4. Liath
LIATH
My lungs seized violently, dragging in a ragged breath that burned all the way down. I was being pushed beneath Blackwood Lake, freezing dark water closing over my head while panic clawed through my chest hard enough to split it open.
I jerked awake choking on water that wasn’t there.
Lightning flashed outside the tower windows as the dream fractured apart.
But my body didn’t understand that yet. My heart slammed wildly against my ribs.
Even after a week, smoke still coated the back of my throat from the fire, turning every breath raw and tight.
I curled forward in the bed, coughing hard into my fist, the taste of ash lingering stubbornly on my tongue.
Thunder rolled across the lake outside. Rain lashed violently against the old tower windows hard enough to rattle the panes. The room was dark except for dying embers glowing low in the hearth.
Another flash of lightning cut across the room, lighting up the pale masked face watching from outside the window before darkness swallowed it again.
I froze, my pulse spiking hard.
I threw the blankets off myself and stumbled out of bed barefoot, crossing the room fast enough that the old floorboards groaned underneath my weight.
There was another flash.
But there was nothing there.
I reached the window and shoved it open hard enough for icy rain to spray across my face immediately.
Wind tore violently through the tower room, scattering loose papers and making the fire hiss sharply behind me.
I leaned dangerously far out over the drop, gripping the stone window frame hard enough that my fingers ached.
Below me, Ravenwood disappeared into storm-dark blur. Rain pounded the ivy climbing the tower walls, thick green vines plastered against ancient stone.
Could someone climb this high?
The thought wormed underneath my skin immediately.
The masked figure.
The Sons.
Another flash of lightning illuminated the ivy twisting down the tower.
It was empty.
There was no movement. No figure. Just rain hammering stone and black water churning far below.
Cold fingers suddenly clamped around my waist from behind.
I screamed as I was jerked backward into the tower room, my pulse exploding into panic as my body slammed hard into someone solid.
“Gray!” Lorcan’s violins flared in my head as his arms tightened to steady me.
It wasn’t an intruder. It was just him.
Lorcan slammed the tower window shut against the storm, breathing harder than he should have been. He turned toward me. His face was white around the mouth, his eyes too wide, too fixed on me, like he was checking I was real.
“Gray.” His voice came out cracked at the edge. “You could have fallen.”
Rainwater dripped from my hair down my throat and beneath the collar of my nightgown. My chest still heaved violently from the fright.
But I couldn’t look away from his face.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Something passed behind his eyes. But it was gone too fast.
“Nothing.” His hand dragged through his damp hair. The color started returning to his cheeks. “What were you doing?”
“I thought I saw…” The words trailed off. Because now that I was fully awake, it sounded insane. No one could climb this high.
Could they?
I glanced back toward the window automatically, unease slowly crawling beneath my skin.
Lightning flickered again outside the tower.
But nothing waited there now except storm and darkness.
Lorcan studied me carefully. “Saw what?”
I hesitated. Every instinct screamed at me not to sound paranoid. Not after everything. Not when I already felt half broken open from grief and exhaustion. When Lorcan wouldn’t let me out of his sight while I recovered.
My fingers tightened around the wet sleeves hanging over my hands.
“Nothing,” I lied.
But even as the word left my mouth, my gaze drifted back toward the window.
Lorcan crouched in front of the Ravenwood library doors, rainwater dripping from the ends of his dark hair as he slid a set of lock picks from inside his coat.
Metal clicked softly against metal.
I stood next to him beneath the archway, arms folded against the cold while Christmas lights flickered weakly across the abandoned Ravenwood quad behind us.
It’d been several weeks of slow recovery since the fire. Ravenwood had broken for the Christmas break. The campus felt wrong this empty. No students. No teachers. Just storm wind pushing dead leaves across the stone paths and rain hammering the stained glass windows overhead.
“You’ve done this before,” I murmured.
His mouth twitched as he worked the lock. “You already know I have.”
I did. Every time he broke into my locked bedroom.
The heavy lock clicked open.
Lorcan pushed the doors inward, the old hinges groaning into the empty night.
The library was cavernous without students inside it.
Rows of reading tables vanished into shadow beneath weak amber lamps left burning for security.
