38. Liath
LIATH
Iwas on my way to lab the next afternoon when the screaming started. It was loud enough that I broke stride. Beside me, Nuala stopped too.
The whole hallway had paused. Students turned their heads, one by one, their whispers rising in nervous little threads before dying under the next scream.
A door slammed open.
To my horror, Bridgit was dragged out of it.
Two staff had her under the arms. A third had her ankles. She was fighting them the whole way, twisting and thrashing against their grip.
I almost didn’t recognize her. Her cheeks had gone hollow, sunk in under the bone.
Her eyes were wild, red-rimmed, the whites webbed through with broken vessels.
Her hair hung in greasy clumps around her face.
Her forearms were raked raw, fingernail tracks crossing older fingernail tracks, fresh blood beading along the worst of them.
“Get them off me,” she screamed as she clawed at her own arms, dragging new red lines through the old ones. “Get them off, get them off—”
The corridor went quiet around her. A teacher who had been trying not to look turned the other way.
“I know what they did,” she screamed, her voice echoing down the hallway. “I know. I know too much. I know.”
Beside me, Nuala had gone white.
I caught her hand and pulled her in against my side.
Her fingers were ice, her whole arm shaking under my grip.
“Are you okay?” I asked her quietly.
For a moment, she didn’t answer. She just stared, eyes wide as they dragged her sister away. “They…” Her voice came out flat. “They said she had a break.”
I squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry.”
Nuala shook her head. “This isn’t right. Bridge…” Her voice cracked. “She isn’t crazy. She never had any of those kinds of problems. Never.”
Her gaze caught on something across the corridor and held, her whole face hardening, eyes narrowing. “At least not before she got involved with him.”
I followed her sightline.
Elias was halfway down the corridor, standing with Aoife and a couple of their cling-ons, leaning against the lockers with his hands in his pockets, watching the staff drag Bridgit toward the side door.
Elias smirked. He said something to them I couldn’t catch. They all laughed with him.
A strange crawling certainty settled under my skin. I had no proof. No logic to pin it to. Just the wrongness of him standing there, watching, and the way my body reacted to it before my mind could catch up.
He had something to do with this.
They dragged Bridgit through the side doors, her gaze locking on mine through the narrowing gap. Her voice shredded raw.
“Help me.”
Guilt slammed into me so hard I couldn’t breathe. I stood there, useless, as another girl was taken away while I could do nothing but watch.
I caught one last glimpse of Bridgit’s face before the doors shut her out, and the finality of it hollowed out my chest.
Her screaming faded behind it, muffled and distant, until the distance swallowed what was left of her voice.
The shocked silence around us began to unwind. Whispers turned to chatting and laughter. A locker slammed, loud enough to make Nuala flinch. Footsteps started up again as students moved between classes.
Nuala and I were still frozen to the spot even as the corridor swallowed Bridgit’s absence as if nothing had happened.
“Where are they taking her?” I asked Nuala.
Her mouth tightened.
“Magdalene.” She said it so quietly I almost missed it.
“No.” My grip on her hand tightened without meaning to.
Alistair’s drawing room rose up in front of me before I could shove it down. The velvet, the girls draped along the couches with their dresses askew and empty eyes. Maeve, sedated to the gills, her hand finding my arm before they dragged her away. Help me.
A sick certainty moved through me.
Bridgit was Alistair’s now.
If he could take Bridgit like that, he could take anyone standing in this corridor. He could take Nuala. He could take me.
I had to find a way to stop him.
Before we all became just another file in his study.
The Ravenwood lab smelled of formalin and the rubber of fresh gloves. I drifted to my usual bench, a white sheet covering the small frame of the cadaver in front of me.
Bridgit’s screaming was still echoing in my head, the ghost of Nuala’s cold hand still in mine before Finn took her home. I hoped she was holding herself together.
I hoped Bridgit could hold on. Long enough for me to figure out how to bring the whole rotten place down.
The lab door opened.
Lorcan walked in, moving stiffly. Not enough that anyone else clocked it.
He paused in the doorway, hand on the doorframe, scanning the benches.
His icy eyes found mine across the lab and held.
I braced for the rejection, for his gaze to slide past me like I didn’t exist.
Instead, he walked the length of the lab toward me.
The whiskey and woodsmoke caught at the back of my throat and the low broken violins dropped behind my eyes as he took the place beside me at the bench.
Something warm moved in my chest before I could stop it.
I glanced sideways at him.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at me. He lowered his bag to the shelving underneath and pushed the sleeves of his charcoal sweater up to his elbows.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” Powell called from the front of the class.
I reached out and pulled the sheet back, revealing the body underneath.
The world stopped as I stared at her.
I was hallucinating. It couldn’t be. What…? How…?
I blinked. The horrible image didn’t change.
It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. A face that just resembled hers under the bad light, that’s all. That’s all it was.
I blinked again.
