Page 173 of Twisting Beauty

An observation window.

Oh God. That wasn’t a cupboard.

That was a cell.

Of course. The female doctor who’d vanished just before Deargán arrived at Magdalene. Nobody had ever found her. Nobody had even looked very hard.

“I have places to hide him away.”

He’d kept her.

He’d been keeping her down here all this time.

A sick horror rolled through me so hard my stomach lurched. Deargán wasn’t some tragic man clawing for justice.

He was a monster.

As I neared, the singing became clearer, a ripple of goosebumps sprinting across my skin as I realized where I’d heard this song before.

Lena’s music box. It was the same lullaby that came from her music box.

Why would the Magdelene doctor be singing a dead woman’s lullaby?

“Hello?” I called out, my voice low.

The singing cut and a heavy silence descended over me, broken only by the thundering of my heart against my ribs.

Behind the door came the soft shifting of material.

I reached up with a trembling hand and slid the hatch open.

Framed in the hatch, staring right back at me, was my face.

It was Rua.

Rua was alive.

48

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.