Page 25 of Irish Oath
I glanced at the doorway. The house had the quiet it gets on the evenings when something big is happening and nobody's saying it out loud. Silence doing a full day's work.
"You think she'll stay," I said.
Cormac gave it the seriousness he gives everything, which is all of it. "Tonight?"
"Past tonight."
Another pause. "I think she'll stay as long as it takes to get what she came for. Whether it turns into anything else depends on things neither of us gets a vote on."
"Deeply useful, thanks. Really. Love that for me."
The corner of his mouth moved. On Cormac, that's a standing ovation.
Then, footsteps on the stairs.
Not Ronan. Ronan's footsteps have a weight and a pattern I've been able to pick out since we were boys. These were lighter. More deliberate. The footsteps of somebody who'd decided to come down and was committing to it one step at a time.
Sienna appeared in the doorway.
She'd changed out of the clothes she arrived in. Dark trousers, a simple top, her hair loose around her shoulders for the first time since I'd known her, which was, I was very aware, a little over a week, though it had the weight of longer. She was still guarded, still carrying that held-together quality into every room, but a shade less armored than she'd been at the front door. A shade. I'd take a shade.
She took in the stove. Then me. Then Cormac.
"It smells like something my mother used to make," she said.
Careful. Not an accusation. Just laying it on the table to see what I'd do with it.
"Lamb stew," I said. "Old Dunraven recipe. Half the mothers around here made a version of it." Which was true, and also not the whole truth, and she knew it, and I knew she knew it, and neither of us said so. That's a kind of conversation too.
She held my eyes a moment, those green eyes that gave back about as much as a locked door, then nodded once and came into the kitchen.
"Can I do something?"
"Table needs setting," Cormac said, before I could tell her she didn't have to lift a finger. He nodded at the cutlery drawer. "Four places."
She found the drawer without being shown. Then the plates. Then the glasses. I watched her move through my kitchen finding my things like she'd lived in it a year, no wasted motion, reading the logic of a room she'd never stood in and bending to it on the spot.
She'd been doing that her whole life. I tried not to think too hard about what it costs a person to get that good at it.
"Where's Ronan?" she asked. Not anxious. Just taking inventory of the room.
"Coming," I said.
Right on cue his footsteps came down the corridor, that weight and pattern, and then he was in the doorway. He took in Sienna setting his table, and for half a second his face did a thing it doesn't do for anybody, so fast I'd have missed it if I hadn't spent my whole life watching for exactly that. A man seeing a thing he'd pictured for years finally standing in the actual world.
He cleared his throat. "Smells good."
"Tiernan's been cooking since four," Cormac said.
"It didn't take that long."
"It took that long," Cormac said.
Sienna glanced between us and said nothing, but something flickered, and I decided to count it as a win.
"Wine?" I asked.
"Water's fine."