It remained Maeve.
Her face was the wrong color. Her mouth had fallen slightly open, the way a sleeping mouth falls open, except no breath was moving through it. Her hair had been combed back from her forehead. Her eyes were open. Her doe eyes. They were staring up at the ceiling tiles, wide and brown and gone.
I forgot how to breathe.
The lab kept moving cruelly around me, students bent over their own bodies, arguing over who was going to get to cut into them first. Laughter sounded like an echo.
Powell said something about scalpel angles, his voice arriving as if from a long way off.
The clock’s small arthritic tick sounded like guns being cocked.
Nobody seemed to understand that she had been someone.
The wide-eyed girl who hid behind a too large mug at the dining hall. Who’d slipped sugar into my tea. Who held my hand when I was scared.
No one understood. No one saw.
Except Lorcan.
He shifted between me and the room, shielding me from them, standing close enough that the front of his sweater grazed my arm. I could feel his gaze on me.
“Gray?” Concern laced his tone.
“I k-know…”
My throat closed over.
I knew her.
Maeve, pale and slack. Her doe eyes open because nobody had cared enough to close them.
Lorcan cursed under his breath as he shifted further, this time moving between me and her. “Don’t look at her, Gray.”
But I couldn’t hear him properly. I was looking past his arm, at her wrist.
A clean vertical line, dark, scabbed dry around the edges.
Suicide.
She’d killed herself because I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save her and she couldn’t take it anymore.
The world went quiet inside my head.
Except… one detail refused to fit.
I stared at the cut on her wrist. At the cut down the inside of her left wrist. A cut that she would’ve made with her right hand.
But Maeve was left-handed.
Not suicide.
Not suicide.
Made to look like suicide.
A sick certainty rose up through me. They’d killed her.
Because she was a threat to them?
Or a warning to me? Did they leave her here for me to find?
The grief came up so fast it knocked the air out of me, the world blurring behind hot tears, a scream coming up behind it, gathering somewhere low and rising.
A hand clamped over my mouth.
Lorcan’s palm. His other arm came around me, locking me against his front, pinning my arms in the crook of his elbow, his body braced like a barrier between me and the rest of the lab.
He lifted me off my feet and carried me out of class. No one questioned him. Not the professor. Not the students. No one dared to stop him.
The rest was a blur.
It was only when he kicked a door shut behind him and the familiar smell of black violets came over me that I realized where we were.
My room. Rua’s room.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled me into his lap, my knees falling down around his muscular thighs. His arms closed around me.
The scream that had crawled back down somewhere, curled back up now. What came out was a sound I didn’t recognize as having come from me, broken and raw, splitting the air like a wounded animal.
All I could see was Maeve.
Maeve’s doe eyes over that mug. Maeve’s pleading glassy eyes. Maeve eyes frosted over and open as she lay on the slab.
They had left her eyes open.
I needed it to stop.
I needed to not feel.
I needed relief. He could give me relief. I shifted in his lap, turning my face into the side of his throat and put my lips against his pulse.
He went still under me.
I rolled my hips against his and his breath caught. He hardened underneath me.
I kissed up the line of his throat. I caught his earlobe between my teeth. I dragged my hands down his chest and started pulling at the bottom of his sweater.
He caught both my wrists.
“Gray.” His voice had gone quiet. “What are you doing?”
His pupils were blown, his jaw set, his chest moving fast under my hands.
“Please.” My voice came out shredded. “I need you to make it stop.”
Something shifted across his face. “Who,” he said quietly, “taught you to ask like this?”
Fuck him. I didn’t need his pity. I needed him to yield.
I caught his mouth with mine, kissing him hard, pouring my grief into his mouth.
For one blissful moment, his mouth opened against mine. His hand came up to the back of my head and he was kissing me back, his body answering me.
Then he made a small pained sound low in his throat and broke the kiss, easing his mouth from mine in a way that knocked the breath out of me.
He rested his forehead against mine, his breath jagged. His hand, which had wound into my hair, softened, even as he held me there.
Close, but not close enough.
His shoulders were rigid beneath my hands, and his fingers flexed against my scalp as if he was he was barely holding himself back.
“Not like this,” he whispered.
I went hot all over. Anger surged up in place of grief—fast and ugly. I shoved at his chest and tried to climb off his lap.
“Fuck you.” My voice cracked. “Fuck off if you don’t want me.”
His arms came around me and locked, gathering me back against him, his hand splayed wide between my shoulder blades.
The more I tried to twist out of his grip, the tighter he held me.
I hit his back with my fists over and over. But he just took it.
“No.” My voice broke on it. “No, no, no—”
He didn’t let me go.
The fight bled out of me, my arms collapsing around him as my righteous anger receded.
Grief roared up again. Painful ugly grief.
I broke, sobs tearing out of me in raw jagged sounds, shaking my whole body.
He just held my broken pieces together while I couldn’t.