36. Liath
LIATH
The next night, I sat on the edge of Rua’s bed in my nightdress with my hair still damp from the bath, listening for a message that didn’t arrive.
I thought that maybe because Alistair had gone away on business, they would start up again.
After half an hour, I lay back against the pillows, staring at the ornate ceiling, and told myself it was pride. Just the small ugly pride of a girl who’d gotten used to being wanted in a particular way.
The lie barely lasted a minute.
It wasn’t his absence. It was the cold of it. The room had heat when he was in it, a center of gravity I’d been orbiting whether I’d meant to or not.
Stupid. I rolled onto my side, pulled the blanket up to my chin, and refused to examine why.
At some point in the night, the violin started, dragging me out of sleep, the low broken melody vibrating with loneliness as it drifted through the walls.
My feet were on the cold floor and my hand was on the door before I was even fully awake.
I followed it through the dark corridors, padding barefoot along the runner, my fingers tracing against the wallpaper to keep my bearings.
It grew louder as I approached the foot of the forbidden tower stairs. Just like last time. Like a siren, calling me to my doom.
“Miss Rua,” Mervyn hissed from behind me, having stepped out from somewhere, a tightness at the corners of his mouth. “You cannot go up there.”
“I heard music.”
“That tower is not to be entered.” His voice was urgent. “Not since the mistress—”
He stopped, his unfinished sentence hanging heavy in the cold of the stairwell.
“Not since?” I paused, waiting to see if he’d fill it in.
He didn’t.
I turned away and stepped onto the first stair.
He didn’t follow.
The stairs narrowed as I climbed, the stone walls pressing close enough that I could touch both at once if I stretched my arms. The air thickened with dust and cold stone.
The violin grew fainter the higher I went as if it were retreating. As if it knew I was coming and was withdrawing into the walls.
Until it was gone.
By the top of the stairs, I was second-guessing that I’d heard it at all.
The door at the top was partly ajar. I pushed it open with my fingertips and the hinges gave a soft sigh. I stood in the doorway for a long moment before I stepped through.
It was a woman’s room. Heavy velvet curtains were drawn back, letting in silver moonlight, but they couldn’t dispel the stagnant, freezing air that smelled of dried lavender and decades of undisturbed dust.
A four-poster bed sat in the center, the linen yellowed with time but tucked smooth, the narrow dent of a head still on the pillow. A dressing gown had been flung over the back of a chair. A pair of slippers were at the side of the bed.
I stepped farther in, my bare feet shrinking from the icy floorboards, the oppressive silence pressing against my eardrums.
There was a small handsewn pillow on the bed, hand-painted with childish brushwork in a blue that had faded to gray.
Lena.
I touched the fabric with one finger and pulled my hand back as if it had bitten me.
There was a line of pill bottles on the dresser, a neat little row beside a silver-backed brush, the labels yellowed past reading. Beside that was a small music box, lacquered black, the lid inlaid with a faded rose.
I shouldn’t have. But I lifted the lid anyway.
The melody started, tinny and mechanical, the little wheel turning under its needle, the notes plinking out in a thin metallic register.
I frowned.
It was familiar. But from where?
I closed the lid carefully, as if the wrong movement might wake something.
On the far wall was a portrait of a woman holding a violin, the canvas slashed clean at an angle. The edge of her mouth showed beneath the tear, one painted cheekbone, the suggestion of an eye behind the folded flap of canvas.
Lena?
I reached for the folded flap.
A hand, knuckles raw, closed around my wrist like a clamp.
I spun.
Lorcan stood right behind me. He must have come from the en suite I had only just noticed. There was a violin and bow in his other hand, his chest rising hard and uneven enough to tell me he hadn’t expected to find anyone in this room.
It was him.
He had been playing the violin in the night, the broken melody, the music that had pulled me out of bed every time, that’d haunted me even before I’d met him.
His face had gone white. His voice cracked. “Don’t touch her.”
I pulled my wrist back and he let me.
The room rearranged itself around me too fast, the pillow, the violin in his hand that matched the one in the painting, the child’s letters spelling Lena.
“Your mother,” I said.
I should have stopped there. I didn’t.
“Where is she?” I asked. “Where’s Lena?”
The pill bottles came back to me. The neat little line of them. The way this tower felt like the kind of place they’d lock someone away in.
Oh.
“She was ill,” I said, words tumbling out before I could stop them. “They locked her away, didn’t they?”
Something vicious moved across his face.
