17. Liath
LIATH
Ipeered inside, my breath held behind a clenched jaw.
Inside the room, an iron bed frame stood against the far wall, the mattress sagged in the middle as if someone had slept there night after night for years.
A small wooden desk leaned crooked beside the window.
The glass had shattered inward, leaving jagged teeth in the frame.
The curtains stirred in the wind like pale ghosts.
The girl was nowhere to be seen.
I stepped inside and the floorboard creaked beneath my weight.
Wind blew in through the broken window, spitting dried leaves into the room and raising goosebumps along my arms.
A worn teddy bear sat against the pillow, one glass eye missing, its fur rubbed flat with age.
My throat tightened.
Whoever this room had belonged to had been barely more than a child when they locked her in here.
A hairbrush lay on the dresser with pale strands tangled through the bristles, like she’d only just set it down after brushing her hair.
Dresses hung in the wardrobe, the same kind of asylum-issued gowns, except in an older style, a stiff lace fringing the collar and hems.
I turned the closest hanger toward me.
The stitching across the breast was faded but unmistakable.
Magdalene.
My breath caught.
Maggie.
Patient number one. The girl from the stories whispered through the halls.
This was her room.
As if in response, the room fell completely silent.
I rubbed my arms against the sudden chill.
“Hello?” I whispered.
Only the wind answered through the broken window.
For a moment doubt crept in. Maybe the girl had never been there. Maybe my imagination had drawn me out here.
Then the hairs on the back of my neck lifted, like someone was standing right behind me.
I spun, heart in my throat.
But there was no one.
Relief sagged through me so quickly my knees almost gave out.
Then lightning struck, lighting up the room, the flash burned white across the peeling wallpaper. For one heartbeat the entire room stood frozen in stark light.
And letters blazed across the wall.
I D I D
I T .
Large angry letters slashed across the wallpaper in thick dark strokes, gouged into the peeling wallpaper. Thunder crashed over the asylum a second later, rattling the broken window frame.
My breath caught in my throat.
I did it.
The stories rushed back all at once.
Maggie.
The girl who killed her family.
The girl who went mad.
The girl who haunts those who are about to break.
A cold knot tightened in my chest as one thought circled through my mind again and again.
What if I’m next?
The next day, I woke up to rain and an odd craving to hear a violin song I didn’t know the name of.
I moved through the asylum with a strange sensory overlap, like the world had doubled.
The scent of rain through tall arched windows triggered phantom violin notes in my head, like someone tapping on the inside of my skull.
The notes spiked when I passed Deargán in the corridor, clashing with his bassy cello.
My steps faltered.
Dizziness washed over me and I had to brace my fingers against the wall as if it could keep me upright.
Homesickness surged through me, sudden and sharp, but it wasn’t for Byrne Manor. The feeling was odd. Detached. Like I missed a place that wasn’t mine.
A raven cawed from the sill outside a nearby window, beating its wings against the glass, and I jumped, the sound snapping something loose in me.
Suddenly I was staring at a raven perched on the top of a massive black wrought-iron gate. Something tugged in my chest. I recognized those impossible ornate curls.
There was a crest in the center, smothered in ivy, the name hidden.
I squinted at it in my mind, desperate to read it, desperate to form letters out of leaves.
I blinked and I was staggering back in the asylum hallway as if I’d fallen back out of a memory.
The floor felt unsteady under my feet, like I’d stepped off a moving train and expected the ground to keep carrying me forward. My stomach dipped and I caught myself against the wall, fingers scraping over brocade wallpaper.
I inhaled a breath that smelled of disinfectant and damp wool, not rain and smoke and iron gates. That should have comforted me. It didn’t.
I passed asylum doors I must have passed a hundred times before, and none of them looked familiar. Not properly. Like I was walking through a place I’d studied from photographs rather than lived in.
My heart wouldn’t settle. It beat too fast, too eager, like it was chasing something just out of reach.
My feet carried me to the library without me remembering that I’d decided to go.
Rua’s chair waited by the window.
It shouldn’t have looked like anything more than material and wood, but the sight of it made something in my chest twist.
I sat down on it and the cushions sighed under me, molding to my hips, and for a second the room aligned. My shoulders loosened before I could stop them. I caught myself and straightened, annoyed at my own body.
My fingers trembled as they found the worn padded arm.
“It’s just a chair,” I muttered. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
My voice sounded small, like I was trying to convince a child. Or myself.
Lightning flashed outside the window and a pointed spire cut into a storm-colored sky, tall and severe against the clouds growing out of an ominous gothic building.
Not the asylum.
Not Byrne Manor.
Somewhere else.
For some strange reason, my shoulders loosened for the first time all morning, feeling something dangerously close to relief. Like I was finally looking at something that belonged to me.
Home.
I shook myself and the image faded, leaving behind the window and the storm clouds beyond.
Why would I relax? Why would I soften for something I’d supposedly never seen? I pressed my teeth together, stubborn and stupid, like if I refused it hard enough it would back off.
“I’ve never been there,” I told myself.
The lie sounded thin.
My hands gripped the cushion underneath me, but it wasn’t the chair cushion anymore.
The material shifted to linen beneath my palms, smooth and cool. My fingers sank into it like it welcomed them.
I was sitting up in bed.
In my bedroom in the asylum.
How… how did I get back here? I was just in the library, wasn’t I?
My breath stuttered and I turned my head slowly, afraid that if I moved too fast the illusion would snap and take me with it.
The pale sheets bled into black silk. The fabric slid against my thighs in a way cotton never did, whispering instead of rustling, cool and soft. It felt expensive. Intimate.
