16. Liath
LIATH
Something wasn’t right. My vision narrowed until the edges of the room blurred. The air turned thick in my lungs. My fingers lay in my lap but they didn’t feel attached to me, like my body had become a room I was locked outside of.
Deargán sat in front of me. Close. Too close.
His presence crowded my skin even without touch. The space between us felt intentional, controlled, like he was deciding exactly how much of himself I was allowed.
My body leaned forward toward him before my mind agreed, a small, humiliating betrayal that made my stomach turn.
A low menacing buzz swelled in the quiet room, jarring against my ears.
My gaze pulled across the room, my focus slipping as if the air had turned to molasses. The sound was everywhere and nowhere, inside the walls, inside my teeth.
I tried to move and the delay terrified me. A blink came too slow. My hand didn’t obey when I told it to curl into a fist.
My neck wouldn’t lift properly. My head weighed too much. Loss of control flashed hot through me.
What the hell?
But it didn’t come out that way. “Wha…”
My tongue was thick and useless.
Deargán’s voice echoed as if he was speaking inside my head.
“This is treatment, Rua.”
The name hit me like a punch to the guts. Rua. Not me. Not mine. The room tilted on the wrong axis.
I tried to correct him but my tongue wouldn’t work. Terror prickled under my skin, sharp and immediate. What had he done to me?
Then something touched me between my legs.
Pleasure surged through me, unwanted and sudden, heat lashing up my body. It hit too clean, too bright, like a switch thrown somewhere deep inside my spine.
My back arched before I meant it to, my muscles contracting like I was being electrocuted, my fingers clawing at the arms of the chair, nails scraping wood.
My breath broke into uneven pulls and I shook my head, small frantic movements, as if I could dislodge whatever had been turned on inside me.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t mine. Not my body. Not my pleasure.
Fear climbed up behind the sensation because my body was reacting and I wasn’t the one deciding.
I ordered my thighs to press shut. But my hips betrayed me, rocking upward in a blind rhythm, seeking more, begging for more.
I pulled air into my lungs and tried to lock myself down from the inside out, tried to force stillness back into my muscles, tried to make the pleasure stop.
But it was too much.
Pleasure rose up over me like a wave, drowning me in it, until I was tumbling with no idea when I would come up for air.
There was no warmth in it. No intimacy. Just sensation without meaning, like nerve endings firing in the dark.
My mind retreated, instinctive and desperate. If I stayed present, I would break. So I slipped back inside myself and let my body become something happening to someone else.
Over the buzzing, my groans filled the room. My body chased more. My hips rocked and begged as the pleasure expanded until it was all I knew.
Then sounds infiltrated.
The creak of footsteps.
Then the sound of strings drifted in, a haunting violin melody, muffled at first, then swelling louder. It didn’t soothe. It stalked me like a starving predator.
And then breathing, loud breathing. Or was that me breathing?
The violin grew louder, more aggressive, more passionate.
Images flashed before my eyes, flashing too fast to grasp, barely shards, dissolving before I could understand what they were.
Black wrought iron curling into impossible patterns.
A pointed spire cutting into a storm-colored sky.
Black silk and dark polished wood.
A single hooded eye watching from the shadows, unblinking.
Then a voice—my voice—whispered, “Lorcan.”
The name slipped out like a confession. Like a summoning.
I blinked.
My lashes felt heavy as wet cloth. My mouth tasted bitter. My nerve endings of my skin were too exposed, too aware.
I tested my head. It was so heavy as I lifted it off the headrest, the room blurring into place.
I was sitting in Deargán’s therapy room, in the patient’s chair.
But things felt off.
My teacup was almost drained. And sitting on a nearby table was the vintage projector that usually sat on his bookshelf. When had Deargán moved it there?
There was a blanket over my legs where there hadn’t been before. He must have covered me.
My right thigh was bruised, a sore imprint blooming under my skin in the unmistakable shape of fingers. My stomach turned as I grasped in my mind for a reason. Memory refused to attach to anything.
Deargán sat in the chair farthest from me, his posture locked, his jaw tight, gaze fixed anywhere but me.
My body reached for him before I understood why, need crawling under my ribs, instinctive and humiliating.
I hated it.
He stood abruptly, kicking back his chair as if he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. As if proximity had been a mistake. As if I had been.
