39. Liath
LIATH
The last thing I saw before Magdalene swallowed me whole was Lorcan on his knees in the gravel.
Rain soaked his dark hair. Blood streaked one side of his face. Hands held him back while he fought against them anyway, his blue eyes fixed on me.
“Liath!” His voice broke on my name.
Then the door closed, cutting off the sight of him, the slam reverberating through the corridor walls and into my sternum.
Oh God, what if that was the last time I saw him?
I choked on a sob as the hands dragged me forward, the gray walls blurring on either side of me.
He had blown his cover. Alistair knew exactly who he was now. The leverage that had protected him was gone.
Alistair had no reason to keep him alive.
I shoved that thought down. No. No, Maggie’s will protected him. She was still protecting her son even from beyond the grave. Alistair couldn’t kill Lorcan without losing control of Magdalene.
Except… there were worse fates than death.
My mind flashed to Maggie’s fate. And Deargán’s. Both locked away and gaslit for years.
I shoved the thought away before it could root itself any deeper.
I couldn’t let the fear win. I had to keep a clear head. Had to figure a way out. Figure a way back to him. Had to hold on to the hope that Alistair would keep him alive.
The corridor narrowed as we descended down into the basement of Magdalene until the all too familiar mouth of the Special Ward loomed before me.
Panic clawed at my throat, threatening to override my senses, my heels locking.
But the orderlies just dragged me forward.
My only choice was whether I walked in with my head held high or if they dragged me in kicking and screaming. I glanced at the two orderlies hanging on to my arms. One of them smirked at me, as if he expected a show from me.
I lifted my chin and faced forward. I would not give him the satisfaction.
I still flinched as the door to the ward locked shut behind me.
Bleach coated the back of my throat and burned inside my nose. Beneath it lingered the sourness of fear, my synesthesia triggering into too many notes at once.
They walked me down the familiar gray corridors, a seed of hope rising in me when I spotted the side corridor that Deargán had taken me to. Maybe I could find that secret panel again. Maybe I could get out that way.
But we didn’t stop. They marched me even deeper than I’d gone before, into a locked section marked “Holding Area.”
My nerves felt pulled taut as they shoved me through.
Dear fucking God.
Iron bars lined both sides of the long corridor.
Cells.
Girls occupied nearly every one. Some sat with their backs against the walls. Some lay curled on narrow beds. Others faced the stone and didn’t react when we entered.
I searched every face. For Nuala. For Dervla. But I couldn’t see them. Why couldn’t I see them?
Maeve’s lifeless eyes as she lay on the slab flashed in my head. I shook the image away. They had to be here. They had to be okay. My chest pulled tight enough that the next breath came in short.
They stopped me outside an empty cell and began to unlock the door.
In the cell across was Rua. She lay curled into herself on the thin mattress, knees tucked to her chest, her eyes staring out into nothing. She looked so small it stopped me for a second.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice echoing through the corridor.
Rua didn’t move. She didn’t look up. She didn’t answer.
I glared at her through the bars. You did this to me.
Then he did this to you, too. My chest ached unexpectedly. I didn’t want it to.
A hand slammed between my shoulder blades, pushing me into the cell.
I stumbled forward, catching myself before I could fall.
The cell was cold mossy stone on one side. Iron bars on the other three sides. There was no privacy. No windows. Just a single bed along the far wall and a small toilet and wash basin in a corner.
The cell door clanged shut behind me, the metal rattling as they locked me in.
I stood in the middle of the cell and didn’t move. Even after they’d walked away.
“Liath?”
I spun left toward the voice.
Dervla stood in the neighboring cell, her hands wrapped around the iron bars separating us.
She was thinner, paler. Her dark hair had grown long enough to pull back, loose strands falling across her gaunt cheeks. The shadows under her eyes had deepened to bruises and there was a hollowness to her eyes that wasn’t there before. Her lip ring was gone.
I crossed the distance between us so fast my shoulder clipped the bars. My hand slid through the bars. Her palm pressed against mine, warm and real.
For a long moment we just leaned against each other. Neither of us spoke.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I’ve been trying to get you out.”
Dervla nodded, tears brightening her eyes. “I know you’d never forget me.”
I held on for another second, then pulled back. “A girl named Nuala. She’s my friend. White-blond hair. She would have come in a few weeks ago.”
Dervla went still.
I braced for the worse news. “Derv?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “They took her this morning. She didn’t come back.”
My hands tightened on the cold iron.
Maeve was dead.
Nuala was gone.
Dervla was locked up here with me.
And Lorcan had been captured by Alistair.
There was no one left to come for us.
The orderlies brought us up from the holding cells in silence. A line of white dresses and bowed heads moved through the Special Ward corridor while shoes scuffed softly against the stone floor. I walked between Dervla and Rua, my stomach tightening with every turn.
