44. Liath #2
He just stood there wearing the same emotionless mask. He didn’t even have the decency to look guilty.
I turned back to the damning wall slowly, my eyes moving across the photographs again before settling on the picture of Maggie and Deargán.
This Deargán looked alive in a way that almost hurt to look at.
His arm was relaxed around Maggie’s waist, his posture loose and confident, like he belonged exactly where he was standing. There was laughter caught in his expression as he gazed at her, frozen just before it spilled out, his eyes soft with awe.
He looked free. Happy.
Which somehow made the cold, unfeeling man standing in front of me feel infinitely more tragic.
Slowly a picture began to form in my head.
“You loved her. Didn’t you?”
Deargán flinched when my fingers hovered near the photograph of them together. That tiny movement said more than any confession would have.
“You did all of this because of her.”
Maggie was the woman from his file. The nameless girl from the half-burned records I’d found in his office.
They had tried to bury Maggie. He kept dragging her back into the light.
My eyes dropped to the newspaper clipping pinned beside Maggie’s photograph.
Heiress Murders Entire Family.
I spotted crime scene photos spread across a smaller section of the board, arranged like a morbid altar.
One had been blown up to focus on the main ballroom door, the very door I’d squeezed through. The door handle had been circled over and over in red pen so that it’d broken through the film paper.
My finger ran across a residue line above it, the ghost of a sticky note, before my fingernail caught on the shallow indent of words that had been pressed hard from the sticky note above.
I didn’t have to lean closer to know what it said.
Locked from the outside.
The sticky note I’d found in that mysterious file had come from here.
“That’s what they said she did,” I said quietly. “But you don’t believe it.”
Maggie’s bedroom wall message flashed in my mind, and the doubt that had lingered until now snapped cleanly into place.
Someone had framed her.
Maggie’s legend flashed through me in shards. The madness. The tower of this very carriage house. The fall. Pushed. Or she killed herself.
Either way, it was their fault.
“You blame the asylum for what happened to her. This isn’t about Maggie.” My voice sharpened. “It’s about revenge.”
My gaze moved again, scanning the wall faster now. It stopped on another newspaper clipping.
Lasair Family Converts Murder Manor to Asylum.
Understanding crept over me so slowly it hurt. “Oh.” I turned toward him. “You want revenge on the Lasairs.”
I said the name slowly, testing it in my own mouth. My eyes flicked back to the photographs of Rua.
Rua Lasair.
My eyes widened. “Rua is their daughter.”
I turned back to Deargán. The pieces kept dropping into place, one after another, ugly and sharp.
“You were going to use Rua to get close to them. But something happened.” My voice hardened. “Rua didn’t survive.”
My hand lifted toward the wall, toward Rua’s face.
“You kidnapped me because I look like her. You thought I could replace her. Tell me I’m wrong.”
I ripped Maggie’s photo away from the wall and shoved it in his face.
“Tell me that you didn’t fuck up my life to exact your revenge.”
Deargán stood there, still silent.
A scream ripped out of me. I grabbed the top of the photograph with both hands, ready to tear it clean down the middle.
“Wait.” His hand came up slowly, palm open, as if I were the dangerous one in the room.
I stopped with the paper stretched tight between my fingers, the top edge already threatening to split.
Deargán’s eyes stayed on the photograph in my hands. “That’s the only one I have left of her.”
My grip tightened. “You kidnapped me. You drugged me. You locked me up in that asylum.”
“Yes.”
The brutal honesty stole the air from the room.
My hands dropped to my sides, Maggie’s photograph barely caught between my fingertips. My mouth opened, then closed again.
I stared at him. “You hunted me. Studied me. Gaslit me.”
“Yes.”
“You made me believe I was Rua.”
“Yes.”
A harsh laugh tore out of me. “This was never about me.”
“No,” he said, his voice quiet, the honesty of it somehow worse than another lie. “This is bigger than you.”
I gestured wildly toward the wall. “You destroyed me for this.”
Deargán’s gaze followed the movement of my hand.
“You weren’t destroyed.” He looked back at me. “You survived.”
The words hit somewhere deep and bruised.
Deargán glanced toward the window as searchlights bled through the curtains in pale sweeps.
“Right now,” he said quietly, “you’re still a patient of the Magdalene Institute.”
The words landed with the cold, administrative finality of a lock turning.
“Try to leave and they’ll drag you straight back. Throw you into the Special Ward. Erase you. But…” His eyes blazed into mine. “I can walk you out.”
I stared at him, waiting for the lie that always followed offers like this. Men like Deargán didn’t hand out freedom unless there was a leash hidden somewhere behind it. “What’s the catch?”
Deargán held my gaze. “You become Rua.”
“No!” I backed away from him, my voice cracking with fury. “You kidnapped me. Drugged me. Locked me up in that asylum. And now you want me to help you?” I laughed, the sound bitter and ugly. “You’re insane.”
“No, I’m being realistic,” he said. “You can’t escape without me.”
I stiffened.
Deargán studied me for a long moment. “Even if you could, where exactly would you go? Back to the father who hurt you?”
I flinched, the ghost of bruises lighting up across my hips and thighs.
“To the mother who let it happen?”
My breath stuttered in my tightening chest.
“You think they’ll protect you?” He shook his head. “Your father sent that first thug to take care of you.”
The alleyway behind The Vault flashed through me. The smell of trash and stale beer. The scrape of my back against brick. The painful strength of that thug’s grip. Deargán yanking him off me.
I shook my head. “No. He… he wouldn’t.”
“You were starting to put pieces together before the alley. The bruises that did not fit the stories. The missing time. The fear that arrived before memory did. Men like your father notice when the past begins to surface.” His gaze held mine. “You had become a liability.”
The room spun. My fingers loosened from Maggie’s photograph and it fluttered to the ground, her pretty face staring up at me.
Another troubled woman.
Another voiceless victim.
Another story buried.
Deargán gestured toward the asylum lights through the window. “And what about Dervla?”
I froze at her name.
“She won’t survive that ward,” Deargán said, twisting the knife. “She won’t survive them. But if you help me…”
He nodded toward the wall covered in photographs.
“We burn the whole institute down.”
I hesitated, his promise sitting heavy in my guts while I weighed the trap I knew had to be there hidden somewhere. “What exactly is it you want me to do?”
He held my gaze. “Become Rua. Eat dinner at their table. Let them trust you. Let them believe you belong to them.”
My pulse started climbing with each sentence. My fingers curled against my palms, nails biting into skin while my mind raced through every way this could end. With me exposed, caught, dragged back through those asylum doors. Or worse.
“And when the time comes…” His voice lowered. “You will be the blade they never see coming.”