17. Sienna
SIENNA
I heard the whole thing go smooth from ninety miles away, a dead headset warm against my ear, and smooth was how I knew it had gone wrong.
I’m the one who taught the rest of them what smooth means.
A meet that runs clean as a sanded board is a meet somebody sanded flat ahead of you.
So I sat in the clean kitchen with my stomach going cold, thinking, he let us have that, he let us have that, why did he let us have that, and that was the exact moment the landline rang.
The landline. The house phone at Dunraven that rang maybe twice a year, that wasn’t on any of our op channels, that no one alive was supposed to have the number to.
It rang in the empty hall and I felt every hair on my body stand up because I knew, the way you know a voice on the stairs in the dark, before I’d crossed the room, before I’d lifted it, before he said a single word.
“Hello, princess.”
The word went through me like cold water.
Nobody had called me that since I was a girl except in my worst dreams, and here it was in my ear on a line that shouldn’t ring, in a voice I’d have known in my grave, and my whole body did the thing bodies do when the past reaches through a phone and puts its hand on the back of your neck.
I did not sit down. I made myself stand very still in the clean kitchen with the dead headset warm on the counter beside me and my heart going hard enough to hear, and I did the only thing there was to do, which was breathe, and listen, and let the strategist come up out of the shock and take the wheel, because whatever this call was, it was information, and I have never once in my life been able to afford to waste information, not even information that arrives wearing the voice of the man who raised and ruined me.
Fifteen years. I had built a whole life out of the absence of that voice and here it was in my ear, warm as a hearth, the voice that read me bedtime stories and taught me to shuffle a deck and wept, I’d have sworn it on my life, wept at my family’s graves.
Uncle Eamon. The kindest man I ever knew. The hand that opened the doors.
I didn’t break. I’d had practice. I put my palm flat on the cold hall table, the anchor, and I made my voice as warm as his.
“Uncle Eamon. You kept us busy in Ennis just to get me alone on the phone. That’s a lot of theater for a chat.”
A soft sound, almost a laugh, almost proud.
“You always did see the misdirection a beat too fast. I could never get a card past you twice.” A pause, and the warmth in it made it worse.
“I wanted to tell you I’m pleased. About the engagement.
I know how that sounds, coming from me, but I am.
You’ve no idea how long I’ve wanted to see you settled, Sienna. Safe. Where you belong.”
There it was. Naked, almost gentle, the steering.
He wanted the wedding. Hearing him say he was pleased turned my stomach precisely because it confirmed everything, that the realest thing I had was the exact thing he’d built me toward, that walking down that aisle was walking his card.
And I let none of it into my voice, because I’d decided already, on the cliff, in the kitchen, that I’d play his card on purpose with my eyes open, and a woman who’s chosen her trap doesn’t flinch when the trapper applauds.
“You didn’t burn your way into my family and wait all this time to congratulate me on a ring,” I said. “Say the real thing, Eamon. You taught me not to waste a man’s time, even an enemy’s.”
“No.” The warmth thinned, and under it I heard something I didn’t expect, something tired. “No, you’re right. The real thing.” A breath. “I wanted you to hear, from me, before you heard it any other way, that I know where Kira Nolan is.”
The floor went out from under me.
Kira. My Kira, who poured pints and rolled her eyes at the regulars and took the keys to my bar and the raise I gave her and the lawyer’s number I left like a phone number was a wall.
Kira, who thought I’d gone to mind a sick aunt.
Kira, who’d never once in her life done anything but be kind to a stranger who turned out to be a ghost with a price on her.
“She’s well,” Eamon said, and the gentleness was the cruelest thing I have ever heard.
“I want you to know that. She’s perfectly well, going to work, locking up at two, walking the same six blocks home she always walks.
I’ve simply made sure someone walks them near her.
That’s all. A courtesy. The world is a dangerous place for a young woman alone, and you can’t be there to mind her anymore, so. ”
“Don’t.” It came out before I could armor it. The one crack. “Eamon. She’s nothing to this. She’s a girl who pulled pints for a woman who lied to her. Whatever you think I owe, she doesn’t owe it.”
“I know.” And here is the thing, the thing I turned over for days after, the thing that changed the shape of the whole war.
He said I know and his voice broke on it.
Not theater. I know his theater, I was raised inside his theater, and this was the thing underneath it, a man who sounded, for one unguarded second, like he hated his own mouth.
“I know she’s nothing to it. That’s rather the point of her, isn’t it.
That’s how it’s done. You don’t threaten the soldier.
You threaten the girl who pours the pints, because the soldier will burn the world to keep the girl safe and call it love while she does exactly as she’s told.
” A pause. “I’m not telling you this to be cruel, Sienna.
I’m telling you because I would give a great deal not to have to, and I am not, it turns out, a man who gets to keep what he’d give a great deal for.
Marry your Kerrigan. Be quick about it. And Kira walks her six blocks home for the rest of a long and boring life.
That’s all I want. I promise you that’s all I want. ”
I heard it. God help me, I heard it, the way you only hear a thing when the man saying it has trained your ear his whole life.
All I want. As though there were a wanting in this that wasn’t his.
As though somewhere behind the kind terrible voice there was another hand, and Eamon Brennan, who I had spent half my life believing was the top of it, the architect, the spider in the middle of the web, had just told me without telling me that he was a thread in someone else’s.
“Who are you afraid of,” I said quietly. “You’re the most frightening man I’ve ever known, Eamon, and you’re on a phone in the dark telling me what someone else wants and calling it yours. Who’s got their hand on you.”
Silence. A long one. The sea, far off, through the old hall window.
“Get married, princess,” Eamon said finally, and the warmth was back, sealed over whatever had cracked, and the seal was its own answer.
“It’s the only move on the board that keeps everyone you love walking home.
You were always best when you played the hand you were dealt and let the other fellow think it was his idea.
” A pause. “I taught you that. I’m so sorry I taught you that. Be well.”
The line went dead.
I stood in the cold hall with the dead phone in my hand and my palm flat on the table and I did not break, because there were eyes in this house and a man I loved driving home from Ennis with a clean thread and two others who needed me standing when they walked in.
I held myself in the room the way my father taught me and my mother taught me and, God help me, the way Eamon taught me, and I let exactly two facts settle into the cold part where I keep the things that are going to cost.
Kira was a hostage now. Alive, walking, watched. A leash with a girl on the end of it.
And the man holding the other end of my whole life was holding the other end of his.
There was someone above Eamon. I’d heard the leash creak. And whoever it was had just made one mistake, the only mistake a patient man ever makes, which is that he’d let me hear, in the voice of the person who taught me everything, exactly how it feels to be forced to play a card you hate.
I knew that feeling better than anyone alive.
And I was going to teach it back.