They ushered us into what looked like a classroom, with rows of desks bolted to the floor.
I had seen this room before, the night I infiltrated the ward, just not from this side of the observation window.
I sat when the orderly pointed to an empty desk. The chair legs scraped softly against the floor.
Around me, the other girls settled into practiced stillness. No one spoke. No one looked around. The silence felt rehearsed, as though it had been drilled into them until it became instinct.
My pulse drummed against the inside of my wrists.
At the front of the room stood a masked man, tall and dark-haired, with gray fabric concealing the lower half of his face. Above it, one eye was an emerald green and the other an arctic blue, both unreadable.
For one irrational moment, I imagined he’d been deliberately constructed to unsettle people.
He introduced himself only as Sir. He walked slowly between the rows, watching and evaluating each girl as he passed.
“So,” he said, his deep voice, partly muffled by his mask, carrying easily through the silence. “When a man reaches for you?”
“We don’t pull away,” the rest of the girls answered together, their voices flat and automatic.
The words crawled beneath my skin.
Sir nodded once. “When a man corrects us?”
“We listen and lower our eyes.”
“And if we feel afraid?”
“We smile and obey.”
What the fuck? I stared around me at the girls, all answering like robots. Not a single one protesting the way my insides screamed to do.
Across the room, even Dervla stared down at the surface of her desk. She never looked up. She never looked at me. She was surviving the only way she could, enduring one answer at a time.
Sir continued walking until he stopped beside my desk. I felt his presence like a thick cloying heat before I looked up.
Those cold multicolored eyes pinned me in place.
“Stand.”
I glanced around. Every eye in the room shifted toward me, and the silence deepened.
I rose slowly.
Sir regarded me for a moment. “Now strip.”
The command hit me so unexpectedly that I thought I’d misheard him. “What? Why?”
No one moved. No one breathed. The room became unnaturally still.
Sir’s expression didn’t change. “When a man wants something from you—?”
The question hung in the air.
I crossed my arms over my chest and refused to answer.
Something cold settled over the room, the silence thickening.
Sir looked past me. “Rua.”
Slowly, Rua lifted her head. Her eyes weren’t vacant or absent. They were simply exhausted.
“Stand.”
Rua obeyed.
“Strip.”
Rua reached for the hem of her dress, and horror twisted through me. She pulled the white fabric over her head, revealing her pale body, her pink nipples hardening in the icy air. She folded her dress neatly, then placed it over the back of her chair.
The room remained silent.
Sir stepped toward her and cupped her face. “Good girl.”
A pink flush rose to her cheeks.
Around the room, no one reacted. Not Dervla. Not the girls beside me. Not anyone. They all understood exactly what lesson was being taught. And so did I.
Sir glanced toward the orderly standing beside the door. The orderly nodded. Then Sir continued walking between the desks as though nothing had happened.
A hand closed around my arm. “Come with me.”
I jerked instinctively, but the orderly tightened his grip.
My heartbeat stumbled as he pulled me toward the door.
The room watched. Every girl. Every pair of eyes.
I caught the gaze of the girl sitting beside me. For a split second, our eyes met. Then she looked away.
Dervla stood so abruptly her chair scraped against the floor. “Where are you taking her?”
The words echoed through the room.
Another orderly moved instantly. His hand slammed onto her shoulder and shoved her back into the chair harder than necessary.
Anger flashed through me. “Dervla—”
Sir turned and glared at the orderly, holding his stare.
The orderly straightened, his hand dropping away from Dervla’s shoulder, and he stepped back.
It wasn’t kindness. It wasn’t mercy. But it wasn’t nothing either.
I was yanked from the room, past the observation window, down the corridor, and through a series of doors. I was taken into a cell that sat at the end of a narrow hallway.
The orderly shoved me forward, and the door slammed shut behind me.
Silence and darkness swallowed everything.
I stretched my arms once and touched both walls, feeling for the dimensions.
This cell had no bars. It was just a box. There were no windows, no light, no sound, and no sense of space beyond the rough stone pressing close around me.
I slid to the ground, scooting into one of the far corners, my back to the wall. The darkness felt alive. And vicious. The kind that seemed to press against my skin.
I tried counting seconds, then minutes, then breaths. At some point I stopped. The numbers lost meaning, but the darkness remained.
In the dark, faces surfaced.
Maeve appeared first, her naked body under a white sheet, her eyes staring at nothing.
Then Dervla, her head bowed and her eyes fixed on the desk, her lip ring stolen from her.
Then the other girls. The ones who had watched me being taken away. The ones who looked down, looked away, and stayed silent.
And Rua, standing naked, his hand on her face, her cheeks tinged pink.
For the first time since I’d been dragged back into Magdalene, I understood exactly what this place was trying to do. It wasn’t trying to break our bodies.
It was trying to break the part of us that remembered how to fight back.