CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Aoife
HE'S STILL AWAKE.
The light under the door told me that. I stand in the corridor for a moment before I knock, two sharp raps, and then his voice comes through—low, careful, the voice of a man who's been sitting in the dark waiting for exactly this.
"Come in."
He's on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees. Tie gone, shirt collar open, still in the same clothes from dinner. He looks up when I walk in, and whatever he reads in my face makes him go very still.
I close the door. I lean back against it.
"Tell me it wasn't you."
He holds my gaze. "It wasn't me."
He says it without hesitating. That's the first thing I notice. Not a long pause, not the tell I've been reading on him since he was twenty-three and lying to our father about where he'd been. Just the words, clean and direct, and his eyes steady on mine.
It almost works.
"Reilan."
"I don't know what you think you know, but I didn't—"
"Stop." I push off the door. "Don't do that. Don't treat me like I'm one of Dad's lieutenants you can manage with a straight face and a calm voice. I've known you my whole life."
He stands up. "Then you should know I wouldn't do this."
"I know what I saw in that dining room."
"You saw me react to a man being shot across the table from me.
We all did." His voice is measured. Reasonable.
Exactly the voice he uses in strategy meetings when he's steering a conversation away from something dangerous.
"That's not evidence, Aoife. That's William Murphy watching a room full of frightened people and deciding to land on me. "
"It's not nothing."
"Every person in that room was frightened. Every single one. What does he have that separates me from any of them?"
I look at him. I look at the line of his jaw and the set of his shoulders and the way he's standing with his weight slightly forward, the way he always stands when he's committed to a position, and I think about all the years I have spent in the same rooms as this man.
All the times I knew before he opened his mouth whether he was going to tell the truth.
"When did it start?" I ask.
Something moves behind his eyes. "When did what start?"
"Stop asking me questions to buy time. When did it start?"
"I don't know what you're asking me."
"Yes, you do."
"Aoife." He moves toward me, and I take a step back, and he stops.
The look on his face is something I haven't seen there before, and I don't want to examine what it is.
"I'm telling you the truth. Whatever William Murphy has convinced you of, he's wrong.
I would not put you in danger. I would not—"
"Don't." My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. "Don't make this about me. Don't try to use that."
"It is about you. You're my sister. I was seventeen when Mam died, and you were fifteen, and I was the one who sat outside your door every night for two weeks because I didn't know what else to do. If I had done what you're accusing me of—" his voice drops—"what would that make me?"
It's good. It's very good. It's the right answer, the one with the most force behind it, the one that uses every true thing between us as cover for the lie in the middle of it.
And the worst part is, I can feel it working.
I can feel the part of me that loves him reaching for the thread he's offering.
"It would make you someone who was desperate and made the wrong call," I say. "And I would still be your sister."
He looks at me.
"But only if you stop lying to me."
The room is very quiet. The single lamp. The sound of the house settling around us. Somewhere down the hall, a door closes softly and then nothing.
Reilan looks at me with his face perfectly arranged, and he says, "I didn't tell them anything."
It comes up from somewhere I didn't know I was holding.
The sound of my palm hitting the side of his face is too loud for the room.
He turns his head with the force of it, but he doesn't step back, doesn't bring his hand up, and when he looks at me again, his expression hasn't changed.
That's what does it. That careful, controlled face, even now, even here, maintaining the lie with the mark of my hand already forming on his jaw.
"You could have just told me." My voice shakes. I hate it. I make myself keep going. "I'm not William. I'm not going to put a bullet in you. I'm your sister, and I would have helped you find a way out of whatever you're in, and you know that. You have always known that."
"There's nothing to tell you."
"Reilan—"
"There is nothing to tell you." Quieter now. Final.
I want to scream. I want to grab him by the collar and put him against the wall and make him look at me and stop performing.
But I've seen what this is now, and I know that more pressure won't get me further.
He's decided. Whatever the reason, whatever they're holding over him, he's looked at the choice in front of him, and he's chosen the lie.