He walked stiffly to the door. “Session’s over.”
My throat tightened. Heat burned behind my eyes. Breathing turned difficult around the sudden, childish ache of being refused.
He wouldn’t look at me as I walked stiffly to the door, my muscles groaning in protest. He stepped back to make sure I didn’t brush him as I passed.
I’d been discarded, and I didn’t even know why.
Humiliation burned my throat as I realized there was wetness on my thighs and an unsatisfied ache throbbing between my legs. My body held an unfinished tension that buzzed under my skin like electricity.
I didn’t understand what had been given to me, only that something had been done, and I hadn’t been there to stop it.
But the darkest terror was the realization that a part of me, deep down, wanted more.
The high-pitched violin drew me out of sleep, a solo thread, thin and haunting, cutting through the drumming of the rain.
Lightning flashed through the arched window of my bedroom, throwing the iron bed frame into sharp white relief before plunging it back into darkness.
Thunder rolled across the hills like something enormous dragging its knuckles along the roof of the asylum.
The notes drifted closer. Like the sound had crept down the corridor and stopped outside my door.
Three notes, then a pause, before the pattern repeated.
Like someone was playing for me.
Wait, was that someone whispering my name?
I pushed myself upright in the bed, breath shallow, listening.
This time, I swore I heard it.
Ruaaaa.
I crept out of bed, tiptoeing across my room, regretting it as soon as my bare feet touched the icy floor past the edge of the rug.
I turned my handle slowly, easing the door open until it was just wide enough for me to peek my head through.
The same girl from the other night stood in the corridor.
But this time she was closer, about halfway down the corridor.
A wall sconce flickered on behind her, outlining her slender limbs in a pale glow, making them almost seem transparent. Her nightgown clung loosely to her thin frame, slightly different from the ones I’d been issued.
“Hey,” I called out just before thunder boomed through the night, making me flinch.
Slowly, she turned to face me like a mechanical doll.
She had a delicate, heart-shaped face, framed with fine blond hair, almost white. Her skin possessed the translucent, bruised pallor of drowned things, and her eyes were nothing but sad, hollow voids.
Her eyes settled on mine.
There was something accusing in the way she looked at me. As if she was disappointed. As if I was late.
I racked my mind for the faces I’d come to know in my time here. I’d never seen her before, other than that one night. She couldn’t be a patient, could she?
Maggie?
The name echoed in my skull.
My stomach dropped.
“No,” I whispered. “You’re not real.”
She tilted her head and for a moment she simply watched me.
Then she lifted one hand and pointed down the corridor.
She gave me one more long look, then turned and walked the way she had pointed, her bare feet making no sound on the floor.
The violin began again somewhere ahead of us.
Three notes.
Pause.
Three notes again.
I hesitated, my hand on the doorframe. If I was caught out of bed…
But something in me tugged me forward. I had to reach her. I had to know if she was real or just a figment of my imagination.
I stepped out and followed her, keeping my steps light as I jogged down the corridor. The violin faded as I moved deeper through the corridors.
The hallway narrowed. The air grew colder with every step and the wall sconces flickered. Ahead of me the girl moved through the darkness.
Each time I tried to close the distance, she slipped around another corner. Always just ahead. Always waiting.
She slowed when the corridor forked, her head turned back, as if checking that I was still behind her.
Then she continued down the darker passage. The one the girls had warned me about.
She was leading me right into the forbidden wing.
I paused at the entrance. The plaster ceiling sagged where part of the roof had collapsed years ago. Broken slate tiles littered the floor and the air smelled damp and stale, like a place no one had opened in years.
The girls’ warning echoed in my mind.
We’re not supposed to go near that wing.
Why?
Because girls who go wandering down there never come back.
She stood at the doorway at the end of the corridor, waiting for me. Her pale hand curled once.
Come.
Lightning flashed again, illuminating the doorway behind her. Then she stepped backward into the room and vanished.
I hesitated.
I could turn back now. Forget that I’d seen her. Ignore that she’d led me here.
But that tug inside me propelled me forward, like someone else was moving my limbs for me. I stepped carefully among the rubble toward the door, dust shifting beneath every step.
The wind moaned through the broken section of roof above the corridor. Rainwater dripped steadily onto the cracked tiles.
I reached the doorway, waiting like an open mouth.