48. Liath
LIATH
Istared at the face staring back at me.
My face.
Rua’s face.
No.
A hallucination. A dream. Whatever was in that vial. This was not happening.
Then her scent reached me through the open hatch, sweet almonds and paint, and a music box rose up in my head, tinkling with one tooth broken, half a key off, eerie and childlike.
The same scent that I’d smelled in Rua’s bedroom. On her sheets. From her things. Drifting up out of the lining of her clothes when I pulled them over my head.
The breath punched out of my lungs like I’d been struck, the air in the room vanishing. I stumbled backward, my boots tangling, until my spine slammed hard into the side of a nearby bookcase.
My hands flew up to cover my mouth, muffling the strangled, impossible gasp tearing out of my throat.
I was looking at a mirror. I was looking at a ghost.
The dim basement shattered, my vision tunneling down to the pale, trembling girl behind the hatch.
She was too thin, her collarbones too prominent against the neckline of her cream dress, her skin almost translucent like it’d been too long since she’d seen the sun. Her eyes were hollow and oh too still.
How long had she been locked in here?
She tilted her head as she watched me through the hatch, her pale fingertips curled around the edge.
“Hello, sister.”
Oh my God. She spoke with my voice. With the same register, just… thinner.
My body went cold.
Rua glanced past my shoulder, scanning the basement. “So, where is the bastard?”
I fought to find my voice. “I… I…”
Her gaze snapped back to me and moved over my face. They stopped at my neck.
“Well,” she said, her eyes narrowing at me, “didn’t take much to convince you to work for him, did it?”
My fingers flew up to the hickey Lorcan had left on my throat. She thought Deargán had done it. Of course she did.
Except I couldn’t correct her. Couldn’t tell her that the man that’d marked me was the brother she was desperately in love with.
“R-Rua? I thought you were—”
Dead. It was no excuse for what I’d done. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t locked her down here. I had taken her name. I had worn her clothes. I was still guilty.
Fuck, stupid, Liath. I had taken his word that Rua was dead. I had not questioned it. I had grieved for a sister I had never met. I had worn her life on his testimony alone.
She stared at my hair. Her gaze traveled down, over my body, over the dark jacket, over the black sweater and jeans I had on, her gaze pausing on the charm bracelet on my wrist. I’d almost forgotten I still wore it.
Her hair.
Her clothes.
Her bracelet.
“I bet you thought you were so clever when you stole my fucking life.”
Heat rushed up my cheeks, the impulse to explain already clawing up my throat.
I bit it back. There was nothing I could say. Nothing that would unmake months of me sleeping in her bed and answering to her name.
Rua clicked her tongue. “What a kick in the bollocks when you realized that Daddy was just as bad as Michael Byrne.”
I shook my head, my mind still trying to catch up. “Wait, so, you… you know about me?”
She scoffed. “Of course I know about you, Liath.”
Her gaze traveled around me as if she were looking past my skin, at something hovering at the edges of me. Then her eyes snapped back to my face, a scowl on her mouth. “Oh, I know all about you. He made me write your diary pages. Over and over until I got your handwriting right.”
A note in my head went flat.
She kept going. “I wake up and I can still feel him crawling around under my skin.”
My ribs caved. Cold rolled through me so fast my knees nearly gave.
Those journal pages. The ones that had broken me apart at Magdalene. The ones that had made me question my own mind, my own memories, my own name.
Deargán hadn’t just gaslit me.
He used my own sister to do it.
Deargán may have started out as a tragic man clawing for justice, a wounded lover seeking to right a wrong. But with every drifted step, every morally gray decision, he had morphed into a monster.
Whatever sympathy I had carried for him crumbled into dust.
Only then did my eyes move past Rua’s face to the room she was in.
Behind her stood a four-poster bed in dark wood. Damask wallpaper, deep and rich, papered the walls all the way up. Paintings clustered across them, pinned and framed.
Oh God. I knew this room.
I’d been sleeping in this room for months.
He had rebuilt her bedroom down here.
Except.
I looked closer.
There were no windows, only a skinny slit of glass set high on the back wall, too far above her head to reach, the only natural light filtering in.
And the paintings were darker, the colors rotting toward black.
My jaw locked, my rage hardening into decision.
I had to get her out.
Shit. If Rua was out, my cover was gone. Everything I’d built. Everything I’d risked. Dervla. The girls. The whole mission.
I shoved it aside. One problem at a time. I could not leave my sister down here, captive to a monster.
“I’ve got to get you out of here.”
Rua’s eyes narrowed. “Nice try.”
I stepped closer and lowered my voice as I glanced to the stairs. “Where does he keep the key?”
She flinched, stepping back from the hatch, both hands going up to her hair, her fingers tangling in it, gripping like she meant to pull it. “This is one of his dirty tricks. Feed me hope and then slap it out of my mouth.”
Bastard. My rage sharpened into something with edges.
I pressed my fingers to the edge of the observation hatch, voice low and pleading. “Rua, I swear to you. This isn’t a trick.”
She muttered to herself, half-audible through the door, “trick… fall for it… can’t… the gray and purple is lying…”
Fuck. If I was going to hide a key, where would I hide it?
I turned to the bookshelves and started pulling books off in handfuls, praying for a false inside to flip open and for a key to clink out. “The key, Rua. Where does he keep it?”
Books hit the floor. Pages fluttered. A row of specimen jars rattled on the shelf above and one of them tipped, falling to the floor with a shatter.
Rua stepped to the hatch from inside the cell and watched me, her eyes widening. “You’re really going to free me?”
I kept tearing through the shelves. Every second was a second closer to him being back. “For fuck’s sake, Rua. The key!”
She pointed through the hatch. “His desk. Top drawer.”
I ran to the desk and pulled the top drawer.
Thank God, the key was there.
I returned to the door and slid the key into the lock. The mechanism gave with a heavy click that traveled up into my back teeth.
I pulled the door open.
God. She was right there. No door between us. Her. Rua. My sister. My twin returned from the dead.
Her eyes flicked past me, up the stairs at the back of the basement, fear pulling the corners of her mouth tight and rounding her shoulders.
I held out my hand. “I won’t let him hurt you.”
After a moment, she took it, her cold hand sliding into mine.
For a moment we just stood there.
Emotion clogged up my throat so thick it hurt to breathe around it. My sister.
My twin.
Alive.
Already the feeling inside my chest was too big for my body to hold.
I wanted to say it properly. Wanted to tell her I knew her somehow, that some impossible part of me recognized her even though I barely knew her at all.
The words tangled together and came out wrong.
“You sound like a music box, you know?” I blurted out.
She blinked at me. Once. Twice. Then the corner of her mouth tipped up. “And you’re gray and purple.”
Oh. She was like me. She had synesthesia, too.
She saw smells as color, saw color around people, the way I heard music.
My chest warmed.
She glanced up at the ceiling, her brows knitting together. “He’ll be back. He always comes back.”
“I know. We have to go.” I led, tugging her behind me as we hurried across the basement.
For half a second I considered grabbing something, the vial, an index card, anything to use as proof so Deargán couldn’t gaslight me on this too.
I dismissed it instantly. Rua alive was my proof.
“Come on.”
I grabbed the banister as we reached the foot of the stairs.
And froze.
Rua let out a small fearful whimper and pressed in against my back, her fingers gripping at my sweater.
Up at the top of the stairs, a figure filled the doorway with his wide frame.
Deargán.
He’d returned.
And he had caught us.