Epilogue II #2
Father Eamon sends a message through Mrs. Fahey, a parishioner needs legal advice, and the advice they need is the kind that lives in the grey spaces between statute and necessity.
The kind that Padraig used to provide from this desk, with the particular generosity of a man who understood that community loyalty was built on a thousand small interventions, not grand gestures.
I tell Mrs. Fahey to tell him I'll handle it.
She nods with the specific satisfaction of a woman who's watched the household shift and has decided the shift is good.
The community that used to be Padraig's is becoming mine. Not because I'm owed it. Because I'm earning it, one parishioner's problem, one pub renovation, one quiet act of provision at a time.
The study door opens. Lorcan doesn't ask permission. He doesn't knock. He just appears in the doorway like he's been summoned, though I haven't called for him. Maybe he has intuition about when I've been gone. Maybe he was just restless.
He's quiet in the way he's learned to be quiet. Not the absence of sound. The presence of intention. Every motion deliberate. His hair is longer than it was. He's let it grow. It makes him look younger, which isn't really accurate. It just makes him look different.
"Galway?" he asks.
"Galway," I confirm.
He doesn't move further into the room. He leans against the doorframe like he's giving me the option to ask him to come closer or to maintain distance. The courtesy is still new. Still striking every time he does it.
"How was it?"
"It was a corpse," I say. "I needed to see that I wasn't dead. I needed to know that the choice I made was actually a choice and not a failure to escape."
He absorbs this. He's learned to listen instead of solve. Instead of manage. Instead of translate my words into strategic implications. Sometimes I'm just talking. Sometimes I'm just trying to make sense of what I've become.
"And did you?" he asks. "Know?"
"Yes. The choice was real. The escape would have been surrender. Staying here is power."
The smile he gives me is small. Satisfied. Not possessive. Not territorial. Just recognition that I've arrived at the same conclusion he arrived at months ago. That power, when shared with someone who understands its weight, is better than safety ever was.
"The network's moving," I tell him. "Cork is either opportunity or threat. I can't read it yet. The Dublin side is solid. Doyle's still contained. We bought another warehouse. The money is clean enough."
"And the work?"
The work. The killing and the planning and the careful architecture of crime and legitimate business that Padraig built and I'm rebuilding into something with different bones.
"The work is what it is," I say. "It's necessary. It's ugly. It's the thing I chose when I chose to stay."
He steps into the room. Just a step. Just enough that he's not in the doorway anymore. He's in the space where I am. Where the desk is. Where Padraig's ghost is trying to decide whether to haunt me or accept that I've rewritten the rules.
"I'm proud of you," Lorcan says. "That's a useless thing to say. It's also true."
The words land in the study with the weight of something he's been holding.
Pride from Lorcan is not the easy sentiment of a man who distributes approval as currency.
It's the hard-won assessment of a strategist who measures outcomes and has measured mine and found them sufficient.
More than sufficient. The word proud from his mouth costs him something, the admission that the woman he married as an operational asset has become something he admires, and that the admiration has nothing to do with the arrangement and everything to do with the person.
I reach out and touch his hand. The scar on his knuckles is still there.
It will always be there. The physical evidence of violence he committed.
The mark of who he was. I trace it with my thumb, the same gesture I've made a hundred times now, the mapping of damage that has become its own form of tenderness, the way a physician's hands learn to read the history written in scar tissue.
"I was afraid," I tell him, "that Galway was the real me. That Dublin was a performance I was forcing myself into."
"And?"
"And I was wrong. Galway was who I could have been. Dublin is who I actually am. They're different things. It took six months and a cliff in Galway to know that."
He doesn't kiss me. He doesn't make a gesture of romantic vindication. He just stands there, present, allowing me to have this realization. Allowing me to be the person I'm becoming instead of the person I might have been.
The study is quiet except for the sound of the rain starting outside. There's always rain in Dublin. There's always this quality of witness. The city knows what we're building here. It knows what we're becoming. It rains on it anyway.
I stand. I move to the door. I turn the lock from the inside. The click is small but definite. The door is sealed. The study is ours. The house is ours. The network is mine. The choice is real.
Lorcan is still watching me. Understanding, finally, what the lock means. Not barrier. Not imprisonment. Autonomy. Deliberate closure. A woman locking the world out instead of locking herself in.
"Mrs. Fahey made dinner," he says.
"Tell her we'll eat in an hour," I reply. "I need to finish the briefing."
But I don't look back at the desk. I look at Lorcan. At the doorway. At the woman I've become who can make a choice as small as locking a door and have it mean everything.
We're going to stay here. In this house.
In this network. In this careful architecture of power and partnership that we're building one day at a time.
The building is slow. Some mornings I wake before dawn and stand at the bay window in our bedroom, our bedroom, the pronoun no longer contested, no longer a territorial claim but a statement of shared geography, and watch the water move in the dark.
Dublin Bay at four in the morning has a particular quality of honesty.
The city is asleep. The pretences are suspended.
The water doesn't know what I am. It doesn't care about the council meetings or the Doyle negotiations or the hundred small violences that keep the machine running.
It just moves. Back and forth. The oldest rhythm in the world, and the one that still makes me feel like the woman who used to stand at the Galway shore and think about nothing more complicated than the next surgery, the next patient, the next small act of healing.
That woman is still in here. She's not gone.
She's just learned that healing takes different forms, that sometimes the treatment is a scalpel and sometimes it's a signature on a document that moves power from one column to another.
That sometimes the patient is a horse with a broken leg and sometimes the patient is an organisation that's been running on fear for two generations and needs someone to show it what it looks like to run on something else.
Tomorrow I'll go back to the work. I'll make decisions that ripple through Dublin. I'll maintain the balance between mercy and violence. I'll be the rí-bhean that the city has decided I am.
But tonight, I lock the door. I choose the inside. I choose him. I choose the life I'm building instead of the life I could have fled toward.
That's the real power. Not the territory. Not the network. The choice to stay.
THE END
Thank you for surviving Blackrock House with Renny — the blood oath, the locked doors, the man who claimed her before he earned her.
But the crown never stops drawing blood.
Two years on, an old enemy stirs and Lorcan answers to a queen now.
Click here —or scan the QR code below— to unlock the bonus chapter and watch the devil worship his wife.
Love,
Emma Harris
P.S. If you’re into dangerous men and wickedly hot Reverse Harem stories, you’ll love Claimed by the Mafia Bosses.
This book is a special one—co-written by me and my amazing friend, Rachael Theron!
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