I breathe. In. Out. I think about William in the dining room, the way he'd set the whole thing up and waited with absolute patience, and then pulled the trigger. I think about what he said to me in the kitchen afterward. I think about a few days and what that clock sounds like.
"William knows," I say. "Not a guess. Not a feeling.
He's been building the evidence, and he's close, Reilan.
You saw what he did to Frank tonight." I hold his gaze.
"His uncle. A man who sat at their table his entire life.
He did it in front of all of us without blinking because the evidence said Frank had betrayed him.
" I pause. "What do you think he does when the evidence says it was you? "
Reilan's jaw is tight. He doesn't answer.
"I bought you time. I don't know how much.
A few days if we're lucky, less if something lands before then.
" I stop. I make sure the next part is very clear.
"I'm not asking you to go to William. I'm not asking you to explain yourself or hand yourself over or do anything except stop.
Whatever they're expecting from you next, whatever channel you're using, it ends. Now. Tonight."
"I don't know what you're—"
"Because if you don't," I say over him, "I will not try to protect you.
I'll step back and let whatever happens happen, and I will not put myself between you and William Murphy if you are still actively feeding the people who are trying to kill him.
" I pause. "That's not a threat. That's just what's true. "
The room goes very quiet.
Reilan looks at me. His face is still controlled.
His eyes are the same eyes that looked at me across every difficult moment of my life, that sat outside my bedroom door for two weeks after our mother died, that found me at the hospital the night Dad was shot and didn't say a word, just stood beside me and waited.
He says nothing.
That's when I know I'm not going to get what I came for. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
I open the door.
"Aoife."
I stop. My hand on the frame. I don't turn around.
"I didn't tell them."
He says it one last time. Into the back of my head. Like if he says it enough times, it becomes true, or like he needs me to carry it out of the room with me, one more layer of cover he can point to later.
I leave without answering.
The door clicks shut behind me.
I stand in the dark hallway, and I press my back to the wall, and I breathe. I count the seconds the way I always do when the ground is moving under me. I get to eight before I can trust myself to move.
He didn't argue when I said I wouldn't protect him.
That's the part that won't leave. Not the denial, not the slap, not the controlled face he kept through all of it. He let me walk out of that room without arguing. Without reaching for me the way he always reaches for me when something is wrong. He just said it one more time and let me go.
Because arguing would have meant admitting there was something to argue about.
I knew when I walked in. I have known since the dining room, since I watched William read the room and tell me what he'd seen, and I felt the cold certainty settle in my chest that I've been refusing to look at directly.
I knew, and I went to Reilan anyway because I needed him to give me something to hold onto.
He couldn't.
I push off the wall. The hallway is dark and quiet, and the light under Reilan's door is still on. I don't look back at it.
Two days.
Two days of the house operating around the thing none of us are saying.
William doesn't ask me anything, which is either patience or strategy.
I haven't decided which. Reilan moves through meals and corridors with a careful quietness, like a man who's made a decision and is waiting to see what it costs.
I watch him from across the breakfast table on the second morning and try to find the brother who sat in a hospital corridor the night Dad was shot, the one who didn't leave, didn't sleep, didn't speak much—just stayed.
He's still in there. I'm sure of it.
It doesn't change anything. That might be the hardest thing I've learned this week.
The call comes at eleven.
I'm on the edge of the bed with my laptop when the connection goes through, and when my father's face fills the screen, I lose whatever composure I thought I had.
He looks thin. There's a bandage at the edge of his collarbone, barely visible above the hospital gown, and he's lost weight in a way that shows in his face.
But his eyes are clear. The same pale blue they've always been, the same shade I see in my own mirror, and when he looks at me, he says, “There she is,” in a voice I haven't heard in weeks, and my chest just cracks open.
"Dad." My voice is not steady. I've stopped trying. "I thought—when they said you were—"
"I'm here." He leans forward slightly, like he wants to close the distance. "I'm right here, Aoife. Not going anywhere."