Soaring ceilings disappeared high above us into a rib cage of exposed timber rafters blackened with age.
Iron spiral staircases curled upward toward mezzanine levels packed tight with towering wooden shelves and rolling ladders.
Rain tapped softly against the stained glass windows while dust drifted through the stale, cold air, smelling like old paper, dust, and damp stone, ringing a thin silver chime through the back of my skull, faint but constant.
Lorcan closed the doors behind us and motioned me further inside. Our footsteps echoed through the reading room.
Lorcan kneeled before the door of the restricted archives, head bent, lock picks already out.
My gaze caught on the computer terminals lining the far wall, dark screens facing the room. I could send Nuala an email. One email. And she could stop worrying about where I’d disappeared to.
Lorcan had been keeping an eye on the news. They’d reported on the fire in the old Magdalene carriage house. No bodies were recovered. The fire had been too intense to leave anything behind.
But there was nothing about the missing Lasair daughter. And that made me nervous.
How was Alistair going to explain my—Rua’s—disappearance?
I glanced to Lorcan, his back turned. But I didn’t move toward the computers.
Lorcan stood up and pushed open the door to the restricted archive for me. “Gray?”
“Coming.” My voice came out level.
I’d come back alone. I would email her then. Nuala wasn’t a risk. She was my friend. And she was a decision he didn’t get to make for me.
The archive room sat deeper inside the library, even colder than the main building.
Narrow slit windows overlooked the storm-dark lake. Shelves towered floor to ceiling, packed with bound newspapers, student records, and crumbling university journals. Dust drifted through the weak yellow light overhead.
I rubbed my fingers together for warmth while Lorcan started pulling files.
Secret societies in Ireland.
Student organizations.
Old fraternities.
Too much information flooded the long wooden reading table almost immediately.
Names.
Symbols.
Political groups.
Catholic brotherhoods.
Revolutionary societies.
I leaned back in my chair. My neck had set hard. My eyes felt like they’d been rolled in grit. Outside, the rain had slowed. We had to be hours past midnight.
“Secret societies is too broad,” Lorcan muttered, flipping another brittle page. “There’s hundreds of references.”
We moved our search to the newspaper archives for Ravenwood, Magdalene, and Blackwood when searching for Irish groups and secret societies yielded nothing.
A phrase snagged me in one of the newspapers.
Ravenwood Opens Admissions to Female Students.
I leaned forward and pulled the head of the banker’s lamp closer.
Forty-five years ago, the first women were admitted here.
The article showed a grainy photograph of a handful of smiling girls standing beneath Ravenwood’s courtyard arches while male students glared in the background.
Something twisted low in my stomach.
“Look.” I slid the clipping toward Lorcan.
We started pulling newspapers from the months surrounding the admissions decision.
The deeper we dug, the uglier the story became. Student protests, threatening editorials, and pictures of graffiti painted across women’s dorm towers filled the articles.
Go Home, Whores.
Keep Ravenwood Pure.
A chill walked down my spine.
We found reports of accidents, including a staircase collapse that injured two female students, harassment allegations dismissed by the college, and one girl disappearing for three days before abruptly withdrawing from Ravenwood altogether.
Then another article caught my eye.
We Will Fight This.
Next to the article was a grainy photo of a young man’s scowling face in center frame, a few other male students blurred around him, his face the only one held in focus.
My God. He looked just like Alistair, but with a wider jawline.
The name was quoted directly beneath the headline.
William Lasair.
Lorcan snatched the article off the table between us. “That’s my grandfather,” he said in a whisper.
A cold prickle ran across my skin.
Alistair’s father. The one who’s throat Deargán slit.
I skimmed the article, stopping at a quote taken from William.
“They don’t deserve to be here. We will fight this. Like Cú Chulainn, we will slay these bitches until they run in fear.”
Something foul moved through me. The bile climbed the back of my throat, his hateful words sitting in my mouth like spoiled meat.
I spotted the next article underneath, the headline stretched across the page in black capital letters and a cold knot tightened in my chest.
Ravenwood Girl Found Dead — Garda Investigating Ritualistic Killing.
