Page 59 of Irish Oath
The verification was almost nothing in the end, and somehow that was the part that nearly took me apart. He didn't ask for ID. He didn't run a test. He asked me what my mother used to hum when she was cooking, because my father had left that as the question, because he knew no document in the worldwould prove what he wanted proven, but that I would carry the sound of her in me wherever I went.
I told him.
I hadn't said it out loud since I was a girl. It came out cracked and small and I hated that it did, in front of Ronan, in front of this stranger, but it came out, the old tune my mother sang low over a pot with no words to it, and Burke closed his eyes and nodded once, like something had been set right in the world.
But the tune wasn't the whole of it. My father, it turned out, hadn't trusted a sound to do the entire job either. Burke opened a drawer and took out a small thing folded in a square of felt and set it on the desk between us. Then he did nothing but watch my face, the way you watch a face when what it does matters more than anything the mouth can say.
I unfolded the felt, and the floor tipped under me a little.
A Miraculous Medal, cheap silver gone dark, the loop worn thin as wire. My mother used to pin one just like it inside my coat every winter, low on the lining where it wouldn't show, to keep me, she said, on the mornings she couldn't walk me herself. Mine burned with everything else. My father had held one back all these years, with a stranger in Galway, for the single purpose of laying it in front of whoever came claiming to be his daughter and seeing what her hands did before her head caught up.
Mine knew. I had it pinned to the inside of my own collar before I'd decided to move, the old motion still living in the fingers all those years on.
Burke let out a long breath, like he'd held it since my father walked out of his office for the last time. "The tune, and the hands," he said quietly. "He said a tune could be overheard, given enough years and enough patience. He said no one could fake what you'd do with that." He nodded, settled and certain. "You're hers. There's no question left in it."
"This way," he said.
The file was in a steel box in a back room. It was heavier than a file that old had any right to be, and when I opened it on the table, I understood why.
Ledgers. Real ones. My father's hand, that hard slanted writing I'd have known blind, columns of figures going back years before the night the cliffs burned. Bank records that didn't match the ones I'd spent a decade reconstructing from scraps, because mine were the version someone wanted the world to see and these were the truth underneath it. I didn't understand them yet. I was good, but I wasn't an accountant, and the story those numbers told was going to take Cormac and a clear head and probably two days, and we didn't have two days, so I packed them.
Under the ledgers was an envelope with my name on it.
Not Claire. Not Layla. The name I was born with, in my father's writing, the S looped the way he looped it on everything, and I sat down in the chair without deciding to sit down.
"I'll give you the room," Burke said, and was gone.
Ronan didn't go. He didn't say anything either. He just moved to stand by the door with his back to me, giving me what privacy a room could give. I was glad of it in a way I didn't have the spare capacity to tell him about right then.
I opened the envelope.
Sienna, it said.
If you're reading this then I got it wrong somewhere, and I'm sorry. I spent your whole life trying to get it right so you'd never have to read a letter like this one, and if it's in your hands, then I failed you in the only way I ever swore I wouldn't.
So first, before anything else. You were the best thing I ever made. Better than the business, better than the name, better than any of it. Your mother and I used to stand in your door at night when you were small and not be able to believe our luck. Ineed you to know that. Whatever I have to tell you in the rest of this, I need you to read it knowing that first.
I had to stop. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth and breathed through my nose, in and out, the system I'd built for the moments that came at me sideways, and it held, barely, and I kept reading.
Now the hard part. If they came for us, it wasn't an outside thing. I want you to read that clearly, because it will save your life. Nobody got past our walls. Somebody opened them. It came from inside, from a hand I trusted, from someone who sat at our table and ate your mother's cooking and watched you grow, and by the time I understood it, I was already too far behind to stop it.
The ledgers prove it. I couldn't put the name in this letter, because a letter can be taken, and a name in the wrong hands is a thing that gets you killed, and I needed you alive more than I needed you angry. But the money doesn't lie. Follow the money and you'll find the hand. Trust the numbers. Don't trust the people. Not the ones who come to you grieving the loudest. Grief is the easiest thing in the world to wear.
I'm sorry I can't do this part for you. I'm sorry it's yours to carry. Be careful, be patient, be your mother's daughter and keep your spine straight, and when it's done, put it down. Don't let it eat your whole life. Build something. Be happy. That's the only revenge that ever mattered.
Run when you have to. Stand when you can.
I love you, princess.
Dad.
I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough that the radiator clicked off and the room went a degree colder. Long enough that the thing I'd held behind a wall for so long pushed against it hard enough to crack the mortar, and I let it, for once, for a minute, in a back room over a wool shop in Galway withRonan Kerrigan standing guard at the door pretending not to hear me come apart.
It came from inside.
I spent fifteen years aimed at the wrong target. Not the Kerrigans, I'd moved off them a year and a half back, men who were at a funeral in this very county the night my world burned. Cathal Mulryan. Years of files and aliases and a bar named after my ghosts, all of it narrowing to my father's head of security, the man whose whole job was the doors and who walked out of that house alive when everyone behind them did not. The man who lived was the man who let them in. It was the one fixed point I had.
Grief is the easiest thing in the world to wear.
