Page 61 of Irish Oath
I'd missed him. That's the truth and I'll carry it. Four seconds is not enough time to count a street. I counted three, and there were four.
He came out of the alley low and fast with a blade, because a blade doesn't jam and a blade doesn't make noise. He went for her, because she was the one with the box, the one who mattered, the one their whole morning was built around.
He got her.
Not clean. She turned into it the way she'd turned into the first one, trying to take it on the meat of her arm instead of anywhere it would kill her. She mostly managed it, which is the only reason I'm not writing this differently. The blade went across her forearm instead of her throat. She made a sound, short and bitten off. She didn't drop the box and she didn't drop herself. She got her good hand into his face, her thumb where a thumb does the most damage, and he screamed. That was the first noise any of them made.
I reached them a half second later, and I was not cold anymore.
The job wanted him alive to question. The job could go to hell.
I don't remember the next part as well as I should. I remember it in pieces. His wrist in my hand and the wrong angle I put it at. The wall, his head, the specific give of a man being stopped. Tiernan's voice very close, saying Ronan, she's in, she's in the car, we have to go, and the words taking longer than they should have to mean anything. The part of me that ran the family and made the cold decisions had stepped out of the room and left someone older and worse in charge. Someone who'd waited a long time to find her and watched her bleed inside the first week.
Cormac put his hand on my chest. Just his hand. Flat. And he said one word, my name, in the flat voice, and it reached me where the shouting hadn't.
I got in the car.
We moved before the door shut. Cormac drove it like he'd stolen it, which in fairness he had. Three turns in four seconds, and then we were out of the lanes and into traffic. He dropped us instantly to the exact speed of every other car on the road, because the thing that gets you caught is going fast, and Cormac had never once in his life done the thing that gets you caught.
In the back seat, Sienna had her good hand clamped over the cut and her face was the gray-white of shock held off by willpower and nothing else. The steel box was still in her lap. She did not let go of it. Through all of it, she did not let go of it.
"Let me see," I said.
"It's not deep." Her voice was steady and wrong. "It's long, not deep. Looks worse than it is."
"Let me see anyway."
She let me peel her hand back. She was right, which I hated, because it meant she knew exactly how to take a blade, which meant somebody had cut her before and she'd learned from it. Long and shallow, bleeding hard the way arms do, ugly but not the kind of ugly that takes a person from you. Tiernan had already passed back the kit from under the seat without being asked. I put pressure on it and she let me, and she watched my face while I did it with an expression I couldn't read and didn't have the room to try.
"You killed him," she said. Not a question. "The one in the alley."
"Yes."
She nodded slowly. "Good."
Nobody said anything for a while after that. Cormac drove. The city thinned out and gave way to gray country, and the adrenaline let go of all of us in stages, the way it does, leaving the shakes and the cold and the slow return of the ability to think past the next four seconds.
And the thought I'd put away on the street came back. There was room for it now, and it was worse than it had been out there with no time to hold it.
They knew.
Not guessed. Not stumbled onto us. They'd had a kill team set on a solicitor's office in Galway, suppressed and funded and four men deep, waiting. There was exactly one way to know we'd be at Hartigan and Burke this morning, and it wasn't luck and it wasn't surveillance, because we'd run countersurveillance the whole drive and Cormac didn't miss things on a drive. Somebody told them.
Somebody who knew the plan.
The plan lived in four places. The dining room of my house. The heads of the four people in this car. The mouth of an oldsolicitor who'd guarded a dead man's secret all this time and had no reason on earth to sell it now. And Boston.
We'd given the Sheridans the date and the target so they could put two men in Galway and a house at our backs. They were the one door in the whole thing that opened outward, away from the four of us, away from an old man with nothing to gain. I did the arithmetic the way you do when you don't want the answer, ruling out the names you'd die for until you're left holding the one you can stand to lose. It left me holding Declan Sheridan. Who knew my father. Who was the last ally the poison hadn't taken. The math didn't care about any of that. The math just pointed.
I found Cormac in the mirror. He was already there. He'd done the same arithmetic, faster, and his face had the stillness it got when the conclusion was bad and he'd accepted it before the rest of us got there. He'd landed where I landed. Boston.
"Don't," Sienna said quietly from the back seat. She'd been watching both of us. Of course she had. "Whatever you're about to decide about your people in Boston. Don't. Not yet. That's exactly what it wants."
She held up the box with her good hand, her bad arm bleeding through the dressing in my lap.
"It came from inside," she said. "My father told me that twenty minutes ago in a letter. So it's true, and we're going to have to live in it for a while." Her jaw set. "But we read the numbers first. We don't accuse. We don't burn the house down guessing. We read the numbers, and we let them give us the name."
I took her in. Bleeding, gray, too thin and too sharp, holding the thing four men had just died trying to take, telling the three most dangerous men in the west of Ireland to keep their heads.
