44. Liath
LIATH
Lorcan’s hand stayed clamped around my wrist as he hauled me up the narrow stone staircase of the Lasair Manor’s forbidden tower.
“Lorcan.” I tried to dig my heels in. “Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t slow.
At the top, he pulled me through the door of Lena’s bedroom and let go of my wrist.
I stumbled forward two steps before I caught myself.
It looked the same as I remembered. A four-poster bed. A mirrored vanity catching the afternoon light. A pillow at the head of the bed painted with her name. Lena. A portrait on the wall with the canvas torn across her face.
I rubbed at my wrist where his grip had been, the charms of Rua’s bracelet clicking against each other.
The last time I had come here he had thrown me out. He had bared his teeth at me for stepping inside it. So what the hell were we doing here?
My eyes flicked to the door. He stepped in front of it, making it clear that I was not leaving. Not yet.
I had failed to get through to Deargán. Now Lorcan had isolated me.
“Lorcan.” I kept my voice level. “Why are we here?”
“Who is Deargán to you?” he demanded.
Every word of truth crowded on the tip of my tongue and not a single one of them was safe to give him. So I swallowed them down.
“He’s just a teacher.”
“Try again, Gray.”
“He’s our new lecturer. You watched him introduce himself. You heard the same—”
“He planted you.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
“He planted you as Rua, didn’t he? This whole thing is his plan.”
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. Not without giving him the next piece, and the next, and the next.
This was no longer about keeping two men from hating each other. I was standing between two dangerous men who both believed they were protecting me, and both might destroy everything to prove it.
“What does he have on you, Gray?” Lorcan’s voice hardened as he took a step toward me. “What does he hold over you that you’d lie for him to my face?”
Fuck. The whole mission was unraveling.
I wanted to scream at him that he was ruining everything. That if he forced me to tell him it would mean making him choose between me and his own blood.
Instead, I said nothing. I held my ground.
He nodded. “Fine. I’ll ask him myself.”
He turned for the door.
I caught his arm. “Wait.”
He stopped, but he didn’t turn back.
“He saved me.” It came out before I could stop it. “When I was in the asylum. He showed me the truth of—” I caught the rest behind my teeth. The truth of Magdalene.
I still didn’t know if Lorcan would choose me over his father. I still didn’t know if any of this was salvageable.
I chose my next words carefully. “He protected me. I owe him.”
He was very still under my hand. Then he turned to face me, his eyes scanning across my face like he was reading every line of it. “So this is a debt?”
“Lorcan—”
“Seducing me? Begging me? Fucking me?” His voice grew hard. “Is that what he’s owed?”
“No.”
“Were you going to stab me in my sleep, Gray?” He almost smiled. “Wait until I was inside you and put a knife in my heart?”
“No!”
He pulled the knife from his pocket, took my hand, and wrapped my fingers around the hilt. Then he brought the point to his own chest.
“Go on, then,” he said as he dropped his hands from mine. “It’s yours anyway.”
I let go like the knife burned me. The blade hit the floor between us.
“I would never.” My voice cracked.
“He would.” He held my eyes. “That’s what he’s after. Me. My father. My whole family. Dead. That’s the only thing that man has ever wanted.”
I opened my mouth to tell him about Magdalene. About the ward. About Maeve whom they’d killed. About Dervla and Bridgit and the girls who were still praying to be freed. About what Deargán’s plan actually was, what mine was, what Alistair was sitting at the center of.
I closed it again.
I didn’t know yet if I could hand any of that to him.
“Bron Deargán,” he said. “I remember him.”
I went still. “What?”
He crossed to the wardrobe and pulled the cupboard door open, its hinges letting out a slow, complaining creak.
The inside of the door was papered over with newspaper clippings. Dozens of them. Yellowed at the edges, some pinned over each other in layers.
My gaze caught on a photo of a younger Deargán, his hair dark all the way through, his jaw set, his eyes flat at the camera, a board with numbers held up under his chin.
The same numbers tattooed on the inside of his right wrist.
It weren’t a birthdate.
It was a prison number.
“He tried to kill me as a baby.”
For a moment, Lorcan’s words didn’t sink in. How could they? They were impossible.
But then my eyes caught on a heading. Local Man Charged with Attempted Murder.
Bron Deargán, twenty-three, son of the Blackwood’s gardener. Charged with the attempted murder of Alistair Lasair’s wife and her unborn baby. Apprehended on the Lasair grounds. The baby and mother survived.
