Page 146 of Twisting Beauty

Lorcan stepped back across from me, settled his shoulder against the lockers, and slid his hands into his pockets. He didn’t bother pretending to look anywhere else.

I turned my body, putting Nuala between me and his sightline. “What did you want to show me?”

He shifted his weight, just enough to keep me in view.

Shite. Getting away from him is going to be harder than I thought.

Nuala pulled something out and held it against her chest. A photograph, face down. Her fingers stayed flat over the back of it for a second too long, like she was deciding whether she could go through with showing me.

Whatever was on it had already frightened her.

I stepped in closer and squeezed her arm. “What is it?”

She slid it into my hand.

It was a photo of a wall with writing all over it.

Red writing. Dark red, dried unevenly against the wall.

Jesus, were those fingermarks? It looked like someone had used their hand to write words all over the plaster in frantic lines.

My limbs went cold.

Blood. It was written in blood.

I’d stood in front of a wall like this before, in the rotting dark of Maggie’s room.

“This is Bridgit’s room,” Nuala whispered. “She wrote it before they took her.”

The words were manic, fragments, phrases doubling back, words repeating, the same three lines threading through the chaos like a refrain.

the Sons watch the Sons choose the Sons will silence the daughters

My stomach bottomed out.

the Sons

No. It couldn’t be the same phrase. Couldn’t have the same meaning.

It couldn’t be the same Sons that sat in Bewley’s letter in Alistair’s secret study. The same Sons that had been murmured about Lorcan in the drawing room.

Right?

Oh God. Bridgit hadn’t been having a breakdown.

She had known something.

She had been silenced.

Just like Maeve.

The urge to grab Nuala’s hand and tell her everything rose up in me. What I’d seen in the study, what I’d heard at Alistair’s drinks evening, what those words meant, who had taken her sister, why. We get her out. Now.

Then I caught myself.

I couldn’t give Nuala crumbs. Not unless I was prepared for her to follow them. And she would. For her sister, she’d walk into that asylum tonight. She’d die there. Telling her was sentencing her.

Deargán’s cold words came back to me. “You’ll ruin everything for one girl.”