44. Liath
LIATH
Black dahlias devoured the wallpaper, their petals folding over one another in thick, velvety layers.
My breath hitched. It hadn’t been a hallucination the first time I woke up in the asylum. It had been a repressed memory of this exact room.
This had been where he kept me during my missing month. Before I woke in the asylum. Where he cut my hair. Where my bruises healed. Where he fucking tattooed me.
Deargán’s arm, his attempt to block me, no longer mattered, not when the room beyond him opened like a wound.
Paper skinned the walls from cornice to floor. Photographs. Notes. Maps. Strings of red thread. The whole thing spread across the dahlias like a nervous system.
I pushed past his arm and walked into the room.
He let me.
A vast bed of dark wood and navy linen stood against one wall.
Reading glasses were abandoned on the nightstand beside a vase of black violets.
Shelves crowded the nook in the corner with a single armchair angled near them.
Old pages and smoke hung in the air, but underneath it all sat Deargán’s cello-song, richer here, steeped into the walls.
This was his bedroom.
“I can explain.” Deargán’s voice came low behind me, but his words were hollow.
I moved slowly toward the center of the wall where there were photographs, pinned carefully, like the center of gravity in the room.
Photographs of me.
Me, in the arched stone corridors of Darkmoor College, head bowed, hair over one shoulder. Ava beside me, half cut from the frame as if she had only ever been in the background.
Me, on a stone bench with Ava and Aisling, all of us laughing.
Me, in that French nightclub, my hair whipping out around me, Lisa, Ava, and Aisling all a cropped blur.
Another from outside my bedroom window at Byrne Manor, my body soft with sleep beneath the covers.
In another, wet hair slicked down my back as I stepped from the shower, droplets clinging to my breasts.
In another, I lay across my bed in nothing but a t-shirt and panties, bent over my notes, oblivious.
Every image was candid. Unaware. Lifted from moments that had belonged only to me until he took them.
The room seemed to tilt around a single brutal fact.
He had been there.
Watching.
Not once. Not by chance. Again and again, with patience.
The wall drifted sideways for a second.
I reached out to steady myself, my hand landing on a cluster of Polaroids.
Mine.
The same Polaroids that had hung opposite my bed. Selfies I’d taken with the girls. Me sprawled on a yacht next to Ava. Me in my bedroom before a night out with Aisling. Me at The Vault, laughing and dancing with Lisa.
Photos I’d pinned up alongside fairy lights on my wall.
Except they weren’t on my wall anymore.
They were here.
Heat flashed over my skin so violently I wanted to claw it off. He’d been in my bedroom. He’d stolen my photos. He’d gone through my fucking things.
This wasn’t accidental. This took time.
Days.
Weeks.
Maybe months.
He had followed me. Watched me. Collected pieces of my life like artifacts. Pinned them up on his fucking wall to look at from his pillow, the last thing he saw every night before he slept and the first thing he saw when he woke.
My stomach twisted. I turned to him, standing like a ghost near my shoulder. “How long had you been planning to take me?”
His jaw twitched as it clenched, but he didn’t answer.
“How long?” I yelled.
“Only a few weeks before—”
“Liar.” I smacked my hand against the wall, dislodging a photograph that fluttered to the floor like a frightened bird. “There are photos up here from over a year ago.”
He nodded slowly, not a trace of apology in his eyes. “You were… a contingency.”
My head spun. I didn’t even know what that meant.
My gaze snagged on the next section of the wall.
Pages photocopied from a diary, pinned into a neat, chilling grid, lines of handwriting so familiar my brain refused them at first.
Mine.
My handwriting.
My diary.
Words I’d written in confidence in my journal now stared back at me. Each page had been defaced. Red ink circled some sentences. Others had been underlined. Notes filled the margins in Deargán’s handwriting.
Predictions.
Reactions.
Weaknesses.
Triggers.
A strange, flaying sensation moved through me, as if the skin had been peeled off my thoughts and stretched up here to dry.
He had not merely read me. He had sectioned me. Dissected me like evidence. Mapped the softest places. Marked where to press. Studied how to break me.
He’d strategically mapped my mind. Built a road straight to my breaking point.
And I’d followed it.
“You stole my diary,” I accused him. “You took me apart.”
“I needed to understand you.” He said it as if it should make sense. As if it justified something.
I tore my gaze off the pages before the sight of my own handwriting on his wall undid something permanent in me.
Then I spotted the photograph set apart from the rest, older and water-damaged, its edges curled and darkened.
