Page 22 of Irish Oath
He'd thought I might need time before facing all of them, and arranged it without being asked. I noted that. Not the way I'd noted things about the Kerrigans all these years, the cold catalogue a person keeps on a target. Somewhere newer than that. No name on it yet.
"And Cormac," I said.
"Here," Cormac said.
I turned. He came around the side of the house with the lack of announcement I was going to have to get used to, the enforcer's habit of being in a space without making himself known until he chose to. He nodded once.
"I'll take your bag," he said.
"I've got it."
He considered the bag, then me, then Ronan.
"She's got it," Ronan said.
Cormac stepped back and gestured at the door.
The entrance hall I did not prepare for.
Two stories of it, the stone floor worn smooth down the center by two hundred years of feet, warmth coming off some mix of the light and the wood and a fire I could smell but not yet see. A staircase curved up to the right toward a gallery that ran the width of the house. Corridors went off in three directions, the near one long enough that its far end sat in shadow, doors down both sides, the scale of a place built for a family that expected to be large and meant to stay. And laid over all of it, so quietly you'd miss it if you didn't know to check, the new work. A keypad set flush into the old stone by the door. A camera angled down from a corner. The suggestion of a steel core behind two-hundred-year-old oak. A fortress wearing a manor like a coat. A house arranged by people who understood how bodies move through a space, updated by a man who understood how they breach one.
And photographs.
Framed photographs down the wall of the entrance hall, the way our family had lined the walls of our estate on the other side of town. The one that was a shell now. The one I'd walked through twice since, like a ghost visiting the place it died.
I stopped in front of one.
A family photograph, taken at some gathering, formal enough that everyone was in good clothes, loose enough that not everyone faced the camera. Ronan's parents in the center. Ronan himself, younger, maybe twenty, the stillness already there but not yet finished, not yet fully him. Tiernan beside him, already grinning at something. Cormac at the edge of the frame, arms crossed, regarding the camera like a man who'd agreed to be photographed and wasn't enjoying it.
And in the background, half turned away, talking to someone outside the frame.
My father.
I pressed my hand flat to the wall.
"That was five years before the end," Ronan said quietly from behind me. "One of the last times our families were in the same place." A pause. "Back then your people came and went from this house like it belonged to them. Mine did the same at yours. Doors left unlocked between families who'd decided to trust each other. That's how close it was, before it wasn't."
I studied my father's profile. The line of his jaw. The way he stood, weight forward, engaged, the posture of a man in the middle of a conversation he actually cared about.
People who had the run of both houses. I marked that, without knowing yet why it mattered.
"He didn't know," I said.
"No," Ronan said. "None of them did."
I took my hand off the wall and turned around.
Ronan was close. Closer than I'd registered, because the hall wasn't wide and he'd come to stand behind me while I looked. Close enough that I had to tip my head up a little to find his face, which I wasn't used to. I'm not a small woman, and I'm not often in the position of looking up at anyone.
His eyes were very near mine.
And for a second I forgot to do the thing I always do, which is keep a clean measured distance between myself and every large dangerous man in a room. I was close enough to feel the warmth coming off him, close enough to catch the specific realization that I didn't want to step back. My pulse did something it hadn't asked my permission to do. I'd trained it out of doing that years ago, and here it was, in a hallway full of my dead family's photographs, betraying me over a Kerrigan. I stepped backanyway. But I clocked how much I didn't want to, and I hated how good the not-wanting felt.
"I'll show you your room," he said. His voice had gone careful in the specific way it went when he was managing something he didn't want to show. "Dinner's at seven if you want it. If you'd rather be left alone tonight, that's fine too."
"Dinner's fine," I said.
He nodded and led me up the staircase. I followed him through the house my father had walked through and my mother had laughed in, the house I was apparently going to live inside now, for however long it took to find the person who'd taken everything from me.
