26. Ava

AVA

I hurried down the tight brick lane that hid the entry to Poe’s Last Stand—an old Victorian haunt hidden away in a quiet corner of old Dublin.

The heavy oak door creaked as I pushed it open, and the smell of peaty whiskey, leather, and worn wood greeted me like an old ghost.

Inside, the dim lighting came from flickering brass sconces, casting long shadows on the crimson walls, and a wrought-iron fireplace lit with a low fire, more for the ambiance than for warmth.

Every surface seemed to absorb the darkness, from the mahogany bar polished smooth, to the mismatched wooden chairs and uneven floorboards that creaked with age under my feet.

Old leather-bound books lined the shelves that framed the bar, dusty and untouched, their presence giving the room an air of long forgotten secrets.

The air was thick with the quiet murmurs of the scattering of patrons who sat hunched over their drinks, their faces obscured by the dim light.

But no one paid any attention to me as I weaved through them to a booth tucked away in the back where Aisling sat waiting.

I shook droplets from my hair and slipped into the booth opposite her, the deep red upholstery had long since faded and the table was scarred with the marks of countless glasses.

“Hey, bish…” I said softly.

But she wasn’t even looking at me.

Her eyes kept trailing toward the door or through the dark velvet curtains framing the frosted glass windows.

She hadn’t bothered with an umbrella or rain jacket. Water still clung to her bare arms as she chewed at her chapped, lipstick-stained lips.

It was hard to see Aisling like this, with stooped shoulders and greasy hair, her usually manicured nails bitten down to the quick.

Grief had carved lines into her face, hollowing out the brightness in her eyes. She looked smaller, fragile in a way that wasn’t just physical.

It was like they stole her too, when they took Liath.

“Were you followed?” she asked, giving me a darting glance.

“No,” I said.

Aisling nodded like she accepted what I’d said, but she looked no less nervous as she played with the sugar packets instead of drinking her tea which I suspected had long ago gone cold .

The waiter appeared to take my order. His presence, though unobtrusive, seemed to shatter the fragile silence.

When he gestured toward Aisling, asking if she wanted anything else, she flinched, like the simple motion had startled her out of her own skin.

It felt cruel, almost, to bring up Liath in this state. To remind her of the loss she was drowning in. But she had messaged me, reached out for a reason, and that was excuse enough.

I reached out and carefully placed my hand on hers, my chest tight with guilt and sympathy.

“Aisling,” I said as softly as I could, “you said you wanted to talk about… Liath.”

She didn’t say anything at first, she just looked past me, her gaze distant.

“I don’t know how to do this anymore, Ava,” she whispered, her voice raw, barely audible. “It’s like… she’s just gone and I’m the one left behind. I don’t even know who I am without her.”

The pain in her words hung in the air between us, thick and suffocating.

A strange, overwhelming urge gripped me, pulling at the edges of my heart. I wanted to wrap her in cotton wool and protect her from whatever darkness had hollowed her out. She looked so breakable, like a single touch might cause her to shatter.

When the bartender returned with my tea, I pressed it across to Aisling.

With a distant look in her eyes, she wrapped her hands around the big steaming mug as a shiver racked her thin frame .

I could sense this was my moment. She was ready to talk. Or as ready as she could be.

But I couldn’t rush at her. I needed to coax out what she knew, gently and slowly, the way you would a skittish foal pressed to the back of a stable.

I leaned forward, lowering my voice to a whisper. “I’ve been investigating for the newspaper…”

I watched Aisling closely, gauging her reaction. Her fingers twitched, but she didn’t look up.

“…and I don’t think Liath ran away.”

Her grip tightened on the mug, the tension in her body rising, but still she said nothing.

I swallowed the lump in my throat, pushing through. “I know Liath was kidnapped.”

Aisling’s shoulders hunched as if the weight of my words pressed down on her.

I could feel her fear, thick and palpable in the space between us, but I had to keep going.

She was Liath’s best friend. They’d been more like sisters, living out of each other’s pockets. If anyone knew anything about Liath’s disappearance, she did.

I leaned in closer, my heart pounding. “I know that Liath was being stalked before she disappeared.”

That did it. She flinched, her eyes finally lifting to meet mine, wide and haunted. The silence stretched between us, heavy with the unsaid things.

I waited, my pulse racing, willing her to say something, anything .

Finally, her lips parted, her voice barely audible as she said, “Liath kept waking up with these strange bruises… and missing time. ”

Her words hit me like a punch to the gut, a flood of dread rushing through me. Bruises. Missing time.

It wasn’t just stalking. Something far worse had been happening to Liath.

I could see the fear etched into every line of Aisling’s face, and suddenly, I understood why she had been so afraid.

Lowering her voice, she said, “When she woke up from her gaps, she’d always complain of this sore throat and a bitter taste in her mouth.”

A flicker of recognition startled me. But it came and went too quickly.

I was left with nothing except for a strange certainty that there was… something. Something I’d forgotten. Or was made not to remember.

“How long had this been happening?” I asked.

Aisling glanced around us again with those wide, darting eyes. “She only told me about it a few months ago. But… it’d been happening on and off for years.”

