Chapter 22
Irish
I woke before dawn because apparently returning to County Clare had convinced my body that fifteen years of distance meant nothing to its memory.
For several seconds I lay staring at the unfamiliar ceiling of Brigid's guest room while the village remained quiet beyond the window, listening to the soft rattle of rain against the glass and trying to remember why the room smelled faintly of old timber, laundry soap, and peat smoke.
Then everything returned at once: the farmhouse, Brigid, the pub, Skye sitting beside me while stories I'd spent years refusing to remember turned my family back into people instead of bodies, and the sound of my first name crossing a table before I had been ready to hear it.
Rory. I had spent so long training myself not to answer to it that I should have been able to dismiss the name as easily as I dismissed everything else I didn't want to touch, yet Brigid had spoken it once and somehow dragged an entire life into the room with her.
Sleep wasn't coming back, so I got dressed and went downstairs.
The Blackthorn was dark except for the low lights Brigid left burning behind the bar.
Chairs sat upside down on half the tables, the fire had burned down to glowing embers, and the place smelled different without people in it, less like beer and food and more like polished wood and the ghosts of a thousand conversations.
I found coffee in the kitchen because Brigid had apparently decided a man couldn't be trusted to operate a kettle after fifteen years in America and had left everything prepared beside a note informing me that if I woke her before seven, she'd finish what the ram had started.
I almost laughed despite myself, though the sound never quite made it out.
The back door opened onto a narrow courtyard where rain-dark stone walls enclosed bins, stacked kegs, and an old wooden bench beneath a slate overhang.
I took the coffee outside and sat, letting the cold work through the lingering restlessness while my phone connected to the encrypted messages Cipher had sent overnight.
There were three.
The first confirmed that the Order properties around Clare were active but quiet. The second contained additional records tied to Saint Brigid's Residential Trust, although the address associated with the trust remained deliberately vague. The third was from Toxic.
You home?
I stared at the question longer than necessary.
Then typed:
In Clare.
The reply came less than a minute later despite the time difference.
Didn't ask where you were.
I exhaled.
That bastard had always been good at finding the place beneath an answer.
Not yet.
Three dots appeared.
Then:
Fair. Don't disappear into it.
I didn't answer because I wasn't sure what promise I could make that wouldn't be a lie.
The back door opened before I finished the coffee, and Skye stepped outside wearing dark trousers, a thick jumper, and the expression of a woman who had been awake long enough to notice I was missing but had decided not to announce that fact as concern.
"Do you people never sleep?"
"Do Scottish women always ask questions before coffee?"
"Only when Irish bikers leave their doors open and vanish before dawn."
I looked at her.
She caught the reaction immediately.
"Your door was open," she clarified. "I wasn't checking whether you were breathing."
"Comforting."
"I assumed Brigid would tell me if you died."
"She'd probably wait until after breakfast."
"Depends how inconvenient your death was."
A smile pulled at my mouth despite myself.
Skye glanced toward the bench.
"Am I interrupting?"
"No."
She sat beside me, not close enough to touch but close enough that the cold didn't seem as sharp as it had five minutes earlier.
"What did Cipher find?"
I handed her the phone.
She read the messages without asking why Toxic's question had bothered me.
"Saint Brigid's is still active."
"Aye."
"No address?"
"Not one we can trust yet."
"Could be a property name rather than an organization."
"That's what Cipher thinks."
Skye looked toward the wet courtyard. "Isla said staff used it like both."
"Aye."
"We'll figure it out."
There was no dramatic promise in the words, only certainty rooted in the fact that every building we'd confronted so far had eventually told her what it was hiding.
I believed her more than I should have.
Brigid found us twenty minutes later and accused me of corrupting her guest with American coffee before forcing both of us back inside for breakfast. By eight, Trigger had messaged that the rest of the team would remain at Maverick's location until Cipher finished narrowing the Saint Brigid's records, which left us with several hours before anything operational required our attention.
I should have used the time to study routes, call Toxic, or go somewhere the village couldn't keep putting pieces of my past in front of Skye.
