Page 70 of Irish Oath
Some things are better left in the ground. Go back to Chicago, Sienna. The bar misses you.
So they knew about the bar. Of course they knew about the bar. They knew the name I'd built, the life I'd hidden in, the exact thing I'd lose if I went back to it and pretended none of this had happened. They knew me. Not the file of me. The me of me, the small private human shape of my life, the way only someone who'd watched me become it could know.
And if they knew the bar, they knew Kira.
The thought arrived ahead of any thought about myself, cold and total, the way the ones that matter always do. The girl I'd handed Madigan's to with a raise and a lawyer's number and a lie about a sick aunt. She stood inside my cover and didn't know it was a cover, and a man who'd kept my father's ring against his skin all these years had just told me, in careful printed capitals, that he knew exactly where she was.
I turned to Cormac. The words were just there, flat and certain, no decision in front of them. "Kira. My manager in Chicago. Get her out tonight. A reason that isn't fear, a family thing, paid leave, anything that travels, but get her clear of that bar and somewhere they can't use her to reach me."
He already had his phone in his hand. "Sheridans keep people who can sit on her by morning," he said. "She'll be covered before she opens the doors."
"Tonight," I said.
"Tonight," he agreed, and meant it. I watched one of mine come off the board before the enemy thought to reach for her, and something in my chest unlocked half a degree.
I set the ring down on the table next to the card, and I stood there, and I felt the old thing rise up in me. The thing that kept me alive. The thing that had a name even if I never said it out loud. Run. Years of instinct screaming the single syllable. They were inside. The walls weren't walls. Nowhere was safe andnobody could be trusted, and the only move that ever worked, the only move that had kept me breathing since I was fifteen, was to disappear. Change the name, change the city, become someone new before they closed the distance.
I felt Ronan come into the kitchen behind me. Then Tiernan. Nobody said anything. They let me have it, the moment, the choice, the way Ronan had let me have the back room in Galway. They could see what was on the table and what it was doing to me, and they stood there not telling me what to do, which was its own kind of love, and it was the thing that made the next part possible.
Because I'd read my father's letter so many times in three days, I could see it now with my eyes open.
Run when you have to. Stand when you can.
I'd done the first half my whole life. Run when I had to, and I'd had to, again and again, until I got so good at the first half I'd forgotten there was a second. Stand when you can. He'd put it last, like he knew the running would come easy to whatever was left of me and standing was the part I'd need reminding of.
Can I, I asked myself. I made myself answer it honestly, the way Cormac answered things, no comfortable lies. Could I stand? Three days ago I'd have said no. Three days ago standing meant standing alone, and alone I'd have lost, alone I'd always have lost, which is why running was never cowardice. It was arithmetic.
But I wasn't alone.
That was the whole of what had changed. I turned around and looked at them, the three of them. The man who found me, the man who waited for me, and the man who couldn't let himself want me. All those years of survival instinct told me they were just three more people who could betray me the way Eamon had, and I looked at it square and found I didn't believe it. I believed a lot of dark things about a lot of people. I didn'tbelieve it about them. Somewhere in the days since I came, and one Galway street, and a kitchen at two in the morning, I'd done the thing I swore I'd never do again. I'd let people matter enough to be worth standing for.
"No," I said.
Ronan's brow moved. "No, what?"
"No, I'm not going to Chicago." I picked the card back up and held it so they could see it, the printed line, the careful threat. "They walked my father's ring through your fortress to tell me I'm not safe anywhere, and they're right. I'm not. I never have been. But they made one mistake in telling me." I set the card down. "They're scared. You don't spend that kind of reach, you don't show me you've been inside the whole time, you don't beg me to go home to a bar, unless what's in those ledgers can end you. They're not warning me because they can kill me. They could have killed me in Galway. They're warning me because they need me gone before I read the rest of the numbers and find the thing they're actually afraid of." I looked at the ring. My father's ring. Soft gold and a worn crest and a small unexplained nick. "So I'm going to read the rest of the numbers."
For a beat, nobody spoke.
Then Cormac, of all of them, who hadn't looked at me straight since the stitches, looked at me straight.
"They think you'll run," he said. "Every move they've made assumes it. The kill team was insurance, but the ring, the bar, the go-home, that's the play they actually want to work. They've built their whole approach on you being a woman who runs." The flat of his voice broke a fraction, something almost like the ghost of approval. "So we stop running. We stop reacting to their moves and we make one of our own. We've a name now. Eamon Brennan, alive or dead, worked for someone, and that someone is local enough and connected enough to put a clean team on a Galway street and a ring on this table. People like that havepeople. People who can be found. People who can be made to talk."
"You want to go on offense," Ronan said.
"I want to stop letting a dead man's paperwork set the pace." Cormac's eyes came back to me and held. "She just told us she's done running. So let's give her something to stand on."
"Then we start with Boston," Ronan said.
The room changed temperature. My skin knew before I did.
"I've already pulled back from the Sheridans." He said it with no give in it at all. "Declan's rung four times since Galway. I haven't picked up. Two of his men were close enough to that street to know we'd be on it, and a kill team was waiting at a door only Boston and the people in this room knew about. I won't pretend the arithmetic says anything else." He held my eyes. "I don't enjoy it. Declan stood at my father's grave when no one else would. But I've buried people for being slow, and I'd sooner insult an old friend than read his name in a coroner's report because I went soft."
It was reasonable. That was the trap of it. Completely reasonable, and wrong, and I knew it was wrong in my gut before I had the words for it.
"No," I said. "My father's letter said it came from inside. Inside. Boston's an ocean away. It's the furthest outside a thing can be. Whoever did this had a chair at this table back then and never gave it up. Declan Sheridan didn't set a team on a Galway solicitor he's never heard of." My voice climbed and I let it. "You want to cut off the one ally the years didn't take, three days after a man spent a fortune telling me I'm not safe anywhere and should go home alone? That's not arithmetic. That's the move they're steering you into. The easy answer is always the one they built for you. Eamon taught me that without meaning to."
Nobody spoke.
