18. Liath
LIATH
Through the nearby arched window, Maggie disappeared around the edge of the building and vanished into the dark as if the grounds had swallowed her whole.
Consequences be damned. I had to catch her. I had to face my ghost, to prove to myself she was nothing but a trick of the light.
I opened the door. Cold air hit me hard enough to steal the breath from my lungs. Rain and mud and damp ivy filled my nose, sharp and alive, and the slick grass soaked my bare feet as I ran along the shadow of the wall.
I peered round the corner.
But my ghost was not alone.
A cluster of dark shapes stood near the tree line, half hidden by bushes, their laughter and whispers cutting through the night.
One girl stood at the center like she owned the dark, shoulders back and chin lifted, her gray skirt impossibly short.
The ringleader.
A boy’s voice rang out. “Go on then, touch it. Bet you won’t.”
The pale girl stepped forward.
She wasn’t Maggie.
She was younger and alive and shaking.
Moonlight caught her face and for a split second it flickered into Maggie again, pale and hollow-eyed, before snapping back.
My stomach lurched.
“Stop it,” I muttered under my breath, unsure whether I meant the night or my own mind.
A boy snapped a photo of the building with his phone. “Bet there’s proper loonies staring at us.”
Their laughter scraped over my skin.
Another boy mimicked a scream and clutched his chest in fake madness until someone shoved him. “Shut up, Eli. You’ll wake the people in there.”
“They’re not people,” the ringleader said, low and bored. “They’re rejects.”
The group laughed.
Someone muttered, “Noice one, Aoife.”
The ringleader, Aoife, shoved the pale girl forward, a cruel smile twisting her glossy lips. “Go on. Run up and touch the wall. Take a bit of ivy. Proof you’ve balls.”
The pale girl’s shoulders were tight and her hands twisted in her nightgown.
No, not a nightgown at all. It was a rough hessian sack that hung awkwardly on her frame, like they’d dressed her for sport.
She turned back to the group. “But…”
Aoife rolled her eyes. “Don’t be thick, Nuala. It’s only a building.”
Nuala looked toward the asylum. Toward me.
Our eyes almost met.
Something tugged low in my chest, not pity but recognition, sharp and immediate.
A girl who didn’t want to be here.
She crept toward the building. Her fingers hovered over a thick strand of ivy crawling across the stone before she pulled.
The crack of ivy seemed to split the night.
A door slammed somewhere behind me and boots pounded across gravel.
“Oi!”
The shout cut through the trees.
Aoife ran first, the rest of the students scattering, vanishing into the trees.
No one looked back.
Except Nuala.
She hesitated, torn between following them and helping a boy who had stumbled near the edge of the grass. That single second cost her.
A guard barreled into her from behind, driving her into the ground hard enough that she cried out, the sound stabbing into my chest.
“Thought you’d be brave, did you?” he snarled, sounding pleased with himself.
“I didn’t. I just—” she gasped as her words broke apart and her palms slipped on the wet grass.
Another guard grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back, hauling her upright. “You stuck-up students think this place is a joke.” His grip slid lower than it needed to. “You won’t be laughing for long.”
My blood ran cold.
“Let go,” Nuala shouted, thrashing as her legs kicked for traction and found none.
This was my chance to run back inside, shut the door, and pretend I had never left my bed. If I was seen out here, if I was caught, Deargán would know, and survival screamed at me to be smart.
Nuala’s eyes darted wildly and landed on me standing half-hidden in shadow.
Help me.
The words were not spoken but it reached between us like a hand reaching out.
I bent and snatched up a rock, the stone slick with rain and heavy in my palm.
If I hit him, I escalated this. They would see me. They’d catch me.
I pictured Deargán in the therapy room, calm and too close, telling me this was treatment while he doled out his punishment.
Fuck him. Fuck all of them.
I couldn’t help Maeve. But I could help her.
My hand shook so violently I nearly dropped the stone. If I missed or if they caught me, Deargán wouldn’t be able to save me from what they’d do.
I swallowed my terror and threw it, hard.
The rock hit the guard in the back of the head with a dull crack and he bellowed, releasing Nuala with one hand to clutch his skull.
“Who’s there?” The other guard’s gaze swept the dark.
Nuala twisted free and stomped down on the first guard’s boot with surprising force before bolting straight toward me.
“Get her!”
I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to the side door, yanking it open just enough for us to slip through.
“This way,” I hissed.
We tumbled inside and I slammed the door shut, throwing the lock across just as boots thundered toward us.
A fist pounded against the other side and the impact shuddered through the wood.
“Open this door!”
My chest held tight, refusing air, as I pulled Nuala deeper into the corridor and into the shadows.
Her chest heaved and mud streaked her knees, and a red mark bloomed along her forearm where fingers had gripped too hard. Up close she looked younger than she had outside.
“Are you mad?” she whispered. “They’ll kill you if they catch you in here.”
A bitter sound pressed at my throat.
“I live here,” I said, breath thin. “They’ll do worse.”
“Oh.” She blinked at me. “I’m Nuala.”
“I’m Liath.”
Saying it out loud pressed against something bruised and tender inside me.
Her fingers tightened around mine.
“Liath,” she repeated softly. “Irish for gray.”
Not Rua.
Liath.
The sound of my name settled into my bones and I squeezed her hand back.
“We’ve got to get you out of here.” I frowned. “Wait, how did you get in?”
Nuala swallowed hard, her chest still heaving as she scanned around the dark hallway. “The outer wall. Just west of the front gate. There's a section choked with overgrown ivy… it's thick enough to climb.”