With a jolt, I remembered the soaked rag in Liath’s room. The paralytic and the memory suppressor compound in it that Seamus had analyzed.

“Your muscles would all freeze. You’d be able to hear, see, and feel but you couldn’t move, a prisoner in your own body. But worse of all, when it wore off, you’d have no memory of what happened to you.”

Someone had been drugging Liath. Not just once, but over and over.

For years .

The horror seeped into my bones, slow and insidious, wrapping around me like an icy grip I couldn’t shake. Every breath I took felt heavier, weighed down by the growing certainty that this was far worse than I had imagined.

Aisling watched undisturbed as I reached across and grabbed the mug to take a big swig. The tea was still hot enough to burn my throat, but I didn’t mind. I just needed to feel something other than terribly, terribly cold.

“It’d be better with whiskey,” Aisling mumbled and then let out a laugh her heart obviously wasn’t in.

I said nothing as I pushed the tea back to her.

She wrapped her bony fingers back around the mug and continued. “She told her ma about it, but… she just brushed it off. Like Liath was just being silly. That she’d been out partying too much. She even told her therapist and he just prescribed her antidepressants.”

Aisling slammed her fist down on the table, making the cups clatter and nearby patrons glance our way. “She wasn’t fucking partying too much. She wasn’t depressed. Something was happening to her and no one would believe her.”

“ I believe you, Aisling,” I said, keeping my voice calm and low. “I believe you.”

Aisling took in a deep breath as if to try to steady herself and rubbed her face before she seemed calm enough to continue.

“Anyway, the last few weeks Liath stopped taking her pills. She was trying this new form of therapy, deep memory revival something or other. I said it sounded like hippie bullshit, but she swore she was close to remembering who…”

Aisling struggled against tears again.

Pins and needles pricked my fingers and toes. My hairs lifted along my arms. The temperature hadn’t dropped in the warm pub and yet I shivered.

“Close to remembering what?” I whispered.

After glancing toward the door one last time, Aisling leaned in. “Liath was sure she was being abused by someone. She didn’t know who but…”

My heart was beating out of my chest. “But Liath was close to remembering?”

Tears broke loose from Aisling’s red-rimmed eyes as she nodded. “I think she remembered. I think the person who abused her knew . And I think—”

Aisling slapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes filling with tears.

She shook her head again.

She didn’t need to say it. I knew.

It was too terrible to say aloud what befell her best friend, too terrible to face what Liath faced. It was easier to keep silent, to repress everything, to bury it all down in the depths of yourself.

But some things would not stay buried.

A memory slammed into me.

The air in the room was stale, unmoving. I had little sense of the time as I pushed myself stiffly up onto my elbow in my four-poster bed. A sliver of pale light quivered between my heavy pink drapes—but was it dawn or dusk?

I awoke sure that I was somewhere foreign, somewhere strange. So it was unsettling to realize that the sheets beneath my numb fingers were my own and that the dark furniture that surrounded my bed was mine.

A bitter taste in my mouth made me gag and I reached for the glass of water on my dark wood bedside table .

Even my body as I slowly assessed it with suspicious, uncertain eyes didn’t feel the way it should. I was like a foreigner in my own skin.

It should have been a relief to find myself fully clothed in my nightgown, one I wore often and must have pulled out all on my own from my wardrobe, but I was sure there was something not right.

I checked my arms beneath the long, lacy sleeves and my breath caught in my chest at the sight of bruises around my upper arms.

I tested one with a delicate touch and winced at the pain.

Fear gripped me—the bruise was fresh.

Not again.

I hastily pulled the hem of my gown up to my hip. All along my upper thighs were bruises.

Something had happened to me. But I couldn’t remember what.

“Ava?” Aisling’s voice broke through the haze, her eyes full of concern as she leaned across the booth. “Are you okay?”

My throat felt parched, the bitter taste of the memory lingering on my tongue like ash.

I reached for my tea, my hand trembling slightly as I brought the cup to my lips and drained it, desperate to push down the rising dread.

The cup hit the saucer with a loud clatter, the sound sharper than I intended.

“I’m grand,” I lied, forcing the words out, but the edge in my voice betrayed me.

I wasn’t grand. I wasn’t okay. And as the weight of everything settled over me, I wasn’t sure I ever would be again.

When I had lived with Scáth, I’d also experienced missing time. I’d wake up with strange bruises that I couldn’t explain, along with a sore throat and the lingering bitterness on my tongue.

At the time, I forced myself to brush it off, convincing myself it was nothing, something I could ignore.

I hid my bruises even from Scáth. Because I liked living there. I liked having him as my foster brother—he made me feel safe. Like I was protected. Cared for.

I didn’t want to complain, to ask too many questions, to give them any reason to send me back to the orphanage.

But now, it all came rushing back, sharp and undeniable.

That’s why the drug from Liath’s room had smelled so familiar. I had smelled it before.

I had just buried it, buried the memories, buried the fear. But now, standing on the edge of that realization, I knew without a shadow of a doubt.

I had experienced missing time, just like Liath.