Page 57 of Irish Oath
The dining room was Cormac's war, and Sienna walked into the middle of it like she'd been issued a rank. She stood at the head of the table with her weight on both feet and her hands flat on a road map of the western counties, and she was so completely inside her own head that she didn't hear me come in, which almost never happened. She heard everything. She heard people deciding to walk into a room before they'd finished deciding. But she didn't hear me, because she was somewhere years back and a hundred miles west, and her face had gone to a place she didn't let it go when she knew she was watched.
I had a rule about her face. I'd made it early, somewhere around the second day, when I understood what I was dealing with. I got to look at the version she performed as much as I wanted, the dry one, the careful one, the one that gave you exactly enough and not a grain more. But the other one, the one underneath, I only got if she gave it to me. Stealing it felt like the kind of thing you didn't come back from.
So I made noise with the plate.
She came back into herself between one breath and the next. It was a thing to watch even when you weren't supposed to be watching it. The spine straightened a half degree it hadn't known it dropped. The eyes cleared. The mouth found the line it lived on.
"You're staring," she said, not looking up.
"I'm delivering eggs. The staring's free."
"I'm not hungry."
"Didn't ask." I set the plate on the one corner of the table that didn't have a dead family's geography on it. "Four hours. You'll be glad of it around Athlone."
She considered the eggs like they were a problem she could solve, and then, because she was smarter than her pride, she picked up the fork and ate. I watched her do it without watching her do it, a skill you developed around her if you wanted to keep any dignity at all.
She set the fork down with the plate half gone and turned that look on me, the one she wore when she'd decided to stop performing for a minute because performing cost more than it was worth.
"You're quiet," she said. "You're never quiet."
"Working up to something."
"Don't."
"Too late." I came around to the corner of the table that didn't have her dead family's geography on it, and she turned on the stool to face me and didn't tell me to stop, which from Sienna was the same as a hand pulling me in. I put my palm to the side of her neck, thumb along her jaw, and she let her eyes fall shut for exactly one second, which was her whole version of falling into a person. "We're about to drive you to the worst people in the world," I said. "I'd like it on the record that I have feelings about that."
"Noted."
"Strong ones."
"Tiernan."
I kissed her. Not the careful kind. The kind with everything I didn't say loaded into it, the four hours of motorway and the man at the wall and the swallowed stone in my chest that kept telling me I was the one who'd led them to her. She made a low sound and got a fist in my shirt and pulled, not away, in. For a few seconds the operational house and the buried records and the whole grinding machine of the day went quiet, and there was just her, warm and alive and gripping me like she'd landed on the same conclusion I had, that we were both coming back from this and it wasn't up for discussion.
She pulled back first. She always would. She pressed her forehead to my sternum a second, breathing, then straightened the half degree that meant Sienna was back in the room.
"Hold that thought for four hours," she said.
"I'll hold it as long as you want," I said, meaning a good deal more than the morning. From the way she went still, she heard the more in it and decided, for once, not to bat it away.
Cormac came in behind me. He'd finished with the guns, and he had her vest over his arm, the low-profile one, the kind you wore under a coat and prayed you never tested. He set it on the table in front of her without a word, which was how Cormac said most things.
"I can dress myself," she said.
"You can." He picked it up again anyway and held it open. "Straps need setting to you. Do it once now or do it wrong in a car park in Galway."
She held his gaze a second longer than the moment required. Then she set down the fork, turned, and let him put it on her.
And then there was the thing I wasn't meant to see.
I read people. It's not a talent so much as a condition, the way some men can't stop doing sums in their heads. I've spent my whole life in rooms full of people deciding whether to lie to each other, and I learned young to watch the parts of a person that don't know they're being watched. The hands. The breath. The half second between the thing happening and the face arriving to cover it.
Cormac set the straps. He did it the way he did everything, economical, exact, no contact that wasn't required by the task. He pulled the side strap snug and ran his thumb under it to check the tension against her ribs, the way you would on anyone, the way he'd have done it on me. Professional. Nothing in it.
Except that his hand stopped.
It was nothing. It was less than nothing. His thumb came to rest against the side of her where the strap crossed, and it stayed there a half second past the work. A half second past anything the work could account for. And in that half second the man I'd known twenty years, the man who never once in two decades let me see the inside of a single thing he felt, went very still in a way that had nothing to do with his usual stillness. His usual stillness was armor. This was the opposite of armor. This was a man caught with the door open.
