Page 50 of Irish Oath
I got back in the car. I didn't cry and I didn't shake. I did the other thing, the one that had kept me alive across a dozen cities and a dozen names, which was go cold and clear and quick. Whatever this was, it was closer and older and more careful than anything I'd let myself believe, and I was finished working it alone in the dark of my own skull.
I drove up the coast road to the Kerrigans faster than the road wanted taking.
Ronan was at the front door when I pulled up.
Not waiting. Or not appearing to wait, which with Ronan was probably a distinction without a difference. He had his jacket on, like he'd been about to go somewhere and paused.
I got out.
"Good?" he said.
"I went to the bookshop. And the cliff path."
His head came up. "The one at the end of the coast road?"
"Yes."
He was quiet. "Your father used to walk that path. When he visited. My father said he always went to the cliff path."
I didn't say anything, because there was nothing to say on a doorstep that wouldn't cost more than I had on hand. I'd tell them all of it inside, at the table, where it belonged. The bookshop. The gate. The man asking whether the girl was dead. Not out here.
I walked past him into the house. He fell into step beside me without being asked, and we went in together.
19
TIERNAN
Cormac had taken the dining room hostage.
That's the only honest word for it. The long mahogany table that had fed two hundred years of Kerrigans sat buried under maps and photographs and timelines and two families' worth of paper, laid out in a mess that only looked like a mess. I'd watched him build it since before six. Cormac doesn't decorate. If a thing's on that table, it's holding weight.
Sienna stopped in the doorway and read it the way I'd known she would, quick, top to bottom, and I clocked the exact second she recognized the logic of it. Because it was close to her own.
"You reorganized my files," she said.
"Integrated them with ours." Cormac didn't look up. "Different system. More efficient."
He wasn't wrong. He usually isn't, the smug bastard.
She came in. I came in behind her, close enough to clock that she'd slept about as much as the rest of us, which was to say not at all. Ronan was already planted at the head of the table, arms crossed, reading the room like it owed him money. "Ready," he said. It's never a question when Ronan says it.
"Show me what you've got," she said.
"Before you start." She didn't move to the table yet. "I've got something for it first."
We looked up. And she gave it to us plain, no dressing on it, the way you hand a hard thing to people you've decided can carry it. The bookshop, and the sharp old woman who told her she was the second person that month to come asking after the old families and this house. The gate at her ruin, and the chain on it. New. Galvanized. Somebody had cut away the lock she'd left there years ago and hung a fresh one on a burned-out shell with nothing left in it worth locking. And an old farmer on the boreen who told her a well-spoken older man had stood at that gate a month back and asked, particular, whether the daughter had died in the fire with the rest.
The room went the specific kind of still that has nothing to do with maps.
"Not the families," she said. "Me. He came to ask whether I was dead. Then he chained the grave, which is not a thing you do to a place you're sure is empty."
That one landed in my chest before my head caught up to why. You don't lock an empty box. You lock the one you think might still have something in it.
Cormac set down the photo in his hand. "When."
"A month, give or take. Bookshop and gate both."
He went quiet, and I watched him lay it against something he already had. That's the thing about Cormac. He never reacts to the new fact. He goes still and checks it against the wall of everything else, and by the time he speaks it's already a verdict. "Your Chicago contact went dark inside the same window," he said. "The lab man who ran your samples. Two missed check-ins, then nothing." Flat. From Cormac, flat is the loudest a thing gets. "A stranger walking your ruin a month ago and your one outside thread going silent a month ago aren't two facts. They're one hand, closing slow."
