44. Liath #3
“Then they killed her parents, framed her, made her look insane, all to steal her inheritance, while I was rotting in Skellig Mór, unable to do a fucking thing.”
Deargán sank into a chair, his free hand running through his hair, the prison tattoo number flashing on the inside of his wrist.
God, I felt his pain. I didn’t want to. But I felt it. The helplessness. The rage. The grief.
“So, yes, when I was released, I was savage with rage. I killed Lasair Senior for what he did to her.” He looked up at me for the first time since he’d started speaking. “But I never tried to kill her. I was trying to rescue her. Her and her… son.”
His voice turned bitter on the last word.
He’d hated Lorcan since before Lorcan had a name. He’d hated him for being made the way he’d been made. And he would still have raised him.
For her.
I believed all of it. I hated that I believed all of it.
He drank the last of his cognac and set the glass down. He stood, the torment falling off him like a cloak as he placed his mask on again.
“Alistair’s father was a monster. He made Alistair a monster. If I’d gotten her and the boy out when he was a child, he might have been saved.”
Deargán held my eyes.
“But it’s too late. He’s one of them. Alistair’s grooming him into something irreversible. Not just to take over the asylum, but to expand it into the twisted empire Alistair is making it.”
For a moment I was back in the drawing room. Candlelight. The smell of cigar smoke and absinthe. A masked man’s hand pushing up my skirt, fingers tightening when I tried to get away. The girl draped across the laps of laughing men with her dress askew, her head lolling, her eyes wide and empty.
I came back into the carriage house with a shudder.
It felt too close to the truth.
“Lorcan is not beyond saving,” I said, needing to believe it.
Deargán crossed to the bookshelf, slid a sheaf of papers from between two books, and dropped them onto the small table between us.
“Don’t believe me? Don’t take my word for any of it.” He tapped the top page with one finger. “This proves your pretty little lover is as corrupt as his father.”
I picked up the papers, noticing they appeared to be a photocopy.
Deed of Conveyance.
It was written across the top, a solicitor’s stamp in the upper corner, witness signatures at the bottom in two different hands.
It was the property deed to Magdalene. All of it. The land, the buildings, the holdings.
And there was the owner’s name.
Lorcan Lasair.
“He is one of them,” Deargán said.
The deed papers slipped out of my fingers and scattered to the floor.
If Lorcan owned the place, he had the power to close it. To open the wards. To let every girl walk out the front gates.
He’d done none of those things.
He’d let it run.
He’d let Dervla rot. He’d let Maeve be killed. He’d let every girl in the ward suffer.
No. I was reading this wrong. I had to be reading this wrong.
But the seed had been planted, the doubt sitting low and ugly in my chest, not big enough to be belief and not small enough to be nothing.
My knees finally gave out. Deargán caught me by the waist before I could fall.
“I am sorry you had to know this,” he said softly.
He was right in front of me, close enough that the cello in my head flared, his scent of clove and pepper rolling over me. An old, ugly pull clenched low in my belly.
He leaned in, his mouth covering mine in a soft press.
His kiss tasted like cognac and it woke up every nerve he’d ever conditioned. My mouth softened against his.
He pulled me closer, flush against him, his cock hardening between us.
Oblivion was right there. He was offering it. My body knew the route by heart.
I’d wanted it. I’d wanted it the way a drowning thing wants air.
But then I thought of Lorcan, holding me together while I broke, without taking a single piece of me as payment.
I might still want Deargán. But I didn’t need him anymore. I didn’t need to disappear into him to survive.
My hand came up and I shoved him in the chest.
He stepped back, his face crumpling before he composed it.
Everything crashed together at once. What Lorcan had told me. What Deargán had just confessed. Every version of the truth tearing against the next until I couldn’t tell which one was real anymore.
My chest felt too tight, my head too loud.
I didn’t know who to believe. I didn’t know what was true. I only knew I needed space. Air. Room to breathe without either of them closing in on me.
I turned and ran for the door.
I pulled it open and tumbled out into the wet grass and the cold air, the taste of cognac still on my tongue, the cello fading as the distance opened up between us.
I barely made it three steps before I halted.
Someone was standing in the lines of the trees.
Lorcan.
Leaning against the trunk of an old oak with his arms folded and his shoulders set, his light-gray coat stark against the dark of the bark, his pale eyes already on me.
Fuck. He’d followed me. He’d been there the whole time.
Lorcan had seen me with Deargán in the carriage house.
Lorcan had seen the kiss.