He had me by the shoulder before I could step back, his palm flat between my shoulder blades, marching me out the door.
“Get out.” His voice was shaking at the edges. “Don’t ever come back.”
The door slammed behind me hard enough to rattle the frame.
The silence afterward felt like a slap. I stood on the cold landing in my nightdress with my shoulder blades still warm from his hand and the echo of his grief in my chest like a stone.
I’d just found the softest wound in the cruelest boy I knew.
And I knew he’d not easily forgive me for it. Maybe not ever.
His punishment started the next morning. He didn’t speak to me. He didn’t even look at me when I walked into a room.
I became invisible. Worse than invisible, I became a pariah.
Chairs got pulled away before anyone could sit too close to me.
Boys who held my eye too long in corridors found themselves shoved against lockers.
A lad who’d smiled at me in neurology came back from the bathroom with a split lip and a story about a doorframe and would not look at me for the rest of the period.
Lorcan never crossed the room toward me. He never had to.
The only male allowed near me was Finn, and only when he was already near Nuala. Even he would only nod at me sometimes.
Aoife clocked the silence on the second day. She was pleased by it. Of course she was.
She started turning up wherever Lorcan was with that polished smile and that lipsticked mouth, circling him while smirking at me.
She caught me between classes on Wednesday.
“Knew he’d get bored of you,” she said.
I rolled my eyes even as her words stung. “You can have him.”
Nuala stepped between us, made a buzzing noise at Aoife like she was a wasp, and waved her off with a scowl that could have stripped paint.
Aoife went, but slowly, with a smug smile on her overly made-up face.
At lunch on Thursday, I watched her drift to his table, her fingers sliding over his sleeve as she lowered herself to the bench next to her.
“Don’t.”
His single word was flat and cold enough to peel the smile straight off her face.
But he never once turned toward me.
I told myself this was easier. No summons. No games. No demands. No knife at my throat. No corridor ambushes, no orders dressed up as questions. Easier.
It meant that at night I could search the rest of the rooms in the manor in peace, searching for something. Another secret room. Hidden documents. Something that would help me unravel Alistair’s empire.
I went back to reporting my movements to Deargán. He didn’t mention Lorcan or our argument at the party again.
I caught myself listening for violins that didn’t come. Watching doorways he wasn’t blocking. Measuring every room by whether he was in it before I registered I was doing it.
It was my fault. I’d crossed a line. I’d walked into his mother’s room without his permission. I’d violated the only thing he had any tenderness left for.
I hated the emptiness of his absence.
I hated that I missed him.
The smell of wormwood and green anise pulled me out of sleep, the heavy pipe organ note pressing in behind my closed lids.
No.
My eyes snapped open.
Alistair was sitting on my bed, his weight making the mattress dip toward him.
He was dressed like he’d walked out of a business meeting, charcoal three-piece, waistcoat buttoned, tie still knotted at his throat as if he hadn’t been to bed. His weathered hands rested on his knees, the signet ring catching the moonlight.
He was just sitting there, watching me surface.
“My unlucky girl.” His voice was too warm, too familiar, the hint of absinthe on his breath. “So beautiful.”
My pulse slammed hard against my ribs.
Stay Rua. Stay Rua.
I sat up slowly, dragging the blanket up to my collarbone like a sleepy girl would, confused and half-awake, even as my mind scrambled for reasons why he should leave.
“Daddy?” I rubbed at my eye with the heel of my hand. “What time is it? I’m so tired. The doctor said I should be sleeping a full eight hours.”
“It’s late, pet. But you can sleep in tomorrow.”
“I had another headache today. I told Mervyn I’d have dinner in my room. Did he—”
“He did.”
“I think I might be coming down with something.” I pulled the blanket higher, trying not to let the panic crack through my voice. “Honestly, I feel like I might be sick. Is that going around the manor? Maybe one of the guests had—”
“Rua.” The single syllable cut through me like a string snapped clean, and I knew before he spoke again that he’d run out of patience for my excuses. “You can stop now.”
My mouth dried.
“You’ve had your time. I’ve been very patient.
Very. Some men in my position would not have given you the months I have given you to settle back in.
To find your feet. To remember whose home this is and whose love made it possible.
I have been gentle, a leanbh.” The Irish word for child slid out of his mouth too easily, the endearment soft as a slap. “I am done being gentle.”
Christ. Christ. Christ.
His unblinking eyes were on mine, no warmth in them at all, just a flat black assessment.