Page 70 of Twisting Beauty

Lorcan Lasair had cleared the room in under a minute. The economy of it was almost admirable.

I waited.

Exactly eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds later, he came back out.

I turned to face the medical board on the wall, hands clasped at my back, and kept my eyes on a laminated infection protocol. His footsteps passed behind me without slowing and he disappeared back out into reception.

Only then did I slip into the office.

The RMS kept a tidy room. Files squared to the desk edge, book spines flush on the shelves, nothing out of place. I had been in here enough times to know the particular neatness of a man who needed his environment to do the work his mind couldn’t.

Which was why the file on his desk drew my eye, sitting askew at an angle.

I stepped around to read it.

Rua Lasair.

He’d pulled out his sister’s file.

I didn’t need to see it to know he had read every word of it.

I sank into the chair.

Christ.

The calculation had shifted. I had built it on the assumption that the son was a blunter instrument than the father, too self-centered, more impatient, too impulsive, not a real threat.

I had been wrong. Somehow, he’d figured out that there was something wrong with the sister who returned from Magdalene.

He’d read her file. Now he had Liath’s name.

Fuck. I needed to pull her out.

“No.”

Pie was suddenly standing in front of me, arms crossed, her pale-blue eyes narrowed as her brows pressed together.

I sucked in a breath. “It’s too dangerous. He has her name.”

“He has a name in a file that the institution has treated as delusional fixation.” Her voice was certain, stripped of everything except the logic. “What else does he have? Nothing actionable. Nothing that doesn’t look, on its face, exactly like what you wrote it to look like.”

“Yet.”

“Her cover isn’t blown.”

I said nothing. The file sat closed under my hands.

“Pull her out now and it’s finished.” She let that land before she continued. “Every year. Every piece of it. Every position you took, every sacrifice you made.” The pause was calibrated, as her pauses always were. “Bron, we are too close.”

The logic of Pie’s argument was sound. Pulling Liath on the basis of a name in a file attributed to psychosis would be a panic move. Panic moves left traces, and traces led back.

I sat with it for a moment anyway, jaw locked, fighting this ridiculous urge to ignore reason and drag Liath out before the whole thing collapsed around her.

The only reason I was even considering pulling her out was…

Something tightened in my chest.

I ignored it.