The unborn baby.
Lorcan.
The clipping next to it was longer. Deargán Sentenced to Five Years.
Then another. Defendant Showed No Remorse, Court Hears.
The clippings blurred together as the blood drained from my head. A sickening, cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck as the room spun.
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs forgot how to pull in air.
I had trusted him.
I had built the man in my head out of grief. I had taken the blame he laid at the Lasairs and called it justified. I had worn my dead sister’s face and walked into a den of wolves because he told me it was justice.
The floor tilted underneath me. I would have collapsed to the floor if Lorcan’s arm hadn’t come around me, holding me up. I clutched on to him to stop myself from falling off the earth entirely, the horrifying truth vibrating in my very bones.
Deargán had tried to kill an unborn baby.
He had broken into this house and tried to put his hands on a woman and the child in her belly and end them both.
There was no justification for that.
The next set of clippings was newer, the paper less yellow.
Lasair’s Monster Released on Parole.
Then below it was a photo taken at a distance. A man in a long dark coat being led out of the gates of Lasair Manor in cuffs. The same set to his shoulders. Older.
Aging Lasair Patriarch Found Dead — Throat Cut in Library.
Then another booking photo. Older Deargán. Salt at his temples. The same flat dark eyes.
Fifteen Years for Murder.
He had come back.
He had served his sentence and walked out and come straight back to this house and cut the old man’s throat.
I had walked past Lorcan’s grandfather’s portrait in the hall. The stern face. The high collar. The mouth that did not soften.
Deargán killing the old patriarch I could maybe make fit. A man who had loved a woman and lost her, blaming the family that had committed her, taking the head of it years too late. Ugly, but legible.
But Lorcan’s mother. Her baby. I couldn’t make that sit right.
The clippings told me what he had done. Not one of them told me why.
Unless…
I glanced at the pillow on the bed. To Lena, in faded silk thread.
I turned to Lorcan. “Lena was your mother?”
Lorcan was watching me. He had been the whole time. “Yes.”
“Why would Deargán want to hurt her?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Because he loved her,” he said. “And she left him. She married my father instead.”
Something clicked as I looked at his face.
Oh my God. She was staring right back at me. How had I not seen this before?
“Lena’s not her real name, is it?” I asked, the words tumbling out in a rush.
He shook his head. “I couldn’t say her full name as a baby. I could only manage Lena.”
I broke out of his arms and crossed to the portrait. He followed, his steps quiet behind me.
I lifted my hand to the torn flap of canvas and stopped, my fingers an inch from it.
I looked back at him.
He nodded.
I pushed the canvas back.
Her face stared back from behind the tear, pale and heart-shaped, her smile radiant, her wild blond hair curled back from her temples. The same striking, frost-colored irises staring right back at me.
“Magdalene,” I breathed.
It was the face on Deargán’s wall.
The girl whose name was whispered through the shadows of the asylum.
Magdalene.
Maggie.
She was the asylum’s namesake. She was the ghost girl. She was the one Deargán had built a revenge plan on top of.
She was Lorcan’s mother, Deargán’s lost love, Alistair’s wife.
Deargán hadn’t lost her to death. He had lost her to a choice.
She had picked Alistair. She had had a baby with Alistair. She had built a life with Alistair and not with him.
And Deargán had come to this house with murder in his heart, not for the man who took her, but for the woman who chose another man and the child she chose to have.
His grief didn’t look clean anymore.
It looked insane.
It looked like a man who had spent decades rotting inside a cell because the woman he loved left him, and if he couldn’t have her, no one could.
It looked like a justification he had dressed in justice because jealousy was too vile a name for it.
Horror climbed up the inside of my ribs.
I had spent months working for him. I had taken his orders and worn my sister’s face into the home of the family he had tried to wipe off the earth, believing his rage was the rage of a wronged man. Believing I was helping him serve an old debt.
What if I had been helping him finish what he had started twenty years ago?
I held on to one last thread.
Magdalene was rotten. That much was true.
And he had protected me in the asylum. He sat with me through nights I could not have lived through alone.
Before I judged him, I needed to confront Deargán. I needed to make him tell me the truth, even if it destroyed me.
I didn’t have much time until Lorcan figured out I was gone.
When Lorcan found me missing from the manor, he would come fast and he would come furious. I had to get to Deargán first.
I climbed the overgrown ivy on the east wall, exactly where Nuala had said it would be, and dropped down onto the asylum grounds.