34. The Informant
Chapter thirty-four
The Informant
Renny
Séan O'Donnell has been coming to the house for three weeks to advise Lorcan on estate management. He's old guard. Sixty-something, with the weathered face of a man who's been in the family business for forty years. He takes tea in the library. He smells like pipe tobacco and whiskey.
He also, apparently, sells information to the Doyles.
I've been back at Blackrock House for two weeks when I find out about Séan O'Donnell.
I find out at 10 PM on a Tuesday when Lorcan comes to find me in the study. The room is quiet. The lamp is warm. I'm reading a paper on equine tendon repair because the distance of academia feels safer than looking at my own life right now.
He behind him.
"O'Donnell is gone," he says.
I look up. His face is completely blank. The voice is flat. Operative voice.
"What do you mean, gone?"
"I mean he was selling information to the Doyles about our movements. Shipment dates. Warehouse locations. Territory coverage. Dec traced the communications this morning."
My book closes without me remembering closing it. "What did you do?"
"What needed to be done."
"Lorcan—"
"Don't." He sits across from me. The distance between us is suddenly the size of a room. "Don't ask me to explain. Don't ask me to justify. He betrayed the family. The punishment was carried out."
The word "punishment" hangs in the air like something with weight.
"Where is he?" I ask.
"That's not your concern."
My hands are gripping the book. I force them to relax. "If he's dead—"
"Then he made the choice that led to death." Lorcan's eyes are empty. Finished. This is a conversation he's not interested in continuing, which means it will continue anyway because I'm not done.
"You executed someone without telling me. Without asking—"
"I'm not required to ask your permission to run my family."
"But I'm part of this family. You keep saying I'm part of it. You keep asking me to understand, to see, to accept. But you still make decisions and keep me in the dark and then present me with the consequences."
"Yes," he says flatly. "That's how this works. I make decisions. You adapt to them."
The words land like a slap.
I stand. I need to move, to walk, to do anything except sit here and feel the enormity of what's just happened. What's always happening. The constant, terrifying momentum of this world that's slowly drowning me while I pretend I'm learning to swim.
"I need to know," I tell him. "I need to know if he's alive or if he's dead. I need to know what 'punishment' means."
"No, you don't." Lorcan remains sitting. Completely still. "You need to understand that you can't know everything. You need to accept that some decisions are made by me alone, and you don't get access to the information."
"Like you didn't get access to information about your father?"
The words come out before I can stop them. Before I can filter them. Before I can remember that Orla warned me not to ask questions about Padraig.
Lorcan's jaw clenches. That's all. Just a small tightening at the hinges of his face. But it's enough to tell me I've hit something true.
"Don't," he says quietly.
"Orla said—"
"Orla doesn't know what she's talking about."
"She confirmed what I already suspected — that you've known the truth about how my father died since before I found those letters. She said—"
"I don't care what Orla said." He stands now, and something in his posture has changed. The carefully maintained distance has become a wall. "What happened to my father is closed. It's not relevant. And you don't get to use it as leverage in an argument about Séan O'Donnell."
"I'm not using it as leverage." My voice is rising. I hate that my voice is rising. "I'm asking you to help me understand the world I'm living in. I'm asking for basic information about the man I married. I'm asking—"
"You're asking me to compromise operational security to satisfy your emotional needs. That's not happening."
The words are cut from ice.
I stand very still. The book is still in my hands. The study is still warm. The rest of the house is still silent. And something inside me has just fractured—not broken, but fractured, like a stress line in a diamond that's been cut wrong.
"I went to a church on St Cillian's," I tell him.
"Did you know that? I started going after the first time I saw what your hands were capable of.
I sat in the back row and lit candles for the people hurt in that pub.
For Séan O'Donnell, if he's dead. For everyone I'm implicitly complicit in harming through the simple act of staying married to you. "
"Don't do that anymore," Lorcan says.
"Don't do what? Pray? Feel guilty? Try to maintain some connection to the woman I was before—"
"Don't go to that church. Don't light candles. Don't create a record of your presence somewhere that's not secured. Don't be reckless with your own security because you're having an existential crisis."
He's not angry. That's the worst part. He's not angry. He's concerned. He's thinking like an operational mind. He's already calculated the risk I've created and is assessing containment.