Dahlia was eighteen years old and the first female scholarship student admitted to Ravenwood. She was found dead, stripped of all clothing, on a stone tomb in the cemetery of Cill na Caoine, the church bordering the Ravenwood grounds.
The Church of the Keening.
The grainy crime-scene photograph underneath the headline turned my stomach.
A small female body lay stretched across a cemetery slab inside ruined stone walls.
Black candles surrounded her, melted down to stumps. Chalk symbols circled the slab beneath her. Small statuettes of hounds lined the edges like guards watching over the corpse. There was an S within a C carved into her stomach with a knife.
Lorcan leaned in beside me, then went still.
“That symbol,” he said quietly, as his shaking finger pressed against the yellowing page. “SC.” His eyes stayed locked on the photograph. “That’s on my father’s ring.”
The air seemed to leave the room.
SC.
The hounds on the slab. Hound in Irish was Cú.
Like Cú Chulainn, we will slay these bitches until they run in fear.
Cú Chulainn.
He was Ireland’s Achilles. Every Irish child grew up on the legend of the boy who killed Culann’s enormous guard dog by accident and offered to guard the smith’s estate himself in penance until a new hound could be raised.
They called him Cú Chulainn. Culann’s Hound.
The hounds at the corners of the slab. The SC on Alistair’s ring.
The Sons.
The Sons of Cú Chulainn.
The Sons existed long before Alistair.
Ice slid across my skin as we kept reading. The Garda investigation had questioned William Lasair directly, but no charges had been filed. No arrests made.
Lorcan pointed to the name of the legal firm representing the Lasair family during the investigation. “That was my great-grandfather’s firm. He was one of the silent partners.”
O’Callaghan & Partners.
I knew that name.
“The lawyers,” I whispered. “Their name’s on the inheritance papers in Alistair’s secret study.”
Lorcan sat unnaturally still beside me now. He had the article pinned under his hand, his fingertip still pressed to Dahlia’s body. His other hand was a loose fist on his thigh, knuckles whitening.
“My grandfather killed her,” he said, the words grating out of him. “My grandfather and his friends.”
Rain battered the narrow archive windows harder.
“And—” Lorcan’s voice cracked. “My great-grandfather helped cover it up.”
I didn’t speak. Fuck. What could I say?
I dragged my eyes back to Dahlia’s photograph.
I started spreading the rest of the newspapers across the table between us, laying them out in order. The editorials first, then the threats, then the accidents, then the disappearances, then Dahlia. A chronology. A spine. A timeline.
I worked in silence, smoothing each clipping flat. Lorcan watched my hands move but didn’t help.
When the timeline was laid out, I stepped back from it.
The whole front half of the table was covered in escalation. The vandalism stopped the month after Dahlia’s body was found but what came after was even more insidious.
“Then they stopped being sloppy after Dahlia,” I said quietly.
“They became… invisible.” Lorcan reached forward and shifted a few of my later articles in beside Dahlia’s.
Articles about Ravenwood women going mad. Articles about women swearing they were being terrorized by masked faces at their windows that no one else saw. By monsters in the shadows that weren’t there. By threatening voices no one seemed to hear.
No one believed them.
The full picture unfolded between us piece by piece.
The Sons began as entitled rich boys trying to terrorize women out of Ravenwood.
But somewhere along the line, they’d evolved it into something quieter and far more effective. Don’t force women out. Let them in. Gaslight them. Label them as crazy. Commit them when they fought back. Steal their inheritances legally. Bury them inside institutions.
And now, with their Mis breakthrough, they had a drug to do the work for them.
Everything I’d been fighting since arriving in Ravenwood suddenly stretched backward through decades, an evil vehicle for oppression, designed carefully and inherited across generations.
Neither of us spoke for a long moment. Dahlia’s dead eyes stared upward from yellowed newsprint.
Lorcan finally looked at me. The line of his mouth had gone unsteady.
“My family did this,” he said quietly.
I didn’t absolve him. I couldn’t. The weight of all those women sat too heavily between us for that. Bridgit. Maeve. Dervla. Maggie. Dahlia.
“Then we’re the ones who end it,” I said, reaching across the table and closing my hand over his warm one.
His eyes widened for a moment before he weaved his fingers tightly into mine.
“We’re the ones who end it.”