I press my hand to my mouth and breathe through it.
We talk. It takes a few minutes for the shock of seeing him to settle into something I can actually work with, and he doesn't rush me, just lets me look at him the way I need to.
"You look terrible," he says eventually.
That startles a laugh out of me. "You're in a hospital bed."
"I've looked worse in better circumstances." The corner of his mouth lifts. Then he goes quieter. "I hear you've been holding things together over there."
"William's been doing most of it."
He looks at me for a moment, the way he used to when I was young and he was working out what I wasn't saying. "Tell me about him."
"He's capable. He knows what he's doing."
"That's not what I'm asking."
I look at my father's face through a laptop screen in a borrowed room in a house where a man was shot four days ago, and I try to find the careful diplomatic version of the answer. The one that gives him the facts without giving him more than he's asked for.
I don't find it.
What I find instead is William at the kitchen range at two in the morning, asking me what I'd seen in Reilan's face.
The way he'd listened—not collecting ammunition, just actually listening, like my read of the room was information he needed from someone he trusted to give it straight.
The way he'd handed me the three days without making it a debt.
And the night before that, the steadiness of him in the dark, no performance of reassurance, just the plain, unadorned fact of his presence. I have you. Said the way you state logistics. It reached further into me than anything dressed up ever could.
"He's more than I expected," I say.
My father is quiet. Watching me with that expression that means he's already ahead of me.
"You've fallen for him," he says. Soft. Certain.
My throat tightens. I open my mouth to give him the safe version, the measured version, the version I've been giving myself for three days. It doesn't come.
"Aoife."
I look at this man who gave me away like currency. Who made a promise and broke it because circumstances changed, and there was no one left to hold him to it. Who is lying in a hospital bed right now because he chose the right side of a war, and it cost him.
"Yes," I say. Very quietly. "I think I have."
He nods once. His face does something complicated—relief and grief moving through it together, the look of a man who wanted this and knows what it took to get here.
"You have my blessing," he says. "For whatever that means to you now."
More than he knows. I don't say it.
"There's something I have to tell you," I say. "About Reilan."
The shift in him is immediate. He knows my voice well enough to hear what's underneath it before I've said anything. His face stills.
"Tell me."
I tell him. I keep it level. I give him what I know, what I saw, and what Reilan said and didn't say.
I watch my father's face go through things I have never seen on it before.
Disbelief first, moving fast into something harder, and then underneath that something old and raw and grieved that he can't quite keep from showing.
When I stop, the connection hums.
Dad's hand, the one I can see, has closed into a fist against the blanket. He doesn't speak for a long moment.
"How much does William have?"
"Enough to be dangerous. I don't know exactly what. He's been building it."
Silence.
"Dad." I wait until he looks at me. "I went to him. I asked him directly, and he denied it. He didn't stop denying it." I keep my voice steady. "I don't know what they're holding over him, but whatever it is, he isn't ready to let go of it. Not even for me."
My father looks past the screen for a moment. Somewhere I can't see.
"Keep him alive." His voice is rough. "Whatever the rest of it looks like. Keep him alive."
I nod.
He looks past the screen again. His fist still closed against the blanket. He opens his mouth and then closes it, like there's something he wants to say and can't find the shape of it yet.
"I'll call you tomorrow," he says finally.
The call ends.
The screen goes dark, and I sit with the laptop on my knees in the quiet, and I let myself feel the full weight of the last four days. Frank Murphy across the dinner table. The crack of my hand against Reilan's jaw. My father's face going gray as I told him about his son.
I think about what my father's face looked like when he couldn't finish his sentence. He's absorbing it still—his son, the hospital bed, what comes next. There's nothing tidy about any of it.
And William, somewhere in this house, who has been giving me the three days I asked for, watching the clock the same as I am.
I close the laptop. I stand up.
The three days are nearly up, and there are decisions that need to be made, and I'm the only person who can make them. I've been moving toward this since the hallway outside Reilan's door, and I'm done moving slowly.
I go to find William.