A young woman lay half-submerged in water, her hair fanned around her face, her eyes open and glassy. Her face looked strangely peaceful. Too peaceful. Like she’d been staring at the sky when the water closed over her. Like hers had been a quiet death. A lonely one.
A chill spread through my chest.
This woman wasn’t part of the study. She was something else. Something personal.
“Who is she?”
Deargán hesitated for a fraction too long. “Someone who mattered.”
I looked away from the drowned woman and into the next section of the wall.
Another set of photographs filled it.
A girl stood in an art room, looking up from a canvas, charcoal staining her fingers, paint streaking her sleeves.
Oh my God. The angle of her jaw. The gray of her eyes. The shape of her mouth.
That wasn’t me. But it was like looking into a mirror.
It was Rua.
My breath caught.
I hadn’t been mistaken for Rua. I had been selected to replace her.
My hand lifted. My fingers hovered, then brushed the photograph.
Oh my God. She didn’t just look similar to me.
She looked exactly like me.
“Is she my…” The question died on my tongue.
“Your twin. Yes.”
The word struck and kept striking.
Twin.
Sister.
For a second the room lost its edges. Not dizziness. Something stranger. Like the shape of my life had been cut open and another version of it shoved inside.
A sister.
Someone with my face. My blood. My bones.
“I have a sister,” I whispered.
For one stupid, aching second, a wild, blinding hope flared in me. I had a sister. Someone who shared my face, my blood, the very shape of my soul. I wasn’t alone in the world.
I had family.
I could find her. We could escape this together.
I turned to Deargán, my heart fluttering in my throat. “W-where is she now?”
Deargán didn’t answer immediately, his silence spreading through the room like a sickness before he spoke.
“She didn’t survive. But you did.”
My twin.
Gone before I had even learned that she was mine.
Grief tore through me with nowhere to go, too new and too huge to fit inside my body. It made a mockery of itself at once, because how could I mourn someone I had never held, never met, never even known existed until a heartbeat ago?
And yet the loss was there all the same.
My eyes moved back to the photograph.
Rua stared out from the paper with my face. My cheekbones. My mouth. The exact tilt of my eyes. Even the way her hair fell across her forehead looked familiar, like I was seeing some forgotten version of myself frozen in time.
Except she was gone.
Dead.
And I was standing here breathing in the space she should have filled.
A strange, vertigo feeling opened inside me, like the ground beneath my life had shifted without warning. Somewhere out in the world there had been another girl with my face. Another heartbeat that matched mine. Another life that should have run parallel to my own.
Someone who might have understood me without explanation.
Someone who might have… loved me.
My throat tightened.
And now she was gone.
Deargán stepped closer. His hand flinched toward me like he meant to touch my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
I turned toward him slowly.
The grief was still there, raw and bewildering, but something darker was beginning to rise through it now. A hard, jagged anger that made my hands tremble.
“You knew,” I accused him.
“They destroy what they can’t control.” Deargán’s voice turned cold and bitter. “They always have.”
My gaze drew to the final section of the wall, to an older photograph there.
I stepped closer.
A younger Deargán stood beside a woman, his arm wrapped around her waist. She smiled up at him, her hand resting against his chest. The intimacy between them was unmistakable.
She was beautiful, yes, but not in the fragile porcelain way the asylum seemed to prefer.
Her hair was a pale honey-blond, loose around her shoulders in wild waves that caught the sunlight, the kind of hair that had never stayed pinned up for long.
Her eyes were bright and unmistakably blue, sharp with a kind of quick intelligence that made it look like she was always one step ahead.
And her smile. It wasn’t shy or delicate. It curved wide across her mouth, crooked at one corner, like she was about to tell a joke.
There was something cheeky in it. Something defiant.
She looked like the sort of girl who climbed trees in good dresses and laughed when people told her she shouldn’t.
The sort of girl who ran too fast, spoke too freely, and never quite learned how to make herself smaller for anyone.
Next to the photograph sat a newspaper clipping.
Heiress Murders Entire Family.
Beside that was a black-and-white photo of the same woman.
Underneath was her name.
Magdalene Blackwood.
The wall rearranged itself all at once.
Not me.
Not Rua.
Not even the asylum, not really.
The person who sat at the center of it all was Maggie.
She was the hidden hinge every other piece swung from. The file. The clipping. The old photograph of Deargán with his arm around her waist. The asylum itself. The dead girl in the water. Even me.
I turned to him. “What the fuck is this?”
Deargán didn’t answer.