12. Liath
LIATH
After that scene in class, I couldn’t avoid Nuala.
Nor could I avoid her questions.
About Rua. About Liath. About who I really was.
I had tugged her across the courtyard to an empty stone bench, glancing around to make sure no one was listening before I had admitted to her the only truth I could afford. “If anyone here finds out I’m not Rua, I’m finished.”
She had gone still at that, the books in her arms tightening against her chest. Curiosity had flickered all over her face, but she had swallowed it down. “I see.”
“You can’t tell anyone.” I had hated how desperate my voice sounded. “Not about Liath. Not about Magdalene.”
Nuala had studied me for one long moment.
She had obviously been curious. I’d seen it in the way her mouth parted, in the questions pressing at the back of her teeth, in the way she kept looking at me like she was trying to solve a riddle.
“I’m begging you,” I said. “Please.”
She nodded. “I won’t tell anyone. Promise.”
She’d held up a pinkie and I grasped it with mine.
Relief came first, thin and shaky, because for one brief moment in this godforsaken place, I had not had to pretend. Someone here knew my real name.
It was only later that the anxiety crept in behind it, colder and harder to shake. Trusting anyone at Ravenwood felt like handing them a knife and praying they liked me too much to use it.
I kept replaying the conversation in my head even as I arrived at college the next morning, trying to decide whether I had found the first safe person in this school or simply made a fatal mistake.
The uncertainty stayed lodged under my ribs, needling at me all the way to class.
The lab was the coldest room in the building.
Metal surfaces, stone floors, air scrubbed of anything warm or living and left with only the antiseptic bite of preservative. The kind of cold that got into the bones and set up residence.
Formaldehyde hit the base of my throat the moment I walked in, heavy and sour, and with it came the twang of guitar strings skittering through my skull, distant train whistles, and that high needling xylophone note driving itself behind my left eye.
Eight sheeted forms lay on the dissection tables, white fabric pulled smooth over the shapes beneath.
Horror dropped cold through me. There were dead bodies under every one of them, waiting for us to peel the fabric back and touch them.
I kept my face still, drew one careful breath through my mouth, and made sure I did not pull too deeply on the preservative stink.
I could do this. I only had to get through one day, one class, one hour at a time.
I took the back corner station, tucked behind the last table, half-shielded by the stone pillar, the least visible point in the room. I just had to keep my head down and survive the next fifty minutes.
Powell was seated at his desk, marking papers. “Second years,” he called out, not bothering to look up. “You should already know what you’re doing. So get on with it.”
My stomach turned over as I glanced around for clues. Rua might have been a second year. But I most certainly did not know what I was doing.
Jason, a gangly, nervous-looking boy with a permanent slouch, slid into the station beside mine before I’d finished processing that thought.
Jason, who had handed me a pen without being asked on the first day when mine had run dry.
Jason, who had not once joined in the laughter when Aoife made snide comments about me.
He set his bag down, pulled out his notes, and gave me the small nod of someone who had no agenda beyond getting through the class.
Something in my chest loosened by a fraction. Two of us bluffing. At least I wouldn’t be doing it alone.
The door swung open.
Every head in the room lifted. Lorcan walked in, late.
Even Powell glanced up but he made no comment. He just averted his eyes. God, even the teachers here were scared of him.
Lorcan’s gaze scanned the room, then locked on me. His expression didn’t shift. He just started walking toward me.
The cold arrived in my stomach before he’d crossed half the room.
He stopped at my station and brought his hand down on the instrument tray beside Jason’s with a sound that was barely audible and somehow absolute.
His eyes drilled into Jason. “This one is mine.”
Fear crossed Jason’s face and I could almost see his rapid arithmetic of what pushing back against Lorcan Lasair would actually cost. He picked up his books and bag, gave me one apologetic look I had no time to return, and slunk away.
Coward. But I didn’t blame him.
Lorcan pulled on his gloves and arranged his instruments, his gaze burning into my profile as I avoided his eyes.
He drew back the sheet.
The dead body lay gray-skinned and slack. The smell of preservative thickened as the flesh was exposed, chemical and dense, and the xylophone note in my skull spiked before grinding into something lower.
Dear God, what were we expected to do to it?
Around me, other students hunched over their tables, making cuts into their cadavers.
Revulsion rose so fast it turned my mouth dry. No. I couldn’t do this.
The weight of Lorcan’s attention landed on me from beside me, cold and exact, and that ended the argument before it could start. I had to do this.
The scalpel felt wrong in my hand the moment I picked it up. Shit. Were you supposed to hold it like a pen or a fork?
He let the silence stretch. His gaze tracked from the grip to my elbow to the set of my shoulders. “Gee, Rua, it’s like you’ve never held a scalpel before.”
