Irish Crown (Kerrigan Mafia #2)

1. Sienna

SIENNA

The nine of diamonds sat face up on the table, and three grown men were looking at it like it might grow legs and bolt.

The sentence just hung there over it. Nobody moved to touch that either.

Let’s go show him what I do with a choice.

I’d said it the night before like I was throwing the bolt on the bar door at two in the morning.

Final. Done. Nobody else getting in tonight.

But there’s a thing you say and a thing you can actually pull off, and I’d spent half my life living in the gap between those two animals.

I knew better than to trust my own big talk before coffee.

The card sat between my flat hand and the middle of nowhere, staring at the ceiling like it had somewhere better to be. And the three men I’d decided, somewhere between the soup and the second bottle of wine the night before, to stand and bleed for were all waiting on me now.

I let myself look at them for a second. Just a second. I’d earned it.

Three days ago I’d have told you I didn’t have people.

I’d have told you people were a liability you paid for in installments and then all at once.

And here I was at a breakfast table I hadn’t run from, in a house I hadn’t bolted out of in the night, with a man at each point of the room who I’d somehow let all the way in past the wall I’d spent years building, and the worst part, the part that still made my stomach do something stupid and sixteen years old, was that it felt good.

Safe, even. Which is the most dangerous thing a woman like me can let herself feel, and I knew it, and I felt it anyway.

So. People. Apparently I had those now. God help me.

Morning light came in gray and flat through the east windows, the same light that had watched me sleep last night without one ear open for the first time in years.

It looked different this morning. Everything did.

The candles from dinner were burned down to ugly little stubs nobody had cleared, and the chair Cormac had stood on to pull the hidden camera out of the cornice was still shoved against the wall at a wrong angle that made my eye twitch, and somewhere under the floorboards a wire ran down through two hundred years of cold stone to a man who taught me how to tie my shoes.

I kept my hand flat on the table. The ring sat warm against the wood under my palm.

You don’t let them see the hand shake. I learned that one early and it kept me breathing through years these men couldn’t picture, and even though these weren’t them anymore, these were mine, the habit stayed.

Some habits you keep because they’re the reason you’re still here to break them.

“Right,” Ronan said.

One word. And I could hear the whole machine of him turning over underneath it, the part of him that ran the family and made the cold calls climbing back into the chair it had stormed out of in Galway.

He had his back to the windows, arms crossed, still white around the mouth from the night before.

But his voice had gone level, and level was worse than loud with Ronan.

Loud was a man reacting. Level was a man deciding where to put the bodies.

I knew that voice in my bones now. I’d heard it in the dark with his mouth against my hair. Hearing it turned on the world instead of on me did a complicated thing to my chest that I did not have time for.

“He wants the arrangement,” Ronan said. “He wants the wedding. So he wants you here, alive, and he wants me here, alive, long enough to stand at an altar. That’s leverage we didn’t have an hour ago.

A man who wants you breathing is a man with a hand we can hold.

” He looked at me, and for half a second the cold machine flickered and it was just him looking at me, the way he’d looked at me last night, before it went away again.

“We find the wire’s other end. We follow it back through the stone to wherever he’s sitting, and we go end it.

No aisle. No card. No princess. Just him, dead, and us, done. ”

It was a good plan. It was the plan I’d have made at twenty-five, before I understood the man we were talking about. I shook my head, slow, and watched his jaw set, because Ronan doesn’t like the shake and he likes it even less when I do it before he’s finished talking.

“You can’t follow it back,” I said.

“Cormac can follow anything.”

“Cormac found a camera that didn’t broadcast, in a wall he’d swept a hundred times, and he found it because the plaster was wrong, not because the wire let him.

” I looked at Cormac. He’d gone still in the specific way he goes still, which is not the same thing as quiet, not even close.

He was listening to me the way he listens to a man in a chair, taking everything, giving back nothing, and for once I was grateful for it, because it meant somebody in the room was already standing exactly where I was.

He always got there first. It used to unnerve me.

Now it felt like not being alone in my own head, and I’d stopped examining how much I liked it.

“The other end of that wire goes exactly where he wants it to go. Follow it and we find what he left for us to find. A room. A body that isn’t his.

A door that locks from the outside. Eamon doesn’t leave loose wire.

Eamon leaves an envelope on the mantel and lets you spend all day not opening it, and the second you finally do, the card inside is the one he picked for you the morning he handed you the deck. ”

Quiet. Outside and far down, the sea moved against the cliffs, steady and bored with all of us, the sound that had been a wound for fifteen years and had only just, last night, for the length of one dinner, started turning into something I didn’t have a name for yet.

“You’re telling me we do nothing,” Ronan said.

“I’m telling you he forces the card.” I turned my hand over on the table, palm up, the way Eamon used to fan a deck for a little girl who thought he hung the moon.

“That’s the whole trick. The only one he’s ever needed, and it’s enough, because nobody ever catches it.

He doesn’t decide what you do. He decides what choices you’re allowed to see, and he builds every single one of them to land you exactly where he already wanted you.

You think you’re refusing him? You’re not.

Refusing is a card he dealt you. Chasing him is a card he dealt you.

Running is the card he dealt me the night it all burned, and I held it the whole way to Chicago and back and never once knew it was in my hand.

” I heard my voice go thin and I let it, two whole seconds, the way Cormac taught me, let the thing show and then set it down.

“He’s been dealing me my entire life. And I am so tired of holding what he gives me. ”

Tiernan moved.