I filed that detail away, a sharp thrill cutting through my panic. If it was thick enough for a student to climb in, it was thick enough for a patient to climb out.
“You need to get back to that wall.” I tightened my grip on her hand. “Come on.”
I led her through side corridors I had memorized in restless wandering, ducking into shadows whenever we heard voices and flattening against stone when footsteps echoed nearby.
Every click of a door tightened my muscles and every shift of light stole my breath because the asylum knew its own and it would know I had brought an outsider in.
At the side door on the other end of the asylum, I eased it open and pulled her out, gesturing toward the grassy slope that led down to the lake.
“Follow the lake all the way until you hit the stone wall,” I said. “It’ll take you back to the main gate. Keep low.”
She hesitated. “Come with me.”
For a second I pictured it, sneaking out over the wall and into trees, away from stone and therapy rooms and names that did not belong to me.
But the shouts of the guards were still echoing across the grounds. They were actively hunting; I’d be caught before I made it past a hundred feet. I needed to bide my time.
Even if the path was clear… my chest tightened. I pictured Maeve locked in the Special Ward, and Dervla trying to survive the dining hall alone. I couldn't just abandon them.
Beneath that, a darker, sicker truth anchored my bare feet to the floor. The phantom hum of a cello vibrated under my ribs. I couldn't leave without knowing what Deargán was doing to me. I had to know what he wanted.
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
She studied me like she wanted to argue and then swallowed it. “Thank you, Liath. Take care.”
She slipped into the dark and vanished among the reeds, the night swallowing her quickly.
Before I could sink back into the building, my gaze caught on something across the lake.
My breath caught.
A figure stood beneath a stand of trees, tall and still and watching.
He was wrong for a guard, too relaxed and too sure, and his gaze moved over me slowly, not leering but measuring.
Wind shifted and lifted his dark hair off his forehead just enough for light to catch his face. I knew that jaw and those hooded eyes and that scowl carved in pencil.
My throat went dry and my skin prickled as if that look had touched me.
For one shameful second I forgot Nuala entirely.
My fingers dug into the doorframe.
He tilted his head slightly, and recognition passed between us.
Guards shouted somewhere in the distance and boots crashed through underbrush, but he did not move.
He held my gaze until my lungs burned from not breathing. Then he lifted two fingers to his mouth.
Ember flared from a cigarette I had not noticed before. Orange light carved his mouth for a heartbeat, sharp and familiar, as if I had traced it before in charcoal.
Then slowly, deliberately, he turned and disappeared into the shadows.
He was real.
Lorcan was real.
Rua existed.
Rua loved him.
And I was standing in her place.
A sick, suffocating wave of imposter syndrome crashed over me. I wasn’t just borrowing a name anymore; I was haunted by the ghost of a girl’s ruined love story.
I stumbled into therapy. I couldn’t have said how I’d gotten there.
My hands felt too far away from me, like someone had cut the string connecting me to my limbs and left them dangling. My mouth was as dry as cotton.
Deargán closed the door behind me, the lock clicking too loud.
I jolted and turned.
Deargán stood too close, enough that the air between us felt claimed, yet not close enough to be comforting.
“How are you feeling, Rua?”
The name hit the center of my chest and made something in me flinch, a knee-jerk recoil.
I opened my mouth to protest. And—
My throat closed like it was guarding something sharp.
“I’m…”
I swallowed and tasted bitterness, like I’d licked the wrong pill.
Nothing came out.
Not Liath.
Just a gap.
It wasn’t a blank, neat pause either. It was a hole with teeth, a place in my mind that pulled at everything around it.
My pulse skittered, my palms dampened, and a hot prickle ran up the back of my neck.
I tried again. “I’m not… I’m…”
It was like my own protests slid off my tongue and fell on the floor between us.
He didn’t fill the silence, didn’t prompt me. He just watched me struggle.
Silence pressed on my eardrums. The hum of the lights sharpened. It made the ticking clock sound like a countdown.
Finally, he stepped closer and placed his hand between my shoulder blades.
My stupid pulse jumped.
His palm was warm through the thin fabric of my clothes, the heat of him making my stomach flip.
Heat slid low and unwanted through my belly, a slow curling ache that made me hate my own body.
“Perhaps you should sit, Rua.” With his hand, he pressed gently, directing me forward, guiding me toward the chair.
My legs moved before my mind could consciously instruct them. Like they responded to him and not me.
Why the fuck did my body do that?
Even as my mind scrambled, my body lowered into the chair on instinct, sinking into the curved palm of its cushions as if they had been waiting for me.
I found myself reaching for my tea out of habit, my fingers curling around the smooth warm ceramic like a tiny hug. Found myself sipping on it, the bitter tea coating my tongue. Was that a hint of a metallic taste underneath the tea?
My eyes snagged on the film projector facing the wall opposite.
It hadn’t been there at our last session. Or it had been and my mind had refused to hold it. Either way, it sat wrong.
The edges of the room started to go fuzzy, a soft blur in the corners like breath on glass. The walls wavered. The lines between wood and shadow smeared.
I tried to focus and couldn’t.
My knee bounced once, then twice. I pressed my heel into the floor to stop it, but the buzzing under my skin only climbed.
What was happening to me? I think I might have said this out loud—or I tried to.
Deargán switched the film projector on, the flicking sound scratching against my nerves. The beam sliced across the wall, taking up my whole vision, filling it with bright white. I winced against the brightness.
“Relax. You’ll feel so much better soon, Rua.”
Images started to flash across my mind.