His words landed in the chest and sat there.
I adjusted my grip and pressed my mouth shut as I leaned in over the cadaver.
I made the mistake of looking at his face properly. He was an older man with kind features gone slack in death. A man who laughed with his grandkids. Who kissed his children on the forehead. Who smiled at his wife of fifty years.
Panic surged. No, no, no, no. I can’t—
I shoved the thought away before it finished forming.
He was just a medical teaching tool. I could do this. My life depended on it. Dervla, the girls, were counting on me.
I dragged up every forensic crime show I had ever watched and fixed on the one useful thing my brain offered me. A Y incision. Start with that.
I placed the scalpel at his chest bone and drew a small line down, barely a scratch.
“Press harder.” He reached across and pushed down on my hand, making the scalpel dig in deeper, my stomach flipping hard as it cut through dead skin.
His touch lasted a second and still sent heat up my arm before I could stop it.
I fixed the depth for the rest of my first incision. Then I chewed my lip as I placed the scalpel down on the top part of the Y.
“Stop locking your shoulders.”
I bit the inside of my cheek as my shoulders dropped.
“Better.” He watched me work for a moment. “Steady your breathing.”
My breathing had gone shallow, and he heard it. Of course he did. He had been tracking every weakness with clinical patience, the bad grip, the locked elbow, the stiff shoulders, the breath that kept catching.
Each adjustment brought him closer to me. Each quiet instruction gave him another excuse to study me more thoroughly than anyone in this room had any right to.
“As much as I love to watch you floundering”—he leaned in—“we’re not doing autopsies in this class.”
Heat climbed up my neck at the words.
He stepped behind me. Close enough that his warmth reached through the lab coat. Close enough that my next breath came out shorter than the one before it.
His right arm came around me and his hand closed over mine on the scalpel.
Unwanted heat climbed under my skin at his nearness, at the feel of him caging me in. His breath touched my hair, warm enough to make my stomach tighten. God, this was humiliating in so many ways.
“Along here.” He redirected the blade. “Is the brachial plexus. A nerve cluster.” He used my hand to slice a small incision into the cadaver’s arm, a gesture so casually educational it made my skin crawl.
“Sever it correctly and your arm becomes permanently useless. You can’t lift it. Can’t fight back.”
I frowned. Those were odd things to say.
The blade continued its path.
“Down here,” he said, his mouth at my ear. “We’re working toward the femoral artery.”
His hand guided mine, the blade tracing a steady path through the outer tissue of the cadaver’s thigh.
“Nicked correctly,” he continued, in the same low gravelly murmur, “you’d bleed out in under three minutes. Less, if you’re running.”
Something cold dropped through my sternum, sharp and clean and entirely separate from the formaldehyde chill of the room. Every word was medically accurate, entirely appropriate for the setting, the kind of thing any professor in this department might say.
But his words were layered threats. He wasn’t just dangerous and ruthless, he was intelligent with the skills of a surgeon. He knew a hundred ways to take my body apart. He wanted me to understand that none of it would cost him anything. He could do every one of those things to me without blinking.
My fingers had gone rigid around the scalpel. The blade held its line only because his hand was holding mine.
“Vagus nerve.” He pressed the scalpel along the side of the cadaver’s neck, then with a flick, made a small incision. “Do that and the body simply stops.”
His mouth dropped lower, his breath moving against my ear. “You’d last three seconds.”
My grip had gone slick against the scalpel. Air kept catching high in my chest, never filling my lungs properly, while fear and the unbearable heat of him this close had knotted together so completely that I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.
He let out a low rumble in my ear. “You’re trembling like a virgin.” Then he chuckled. “Are you a virgin, mo chlunaireín?”
My little imposter.
My face went hot. My pulse kicked up hard I swear he could feel it through his large hand still closed over mine, which was its own particular humiliation.
All the while his heartbeat against my back stayed slow and steady. Psychopathically calm.
The bell rang and the room filled with chairs scraping and bags zipping and voices coming back up to normal volume.
He finally let go of me and stepped back, stripping his gloves off. Nothing in his face suggested the last hour had cost him a thing.
The first breath in an hour without him in it made my legs go briefly unsteady.
I took one step away from the table. Then another. Like I was gauging how far I’d get if I broke into a run.
His fingers closed around my wrist, pressing the charms of Rua’s bracelet into my skin.
He turned me to face him and the proximity hit all over again, his chest too close, the scent of woodsmoke and whiskey cutting through the formaldehyde, the low orchestra of violins rising through the xylophone and guitar strings and swallowing everything else.
His eyes moved over my face.
Then his mouth curved, just slightly, and he dropped his voice low enough that the last few students filing out couldn’t have caught a syllable of it.
“You’ve got to get better at faking it.”