Page 175 of Twisting Beauty

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?”