45. Liath #3
He sat down on my other side. Close enough that the wool of his coat brushed mine. Close enough that the scent of clove and pepper reached me before the cello started low under my ribs and his cognac taste flickered up at the back of my tongue.
I swallowed the last of my chocolate bar, getting it stuck in my throat.
Lorcan was at the corner now, shouting something at Finn, his arm raised.
I could feel Deargán’s stare burning into my profile.
Nuala had gone still on my other side, reading the silence between us. She cleared her throat. “I’m gonna grab us coffees. Back in a sec.”
She gave me a tiny look as she went. Giving you space.
No, don’t. I reached for her sleeve just as Deargán’s hand landed flat on my knee, pinning me down.
But she was already too far away, threading between knees and coffee cups, lifting a hand to wave at someone she knew.
He leaned in, his voice pitched only for me under the noise of the crowd. “I told you there was a way to end this.”
The cello dropped lower under my ribs. His other hand came up and brushed a piece of hair back from my temple slowly before trailing down to the line of my jaw.
Then Deargán’s mouth was at my ear. “You convince him you love him. You get him to name you as his heir.”
I stopped breathing.
On the field, Lorcan had possession of the sliotar, soloing it on his hurley as he sprinted for the goal, three men closing in on him.
“Then,” Deargán said, “he dies.”
“No,” tore out of me.
Deargán didn’t react, he just kept talking. “We don’t actually have to kill him. We just make it look like we did. An accident. I’ll handle it. I have places to hide him away. I’ll make sure he’s comfortable.”
Christ. Was he really suggesting this?
On the field, Lorcan smacked the sliotar into the back of the net. A roar went up around us, but it sounded like it came from underwater.
Deargán didn’t even glance at the field. “You’d control the asylum. The girls walk free. Dervla walks free.”
“And you get to take away the only two things Alistair loves,” I said bitterly.
Deargán shrugged, like it hadn’t even occurred to him. “See? We all win.”
My right hand was at my left palm, my thumb rubbing at the scar Dervla and I had carved into each other at the asylum.
I won’t forget you.
If I refused him, the girls in the Special Ward stayed sedated, hands of strangers all over them. Maeve’s death stayed unavenged. I failed Dervla.
If I accepted, Lorcan would have to “die.” He would believe I had loved him before I betrayed him. He would know I had used him. That I had made that choice. It’d destroy him.
Deargán had not offered me a plan. He had offered me two unbearable sentences.
“We’re out of options,” he said softly. “And we’re running out of time.”
Lorcan was running again, his head up and his jaw was set.
Deargán squeezed my knee. “Look at him,” he murmured. “He has violence in his blood.”
Lorcan shouldered a defender out of his line and the man went down hard. The ref blew a long whistle. Lorcan put a hand up in sorry but kept moving.
“One monster’s life,” Deargán said, “for the lives of all those girls.”
For one sick second, I saw the monster on the field, beautiful and brutal, raised to hurt, taught to take. The monster who’d tied me to a balcony in a straitjacket and taunted me. The monster who’d drugged me with a kiss. The monster who had held a knife to my throat the first time we ever spoke.
For one moment, the trade balanced. One of him. For all the girls in the ward. For the girl at Alistair’s drinks evening with her dress askew and her eyes wide and glassy. For Bridgit.
For Dervla.
Then it tipped over because behind the brutal monster was the one I’d come to care about. The boy who had held me without taking anything. Who’d defied his father in front of a room full of men for me. The boy who had let his father destroy the thing most precious to him to save me.
Across the field, Lorcan looked up, his eyes finding mine. They shifted to Deargán beside me. Then dropped to Deargán’s hand on my knee.
He flinched, his face cracking, exposing the raw wound underneath, like a boy who had just had his worst suspicion confirmed.
He thought I had been seduced.
He thought I was choosing.
He did not know, could not know, that the man beside me had just asked me to engineer his death.
This was one more thing that I had to keep from him. One more thing tearing us apart.
A defender came at him from the side. Lorcan turned into him without looking away from me.
His hurley caught the man clean across his helmet.
The crack of it carried up the bleachers.
The man’s head snapped sideways and he hit the grass hard, blood already coming out of his face by the time he landed, staying down as still as death.
The ref blew his whistle. People were shouting at Lorcan from the sideline. The medic was sprinting in.
Lorcan stood over him; his eyes had not left mine.
“Your choice, Liath.”
I lose Dervla.
Or I lose him.
How was I supposed to choose?
From across the field, Lorcan was looking at me like I had already betrayed him.