44. Liath #2
I kept to the line of the trees as I crept past the main building, my body running off wired exhaustion.
Every crack of a twig became an orderly ready to spring out and grab me.
Every lit window was an eye. Every shadow was an arm waiting to come down on my shoulder.
If they caught me here, I’d be back inside before morning.
Stripped. Sedated. Filed away. Forgotten.
Finally, the carriage house came up out of the trees ahead of me, its old slate roof black against the gray sky. One light was on at the side window, smoke drifting out from the chimney.
I slowed.
A woman’s voice was singing, somewhere on the wind, soft and sweet.
The lullaby sounded… familiar. Not just familiar from the night in the tunnels. But I couldn’t figure out from where.
It had to be synesthesia. A trick of my mind. A hallucination born from returning to this place.
Or a ghost.
My gaze fell on the broken stub of the carriage house tower lying on the ground beside the building. One upper window in what was left of the front face sat darker than the rest.
I tore my eyes away and the lullaby trailed off into nothing. If it was ever there at all.
I stopped at the door with my fist raised.
If I knocked, I couldn’t pretend I’d never been here. Whatever happened on the other side of this door, I’d walked to it on my own.
I banged my fist on the wood.
A moment later, the door opened.
Deargán stood in the gap, his shirtsleeves pushed to his elbows, his hair pushed back like he’d run his hands through it more than once tonight. The cello started up, slow across thick strings, vibrating through my ribs.
“Liath.” He didn’t look surprised to see me.
“Why did you put a camera in my bedroom?” I shoved past him and stepped into his living room.
It looked just like it had all those months ago for the brief moment that this place had been safe. On the side table next to an empty glass, stained amber, sat an ashtray with three cigarettes ground down in it. The smell of clove and pepper rolled off him, fresh smoke underneath.
I spun to face him as he closed the door.
He held my eyes for a moment, then he turned to the counter where the kettle was. “Tea?”
He turned on the kettle, set out two cups, and began to measure out tea leaves.
A slow, ugly cold went through me at the sight of his hands moving in ritual. I flinched as my vision flickered for a second, time dragging sideways, the ghost of that sinking pull in my limbs and a vibration of need going through my body.
I grabbed the empty teapot out of his hands and threw it across the room. It hit the far wall and shattered into white china pieces that skittered across the floorboards.
“Answer the fucking question.”
He looked at the broken pieces of his teapot, then at me. “I’m trying to protect you.”
“What part of my naked body needed protecting from behind a hidden lens?”
His shoulders shifted under the shirt, his calm cracking. “Well, you certainly weren’t going to tell me you were fucking the enemy. I had to know what you were keeping from me so I could protect you from yourself.”
“The camera.” My voice climbed. “Then showing up at Ravenwood. Now telling me it was protection? Do you think I’m a gullible eejit?”
“That boy has corrupted you.” He took half a step toward me. “I’m here to save you.”
“Save me?” The word came out of my throat full of teeth. “The way you saved Maggie?”
The room went very still.
His face emptied. The color went out from under his cheekbones. “What are you—”
“I know,” I said. “I fucking know you went to jail for murder.”
He held very still. “That was justice.”
The words landed flat between us.
For a second I couldn’t speak. He’d said that line like a lie he’d practiced. Like this had been his line for twenty years.
“You think,” I hissed, “killing an unborn baby is justice?”
The stillness broke for half a second. His eyes widened. Shock cut through the mask before he could lock it down. He glared at me with something dangerously close to anger. “Is that what he told you?”
I crossed my arms. “It doesn’t matter how I found out.”
“That’s the story Alistair told the court,” he said, his cold mask smoothing itself back into place. “He’s a liar and a monster. You know that as well as I do.”
He wasn’t telling me everything.
The recognition slotted into me cold and clean. This was him. This had always been him. A man who never quite lied, but who withheld. He only chose which parts of the truth I was allowed to see.
“Tell me everything.” My voice came out lower than I meant it to. “All of it. Or I walk out of the Lasair Manor tonight and find another way to get Dervla out. Without you.”
My threat hung heavy in the silence between us. I now knew why he had created this elaborate plan, why he needed me. He couldn’t get anywhere near Alistair without being thrown back into prison.
He blinked first. “You need me, Liath.”
I shook my head. “Not anymore.”
A flicker of something raw went across his face, almost gone before I’d clocked it.
He took a glass off the shelf, poured himself cognac from a half-empty bottle, then threw back half of it before he started speaking.
“I loved Maggie since we were kids. But her family was never going to let me marry her. I went away to make something of myself, leaving her alone at the mercy of those bastards. I’ve regretted it ever since.”
The newspaper clipping from the wardrobe came back to me. Son of the Blackwoods’ gardener. The Blackwoods were the founding family of this town. Their class differences would have been too great.
“By the time I came back, the Lasairs had forced her to marry Alistair. He’d forced himself on her and she was pregnant.”
The breath went out of me. Oh fuck. Lorcan was the product of her rape. God, did he know?
A wave of nausea moved through me so fast I almost collapsed, grabbing for the back of the nearest chair as he kept talking.
“They spun the whole thing into me trying to murder the love of my life. Turned me into the jealous spurned ex.”
I wanted it to be true. Because if it was, I hadn’t been wrong.