Page 69 of Twisting Beauty

Rejects established personal history.

Fixation on alternate identity.

Then finally…

In neat typescript, same as everything else, buried within observations about eating and sleeping and medication compliance.

Patient insists her name is Liath Byrne.

My thumb pressed against the name. Liath Byrne. The name ran through the rest of the notes, in all the staff observations, incident reports, one transcribed session where she’d apparently screamed it three times before they’d sedated her.

Liath. Irish for gray.

Her eyes came to mind at once, those stormy grays that flashed even when she was cornered.

Rua had always felt like something draped over her. Liath fit her.

I sat there with the folder closed beneath my hand, a predatory possessiveness moving through me. Like knowing her real name claimed power over her the way it did in Irish fairy myths.

I said her name quietly, almost under my breath, and the private weight of it sat wrong and right at once.

Then again just to settle the shape of it in my mouth.

“Liath.”

Her name was mine now. Mine. And I knew exactly what I was going to do with it.

I would wait for the right moment.

Then watch her face turn when I wielded it.

21

DEARGÁN

“Move.”

The boy’s shoulder came within an inch of mine as he passed. He barely looked at me, like I was furniture to him and he did not look back.

Alistair’s son. Here.

On a Tuesday afternoon with no warning and no appointment and no conceivable legitimate reason, which meant his reasons were not legitimate.

I stood in the corridor and watched him go.

I had looked at photographs for years, read his files, including his college entry assessment. I’d constructed a profile of him that was manageable. After all, he wasn’t Alistair. Not yet.

They had not prepared me for his forceful presence. He moved through the space as if he owned it. Owned everything. There was almost an inhuman determination and focus in the hard set of his mouth and the unwavering line of his gaze. He was a man who wasn’t used to hearing no.

What, exactly, was he doing here?

I followed, keeping my distance, staying far enough back that if he glanced back, he would find an empty corridor.

The receptionist led him to the RMS’s door, but he barged past her and opened it himself.

I pressed back against the far wall and waited.

The RMS came out forty seconds later, moving at a pace that was close to a jog, tugging his collar straight with both hands. His face was the color of old chalk. He turned in the opposite direction without looking up and disappeared around the corner.