Page 155 of Twisting Beauty

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.