Instead, Brigid handed me a list.
I stared at the paper.
"What the hell is this?"
"Things I need from the chemist."
"I'm not your delivery boy."
"You're staying free."
"I'm thirty-eight."
"And still argumentative."
Skye looked over my shoulder. "Tea. Milk. Paracetamol. Batteries. Very dangerous assignment."
I turned the paper toward her. "You encourage her once and she thinks she owns us."
"She owned you before I arrived."
Brigid pointed at Skye. "See why I like her?"
I muttered something unfit for breakfast and took the list.
The rain had eased to mist by the time we stepped outside.
The village looked different in the morning, less nostalgic than it had yesterday and more like somewhere ordinary people lived.
Vans unloaded behind shops. A man swept water from the pavement outside the bakery.
Schoolchildren in uniforms moved past in small groups while their parents hurried them along, and somewhere behind the church a dog barked with enough determination to suggest it had discovered a threat to national security.
Skye walked beside me without pretending not to notice the number of people who recognized me.
Some nodded as we passed, a few stopped outright, and most looked twice before continuing whatever they had been doing.
Every reaction reinforced what had unsettled me the night before.
I'd spent fifteen years believing I had severed myself cleanly enough that returning would mean entering as a stranger.
Instead, people remembered. Not enough to know the man I'd become, but enough to recognize something of the boy who had left.
We had nearly reached the chemist when Skye stopped beside a shop window.
"What?"
She didn't answer immediately.
Her attention had shifted across the street.
I followed it.
A woman stood near the bakery pushing a dark blue pram while trying to pull a rain cover over it with one hand and hold a paper bag beneath her opposite arm.
Her hair was darker than I remembered, cut shorter now, and she wore a wool coat the color of moss over jeans and boots.
Fifteen years had changed her face in subtle ways, softening one line while adding another, but recognition hit before she ever looked up.
Niamh. Recognition hit hard enough that my body went completely still, and when Skye turned toward me, I had no idea what she saw because I wasn't entirely certain what I felt myself.
There had been a time when I knew Niamh Kelly's routines better than my own.
I knew how she drank tea, which songs she hated, the exact expression she'd make whenever Da started talking politics, and the way she tucked cold hands beneath the back of my shirt just to make me swear.
She had once known Rory O'Brien well enough to see anger before I admitted I was angry and grief before I understood I was grieving.
Then I'd taken the worst night of my life and used it like a blade, cutting through everyone who tried to stand close enough to help.
Including her.
Niamh looked up.
The paper bag nearly slipped from her arm.
For one suspended second the entire street seemed to disappear around us.
Her lips parted.
"Rory?"
The name hit differently coming from her. Brigid had spoken Rory like a memory she had accidentally uncovered, but Niamh spoke it with immediate recognition, as though fifteen years had done nothing to change who she saw standing across the road.
I crossed the road before I decided to.
Skye followed several paces behind, leaving me the space without being asked.
Niamh still hadn't moved.
"Hi," I said.
Of every sentence I could have chosen after fifteen years, that was apparently the best my brain could produce.
Her eyes searched my face.
"You're here."
"Aye."
"Brigid said—" She stopped and laughed softly, shaking her head. "No, actually, Brigid said nothing, which should've warned me something was happening because she's never been quiet in her life."
"She hasn't improved."
"No."
Her smile appeared then, tentative but real, and something in my chest loosened.
The pram made a small noise.
I looked down.
A baby stared back at me from beneath a knitted cream hat, wide blue-gray eyes fixed on my face with the solemn suspicion of someone who had never seen a biker before.
Niamh followed my gaze.
"This is Orla."
The name struck harder than I expected.
"She's yours?"
The instant the question left my mouth, I realized how stupid it sounded.
Niamh's smile widened.
"That tends to be how babies in my pram work."
Skye made a quiet sound behind me that might have been a laugh.
I looked at the baby again.
Orla kicked once beneath the blanket.
"She's beautiful."
"Thank you."
"How old?"
"Seven months."
I swallowed around something unexpected.
"Congratulations."
And I meant it.