"I hate that you're always thinking like this," I tell him. "I hate that you can't just be a person. You're always the machine. Always calculating. Always making decisions that affect my life and expecting me to accept them because you're smarter than I am about violence."
"I don't think I'm smarter than you. I think I'm trained for a world you're just learning to navigate.
" He walks toward me. His hands are empty.
But there's something in the set of his shoulders that reads as dangerous, even in stillness.
"And I need you to understand something right now, while you're angry with me: when you put yourself at risk, you put me at risk.
When you go to a church and light candles, you create patterns that people can track.
And if people can track your patterns, they can use them. "
"Like they used Séan O'Donnell?"
"If he was useful to them before, he won't be useful to them now."
The coldness of it. The finality.
"Is he dead?" I ask directly.
"Yes."
The word sits in the room like a stone dropped in still water. The ripples move outward, touching everything.
I can't look at him. I'm afraid if I look at him, I'll see the man who made a phone call and decided that someone would stop breathing.
I'll see the machinery inside him that I've been slowly becoming compatible with, and I won't be able to pretend anymore that I'm anything except what he's making me.
"I'm going to bed," I say.
"Renny—"
"Don't. Just don't." I move toward the door. "I need to be alone."
He doesn't stop me. That's both the mercy and the problem. He's learned that I'm capable of making my own choices. That I don't want to be forced. That the seduction of this world works better if I'm allowed to walk into it willingly.
I climb the stairs alone.
The hallway outside the master bedroom is dark. The house is sleeping, and I'm not part of the sleep. I'm awake and walking and trying to figure out who I've become and whether it's reversible and whether I even want it to be.
I push open the door to the kitchen instead.
The kitchen is empty. Mrs. Fahey isn't there. It's Tuesday night—it's her night off. This is the safe space, the place where I come when the house feels like a trap. Where Mrs. Fahey makes tea and doesn't ask questions and lets me pretend that the life I'm living makes sense.
The kitchen is empty.
I sit at the table and I don't turn on the lights.
I sit in the dark and I let myself understand something I've been avoiding: this is the cost Orla was telling me about.
This moment. This understanding that the man I married is capable of ending a human life and then coming to me and asking me to be strategic about my church attendance because he wants to protect me.
That's the cost.
The loss of the person you were. The acceptance of what you're becoming. The moment where you realize that complicity isn't passive. It's active. It's a choice you make every time you stay.
I think about Séan O'Donnell. Sixty something. Pipe tobacco smell. The way he'd ask about my work with gentle curiosity. The way Mrs. Fahey made him biscuits. The way his hands shook slightly when he held his teacup.
He's gone now.
He made a choice, and the choice had a price, and Lorcan collected the price with the efficiency of someone who was trained to it.
The problem is that Lorcan is also right.
Séan knew the rules. He understood the consequences.
He accepted the money and accepted the risk and now he's accepted the outcome.
But knowing that doesn't make it smaller.
I think about my hands. I think about the woman who could order violence if it meant protecting someone else. I think about how that woman is already living inside my skin, waiting for the moment when the choice becomes clear enough to stop refusing.
Outside, Dublin is sleeping. The stone is cool under my palms. The kitchen smells like the bread Mrs. Fahey made yesterday, yeast and salt and time. Inside, I am alone in an empty kitchen, and the woman I was is becoming unrecognizable.
I'm not sure which one of us is the real me anymore.
Maybe they both are. Maybe that's the answer Orla couldn't quite articulate.
Maybe we're all just some version of both, and staying means accepting that the woman I am now will do things the woman I was would never forgive. Maybe complicity and choice are the same thing when you're standing inside the machinery long enough.
The question is whether forgiveness is even possible when you're the one who has to forgive yourself.
And the terrible answer is that I'm not sure I want forgiveness anymore. I'm not sure I want to be forgiven for becoming useful. For learning. For understanding that violence has logic and logic can be mastered and mastery is power.
That's what terrifies me most. Not that I might become this.
But that I might already be becoming it.
That every day I stay, I consent a little more.
That every secret I keep, I become a little more complicit.
That every time I look at Lorcan and don't ask questions, I'm building the cage around myself brick by brick.
And worst of all, I'm not sure anymore if I want to escape.