28. Deargán
DEARGáN
Ipaused just inside the doorway of the Magdalene art room, Liath close at my heels.
Something about the room pressed at me in a way my office never did. My office had structure. Boundaries. Chairs positioned exactly where I wanted them. Shelves, files, instruments of authority. Everything in its place.
The art room refused all of that. Tall ceilings rose above us, and gray Irish light poured through the arched windows in long slants across the parquetry. Easels and tables stood scattered throughout the room, and paintings lined the walls so densely that the whole space felt watched.
The open space stripped away the quiet control I relied on during sessions.
Nothing here reinforced my role as the doctor. Nothing here reminded Liath that she was meant to be the patient.
She moved through the room with easy confidence, crossing to an easel near the window. She settled onto the stool and picked up a brush and began squeezing paints onto a palette.
“Do you like the paintings?” she asked, gesturing casually toward the walls.
I skimmed over them as I strode farther into the room. “They’re interesting, I suppose.”
“You don’t recognize them?” She looked at the walls rather than at me. “Those are mine.”
“They’re Rua’s work,” I said automatically.
Shite.
Her brush paused against the canvas and her eyes lifted slowly toward me. Something sharp moved through her expression.
I straightened. “Yours,” I corrected smoothly. “Of course they are yours.”
She studied me for a long enough moment that the mistake seemed to hang between us in the air. Then she turned back to her painting with almost careless calm, her brush moving again as if my correction had satisfied her.
As if she had noticed the slip and chosen not to press it.
Unease weaved through me.
After a few moments she lifted the end of her brush and gestured toward the nearest painting.
“Do you see the pattern in my work?”
I studied the canvas she indicated, then the next, and the next, my gaze moving over brushstrokes, color, shape.
Nothing.
Only the same bleak beauty Rua had always favored. Dark washes of black, gray, and blue. Figures half-lost in shadow. Stone. Water. Barred windows. The suggestion of confinement without ever naming it.
I had cataloged those qualities months ago. I knew her palettes, her recurring textures, the way she painted shadows as though they were something felt rather than seen.
And still, whatever she wanted me to find refused to rise.
After a moment I had to admit the truth, my curiosity too sharp to let pride interfere. “What pattern?”
“The doors.” She nodded toward the painting. “Every painting has a hidden one.”
I looked again, more carefully this time.
At first I saw only the same dark arch of shadow near the back of the composition. Then something in the paint caught at me. A faint edge of warmer color buried beneath the gray, as if the darkness had been layered over something once meant to stand open.
My gaze sharpened.
There.
A door.
Not obvious. Not literal. More the suggestion of one, worked into the negative space so naturally it vanished unless you already knew how to look for it.
My jaw tightened. How did I miss that?
She gestured toward another painting on the opposite wall. “And that one.”
Another door emerged there too, buried deep in the composition. How annoying that I missed it.
Even more unsettling was the ease with which she found them. As if the paintings were speaking in a language I had studied from the outside while she, somehow, just recognized each word.
I had spent months observing Rua. Cataloging her habits, her preferences, her fractures. Yet Liath stood in front of the same canvases and moved through them by instinct, as though the path had been laid in her already.
How unsettling. How curious.
“What do the doors mean?” I asked, finding myself walking closer to her. I forced myself to pause at a desk, gripping the edge, as if I needed a physical barrier between us to stop me from getting too close.
“A door means there’s always another way out,” she said without hesitation, like the answer had not been formulated in the moment but pulled instinctively from somewhere deep inside her.
She paused, and the faintest smile touched her mouth, hovering there with the quiet ambiguity of a Mona Lisa smile. “People miss it when they’re too rigid in their way of looking at things.”
The words settled into the space between us with deliberate weight.
Something tightened low in my stomach.
She understood Rua’s work in a way I never had, and that fact lodged somewhere under my ribs with quiet force.
I had examined the paintings for evidence of pathology, symbolism, intent. I had looked for clues, leverage, openings.
She looked and found the exit.
I found my eyes tracking the movement of her hand as the brush glided across the canvas with steady confidence. She painted without hesitation, as though the image already existed whole inside her and she was simply revealing it.
“Let me see what you’re painting,” I said, suddenly needing to know.
I stepped closer to the easel and stopped at her side, and the image came into view slowly as my gaze moved across the canvas.
I recognized the heavy, tense line of the shoulders and the hard planes of the chest. The muscular thighs spread slightly askew in the chair, painted with a heavy, shadowed intimacy.
Then the face peering out from the brushwork.
It was me.
Then the final detail settled into place.
I had no clothes on.
I was naked.
She had studied my body closely enough to recreate it with unsettling precision. The knowledge that she had imagined me this clearly sent a hard pulse of awareness through me.
I was the watcher. I was the one who moved in the shadows. But looking at the exact shade of my skin rendered in oil paint, I realized she had been hunting me right back.
I turned to her, suddenly all too aware of how close we were. I was too self-conscious under her stare, feeling as though she were peeling me open.
“Is this what you’re thinking about when you look at me?” I asked, my voice rougher than I had intended.
“No,” she said quietly, still looking at me. “This is how I see you. Bare. Exposed.” She paused, her voice softened on the final word. “Vulnerable without your rules.”
She lifted the canvas carefully from the easel while the paint was still fresh and placed the painting into my hands as if the decision had already been made.
“Hang it somewhere private,” she murmured as she leaned in, close enough that I caught the faint scent of linseed oil, her smell of black violets, and the clean soap she must have used earlier that morning. Her voice softened further when she added, “Think of me.”
Then she brushed past me, the ghost of her heat lingering on my arm, and left the room before I could answer, the session ended.
I stood alone in the art room with the canvas in my hands.
I should have torn it apart. Burned it. Reduced it to wet pulp and paint.
But I didn’t.
Later, I carried the painting into my living room and hung it where no one but me would see it.
Then I stepped back.
The portrait did not feel seductive or flattering. It seemed uncomfortably accurate, as if she had stripped away the authority I hid behind and placed the man underneath on display.
I was utterly exposed.
I turned and froze. Pie stood in the doorway, head tilted slightly as she studied the painting, blond hair falling over one eye, her mouth pursed in that way it did when something irritated her.
“She painted that, didn’t she?”
“It’s a patient exercising a power fantasy. She’s projecting a connection. Transference is common in cases like this.” The explanation came out faster than I intended.
Pie held my gaze for a moment, then stared back toward the painting. “But you kept it.”
My shoulders tightened. “It means nothing.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “She’s compromised you.”
Silence settled through the room.
Fuck.
I turned away from her, took the painting off the wall, and leaned it face-first against the floor.
When I turned back again, she was gone.
The house had fallen silent.
I stared at the empty doorway for a moment, then looked away. There was no point chasing after her when she was in one of these moods.
The room felt smaller now, as if the walls had shifted inward while I wasn’t looking.
Something had changed between Liath and me.
And I knew, with a certainty I could not soften or deny, that I had somehow crossed a line I could not uncross.