He’d been the quiet one since I came down, which was so wrong it was its own alarm bell.

Tiernan with nothing to say. Tiernan with all that easy charm packed away somewhere he couldn’t reach it.

That’s how I knew exactly how scared he was, under all of it, scared for me specifically, and the knowing of it sat in my chest warm and awful at the same time.

He crossed to the sideboard and put the kettle on.

Just put it on, because his hands needed a job and tea was a job they knew by heart, and he stood there with his back to all of us and his shoulders up around his ears and said, to the wall, in a voice with none of his music in it, “What does he do to her. If we don’t play. What’s the worst card in the deck.”

Nobody answered, because we all knew, and because Tiernan was the one of the three who physically couldn’t make himself say it out loud.

So I said it for him. That’s becoming my job in this family, saying the thing the people I love can’t.

“He takes something. He told me himself, three weeks ago. The next thing I take won’t be a ring.

” The kettle started its low tick as it warmed.

“He’s got a whole life of mine he can reach into.

People who never signed up for any of this.

People who think I’m just some woman who left a bar in good hands and went home to mind a sick aunt.

” Kira came up behind my eyes. Kira with the new keys and the raise I’d given her and the lawyer’s number I’d left her like that was a wall instead of a phone number.

I put her in the box with the rest of the things I wasn’t allowed to fall apart over yet.

Standing first. Falling apart was a thing you scheduled for later, if you lived.

“If we do nothing, he reaches into the soft part of me and squeezes until I walk myself to that altar just to make him stop. That’s the card he’s holding for the day I won’t pick one on my own.

He always keeps the next one ready. He taught me that too, sitting on the good sofa with the deck fanned out.

Always know the card you’ll force if they won’t be forced. ”

“Then we don’t refuse,” Cormac said.

First thing he’d said since the cornice, and the whole room turned to him, because Cormac talking is a thing that happens on purpose and never by accident, and he’d just spent words on a sentence that sounded like giving up.

He still had the camera in his gloved hand.

He set it on the table next to the card, the eye and the trick laid out side by side, the two things one man had used to run my entire life from a hole in a wall.

“He wants the wedding,” Cormac said. “Whatever he is, whatever’s standing behind him, he’s wanted it for years, and a man does not wait years for a whim.

He needs it. Something about that arrangement is worth more to him than the killing was, because he killed easy and he’s been patient about this, and patience like that has a reason underneath it that we can’t see yet.

A want is a door.” His amber eyes came up and landed on mine and stayed there, the door he keeps between himself and the rest of the world open exactly a hand’s width, no more, the way it’d been since Galway.

Even on a morning this size, Cormac does not throw a door open.

But he opened it the hand’s width, for me, on purpose, and I felt it land somewhere I was trying not to think about.

“We don’t refuse him the wedding. We give it to him.

Every step of it. The dress, the date, the church.

We let him sit in his hole in the wall and watch us walk exactly where he’s been pushing us.

And while he’s busy watching the hand he thinks he’s forcing, we learn why he needs it so badly, and we run the one he can’t see. ”

The kettle hit a boil and screamed, and Tiernan pulled it off the heat, and in the quiet after I felt the thing in my chest that had finished dying last night settle down into whatever was going to live there in its place.

Something with a colder pulse. Something that had spent half a life getting dealt and had just, this morning, started wondering what it’d feel like to shuffle.

“You want to walk me down his aisle,” I said.

“I want you to walk down it knowing it’s a trick,” Cormac said. “His or yours. Those are the only two kinds there are. He taught you that one too.”

I looked at the three of them. Really looked.

Ronan, the one the card named, the heir, the hand two dead fathers shook across this exact table before I could spell my own name, the one I’d have to stand beside in a church in front of the whole watching world while two other men I loved just as much stood in the pews and pretended to be guests.

I saw him do the math on that in the same second I did, saw something flick behind his eyes and get folded up and put away for a later we might not get.

Tiernan, pouring tea nobody asked for into four cups because four was the number now, his hands finally steady because pouring was a thing he could actually finish.

Cormac, watching me with the door cracked and the cold clean logic fanned out on the table, handing me the only thing he’s ever really known how to give, which is the truth about how the trap works.

Three men. All mine. All about to walk into a church to help me con the devil who raised me.

I should have been terrified. I mostly just felt held.

“Okay,” I said again. Same word as last night. It carried more this time.

I picked up the nine of diamonds. I didn’t slam it down and I didn’t tear it in half and I didn’t do any of the things a younger, dumber version of me would’ve done to feel something.

I turned it over once in my fingers, the worn face, the neat little hand on the back, time to honor your father’s arrangement, princess, and I slid it into the breast pocket of the shirt I’d slept in, right against my chest, where I’d feel the edge of it digging at me all day.

“He picked my card,” I said. “Fine. I’ll hold it.

I’ll hold it all the way to the church with a smile on my face, and I’ll let him think the whole thing was his idea, exactly the way he taught me.

” I closed my hand over the ring, the anchor, my father in a band of gold telling me to stand when I could.

“And somewhere between this kitchen and that altar, I’m going to learn how to deal. ”

Out past the east windows the cliffs stood dark and patient against the gray, the same cliffs, the same gray, the same sea that watched my family burn and watched me run and watched me crawl back, bored with every second of it.

For so long they’d been the last thing I saw before the dark. The edge of the world somebody threw me off of.

This morning they just looked like high ground.