voice cut into my head, the feel of his thigh under my hand.
Michael took without asking.
Deargán refused to take what I’d offered.
My throat clenched. Heat crawled up my neck and shame followed it, sharp and sour.
No.
“I am Liath,” I said louder, voice shaking.
The silence pressed in.
I needed proof. Something I could press my fingers into and feel. Something I could see with my own eyes, that didn’t shift when he spoke.
Something that would prove I was me. That could prove that my memories were mine. That I was Liath.
The bruises.
I pushed myself off the bed and crossed to the mirror, the floor cold beneath my bare feet.
I reached for the zipper at the back of my institute-issued dress and pulled it down with trembling fingers. The fabric loosened. I pushed the dress down over my shoulders, over my breasts, over my ribs, exposing my torso.
My eyes scanned my hips, searching for the deep-purple marks I remembered so vividly.
Nothing.
Just pale skin.
“They were here,” I breathed. “They were right here.”
I pressed my fingers hard into my side where they had been only days ago. No tenderness. No ache.
“They should be faded,” I said to no one. “Not gone.”
My stomach twisted. There had to be some logical explanation. Something other than the narrative this fucking place was trying to shove down my throat.
My fingers paused as something in the mirror caught my eye.
A dark smudge at the top of my thigh.
I pushed the dress down all the way over my hips, letting it fall to the floor with a soft whisper, the air chilling my skin as goosebumps rushed over my legs.
I stepped closer to the mirror. My breath caught.
Ink glared back at me, black and gray, sharp against the pale skin of my upper thigh.
A woman’s face stared out from my flesh, cold and beautiful, her hair a writhing crown of coiled scales and watchful snake eyes.
Medusa.
My pulse roared. He didn’t just change my memories. He fucking marked me.
“No,” I whispered.
My hand flew to it. I rubbed hard, nails scraping over skin that should have been mine.
The ink didn’t fade. It wasn’t drawn on. It wasn’t painted on. It was in my fucking skin.
I scratched harder.
“Come off,” I hissed. “Come off.”
I dug my nails into the snake’s eye until my skin split.
Blood beaded. But the tattoo remained, clean and healed.
It was healed.
It wasn’t fresh. It wasn’t scabbed. It wasn’t swollen.
It was fucking healed.
I stared at it, chest heaving, skin crawling. Get off me, get off me, get out of me.
“That’s not mine.” My voice cracked. “I’ve never gotten a tattoo. I would remember.”
I backed away from the mirror, shaking my head.
“I would remember that.”
My reflection tilted its head a fraction too late.
My breath stuttered. “No.”
The girl in the mirror smiled darkly back at me.
I rushed back to the bed and grabbed the pages.
“I am not Rua,” I said, voice rising. “I am not.”
My eyes scanned the final page. Across the top was one single line.
He said he’d break me. Because only what breaks can be rebuilt.
My stomach dropped.
Only what breaks can be rebuilt.
His deep gravelly voice rose up out of the darkness.
“I’m going to have to break you because only what breaks can be rebuilt.”
My hands began to shake violently.
“They’re not my words,” I gasped. “They’re not mine.”
My vision blurred.
“I remember the man who raised me,” I said desperately to no one. “Michael Byrne. I remember him. I remember flinching. That happened. I’m a Byrne not a Lasai—”
I froze. My tongue wouldn’t finish the name.
Lasair meant flame in Irish.
Lasair.
Flame.
Burn.
Byrne.
I laughed once, sharp and wrong.
Did I rename myself? Or did he rename me?
It was too clever. Too vicious. If this was a delusion, my broken mind had built it like a genius. But if this was Deargán, he was playing God with my very identity, mocking my real name by translating it into a lie.
The room tilted as I tasted metal.
My bruises were gone.
The tattoo was healed.
The journal sounded like me, written in my handwriting, in my purple pen.
My chest tightened until breathing felt impossible.
“They’re rewriting me,” I choked. “They’re trying to rewrite me.”
I looked down at the pages in my hands.
“You’re not real,” I whispered to them.
My panic spiked, sharp and electric.
“You don’t get to be me.”
My fingers curled into the paper.
“I’ll destroy you before you destroy me.”
I ripped the first page in half, the sound tearing through the room. Too loud.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside.
I froze. If he found out I destroyed them, he would punish me.
Fuck him. Fuck that.
I ripped again and again, paper shredding between my hands as my breath came in broken gasps.
“No,” I screamed, shredding the last piece. “No, no, no.”
The fragments scattered across the bed like snow.
I stood there naked, shaking, staring at the ruined pages, my chest heaving.
Shit. What if those words were the only proof I had?
My reflection stared back at me.
The Medusa watched me from my own skin.
And I didn’t know whose body I was standing in anymore.
The early light was thin and gray through the high windows. Soft-soled shoes whispered against stone. The distant clatter of trays and cutlery echoed faintly from the dining hall below.
I walked between Maeve and Dervla, close enough that our sleeves brushed. Maeve smelled faintly of fresh laundry.
He has trapped me here. In this place. In this nightmare.
I was barely aware of Maeve talking. “And Wednesdays is Irish breakfast day,” Maeve chattered away softly. “If we’re early, there might still be some black pudding.”
Dervla gave a faint hum in response, but her shoulders were tight, her gaze fixed down the corridor as if she could sense trouble before it arrived.
They say I’m confused. That I make things up.
The corridor ahead was mostly empty. Just a nurse disappearing around a corner, the low hum of the wall lights and the occasional distant scream that threaded through the building like background noise everyone pretended not to hear.
No one will believe me when I say I don’t belong here. They refuse to let me leave.
Two orderlies stepped out from a side corridor without warning and fell into step behind Maeve.
Maeve noticed too late.
“Sorry,” she said automatically, stepping aside to let them pass.
They didn’t pass.
One of them took her elbow.
Maeve frowned down at the hand on her arm. “What are you doing?”
The second orderly took her other arm.
“You’re coming with us.”