Four posts of dark polished wood rose up at the corners of my bed. They were tall and carved, reaching toward the ceiling like they belonged in a cathedral instead of a bedroom. And the white in the wallpaper bled.
I didn’t move. Didn’t dare to breathe. I just stared as my bedroom bled into someone else’s.
Until I was in a dark bedroom in a four-poster bed, watched from every direction. The crimson brocade walls were smothered in a mosaic of paintings in dark gold frames, layered and overlapping, faces and bodies I couldn’t quite focus on.
I didn’t try to leave the bed. Somehow… I belonged in it. Or it belonged to me.
My pulse slammed against my ribs, panic scrambling over my body like claws.
In the shadows by the fireplace, a single hooded eye watching me without blinking. He stepped out and the light fell across the harsh, unapologetic lines of his face.
Those shadowed eyes.
That violent glare.
Familiar in a way that made my stomach drop.
He didn’t look surprised to see me. He looked like he’d been waiting.
There was something almost amused in the set of his mouth, like I’d taken longer than expected.
“All these paintings of me.” His gaze moved slowly across the walls. “You’re fucking obsessed.”
The blurry figures in the frames sharpened. All of them transforming into him. Him from various angles, in various poses, some of them from afar as if he didn’t know he was being observed. Some of him naked.
“No,” I whispered, my voice thin. “I don’t know you.”
He just kept moving closer, floorboards creaking under his boots. Until he stopped right by the bed and leaned in. So close I could see the threads of silver in his arctic eyes.
“But I don’t think fucking you would cure it.” His gaze slid down my body before snapping back to my face. “I think it would make you worse.”
My pulse answered him, traitorous and steady. My breath stuttered, heat blooming across my breasts, tightening my nipples to painful points, and settled low and insistent in my belly.
No. This was not real.
I squeezed my eyes shut and counted back from ten.
Nine, eight, seven. My voice sounded breathless in my own head. Four. three. I nearly forgot two.
One.
Then I opened them.
Relief hit me in a shaky exhale.
I was back in the asylum.
The ornate ceiling was pale cracked plaster again. The air smelled of old stone and antiseptic. The bed beneath me was narrow and unremarkable. The walls were that same black-and-white floral wallpaper.
Everything in the bedroom was exactly as it should be.
No paintings on my wall. No black sheets. No dangerous boy.
Something felt too much like disappointment in me.
Then realization struck me with a sick, certain weight.
I knew him.
I tumbled out of bed and scrambled for the secret compartment behind my dresser, fingers clumsy with panic.
The wood panel stuck for a second and I nearly swore out loud. “Come on,” I muttered under my breath.
Finally, it shifted.
I pulled out the art journal into my lap, feeling heavier than it should have.
I hesitated before opening it.
Because I already knew what I’d find.
My hands shook as I opened it.
The drawing of the boy stared back at me.
The same jaw.
The same darkness in the gaze.
That dangerous scowl.
My fingertips traced the pencil lines of his jaw, slow and reverent, even as my mind recoiled.
“How do I know you?” I breathed, my throat tightening so badly the words barely made it out.
A name slid into place like it had always belonged there, coating my tongue. Like it had always belonged to me.
Lorcan.
My pulse roared. I jerked my hand back as if burned.
“How do I know that?” I whispered. “How do I know that name?”
My palms pressed to my temples as if I could hold my skull together.
“This isn’t real. These aren’t my memories.”
I sounded desperate now. Properly desperate.
These were just hallucinations. Images born from hearing that cursed name over and over.
Rua.
Rua.
Rua.
Anything but the truth.
And yet.
A part of me, deep and humiliating, leaned toward the face in the sketch.
A part of me wanted him.
And that part wasn’t afraid of him.
That part would follow him through those gates without asking why.
That part would choose him over safety.
The thought made my stomach flip. This wanting terrified me more than the ghost in the hallway.
The violin resumed, closer now, as if answering me.
My skin prickled, every nerve standing on end.
I tested his name on my tongue, my voice barely making a sound.
“Lorcan.”
He seemed to smirk back at me from the sketch.
I wasn’t sure whether I’d summoned him.
Or whether he’d been there the entire time, just waiting for me to remember.
That night, I woke up with a jolt to a sharp crack that split the dark. It was followed by a muffled thud.
I lay there with my eyes open, the dark pressing in on all sides, and listened.
The asylum had its own noises at night, pipes ticking, the creak of wooden doors settling in their frames, the occasional groan of the building sinking on itself, but this had weight to it. Something physical. Something human.
Wind moved through the trees, and then something scraped softly against the outer wall beneath my window.
I pushed myself out of bed and crossed to the narrow pane, my nightgown clinging to my thighs, my skin prickling as I listened for more movement.
Through the glass, a pale figure ran across the grounds below, a girl in a loose nightgown, hair pale against the dark.
“Maggie,” I breathed.
As if she heard me, she looked back over her shoulder, and my heart kicked hard against my ribs.
Wait!
I didn’t think before I moved. I yanked my door open and slipped into the corridor, bare feet landing silent on icy stone. The asylum air at night was thinner and the shadows were like gaps waiting to swallow something careless.
My pulse pounded so hard I expected it to echo off the walls as I raced down the side stairs.
I reached the side door that led to the grounds and stopped with my hand hovering over the iron handle, blackened and worn smooth.
My fingers trembled a hair’s breadth away.
If I opened it, I risked being seen.
If I was seen, Deargán would know.
If Deargán knew, there would be consequences.