Chapter 24 #2
"He'd fought. I could tell that much. Furniture was overturned. Papers everywhere. The desk drawers had been pulled open. Whoever came here wasn't only killing people."
"They were searching."
"Aye."
That was the first detail I had never understood.
Not until now.
"The police said robbery, retaliation, maybe something connected to Da's work, but there was no clean answer.
Nothing valuable was gone. No arrests. No witnesses who knew anything useful.
They eventually treated it like one of those crimes everyone promises they'll keep working while the file gets thinner and the years get longer. "
"And you?"
I laughed without humor.
"I made sure they didn't need to find another explanation."
Skye's expression tightened.
"I'd left after an argument. Everyone knew it.
Niamh knew. Eamon knew. Brigid knew. I spent the entire funeral thinking the same thing over and over: if I'd stayed, maybe I would've heard someone arrive.
Maybe Da wouldn't have been alone when it started.
Maybe I could've gotten Finn out. Maybe Mam wouldn't have walked into the kitchen because I would've been there first."
"You might have died too."
I looked at her.
"That's what everyone said."
"Because it's true."
"You don't know that."
"Neither do you."
The answer was quiet, not confrontational, but it cut cleanly through the argument I'd been having with myself for fifteen years.
I turned away.
"I wasn't there."
"No."
"If I had been—"
"You don't know what would've happened."
"I should've been there."
"Callum."
"I left them."
"You left after an argument."
"I didn't answer Mam's call."
"You were angry."
"I ignored Maeve."
"You were twenty-three."
"I came home after they were dead."
Skye crossed the remaining distance between us.
"You didn't kill them by leaving."
The sentence hit hard enough that my chest tightened.
"I wasn't there."
"That isn't the same thing."
"It felt the same."
"I know."
"No, you don't."
The words came sharper than I intended. She didn't flinch.
"No," she said. "I don't know what it feels like to walk into your childhood home and find your entire family gone.
I don't know what it feels like to spend fifteen years replaying one night because you've convinced yourself that choosing differently would've given you control over people who came here intending to hurt them.
But I do know what it feels like to take someone else's decision and turn it into your own failure. "
I thought immediately of Isla and Croft House, of the guilt Skye had carried because she believed she should have recognized the structural changes sooner. She understood enough of what blame could do to someone, perhaps more than I wanted her to.
"I told you before that the people who took Isla were responsible for what happened to her," I said.
"Aye."
"You believed me."
"Eventually."
"Then why is this different?"
"Because this is me."
Her expression softened in a way that hurt.
"Exactly."
I looked away.
Skye lifted one hand but stopped before touching me.
"Can I?"
I stared at her fingers before nodding.
Her palm settled against my jaw, warm and careful against skin that suddenly seemed too sensitive to the tenderness of her touch.
I closed my eyes for half a second because the tenderness was worse than anger would have been.
"Look at me."
I did.
Her thumb moved slowly along my beard.
Then she said the name she had promised not to use until I gave her something more.
"Look at me, Rory."
Everything inside me stopped.
There was no surprise or panic this time, and none of the anger I had expected to feel at hearing someone reach into the life I'd buried and pull that name back into the light.
Coming from Skye, it didn't sound like Brigid remembering a boy or Niamh recognizing someone she had once loved.
It sounded like a choice. She knew Irish.
She knew Callum. Now she was looking directly at the part of me I'd spent fifteen years believing had died in this house, and she wasn't turning away.
My hand closed around her wrist, not because I wanted to remove her touch but because I suddenly needed to keep it exactly where it was.
"Say it again."
Her eyes searched mine.
"Rory."
The name broke something open that I had spent too long mistaking for strength.
I leaned into her palm almost imperceptibly, but the movement was enough for both of us to understand what I was allowing.
"I should've come home sooner."
"Maybe."
The answer surprised me.
I stared at her.
She didn't soften it into a lie.
"Maybe you should've come back to Brigid and Eamon and Niamh sooner. Maybe you should've answered calls. Maybe you should've let people love you when you were convinced loving you meant standing too close to death. But none of that means you caused what happened here."
My throat tightened.
"You don't make it easy."
"You don't need easy."
"What do I need?"
Her gaze held mine.
"To stop punishing a twenty-three-year-old man for surviving something he couldn't control."
The kitchen blurred.
I kissed her before I could decide whether that was wise.
It wasn't like the first kiss in the SUV, fueled by fear and anger until neither of us could tell where one ended and the other began.
It wasn't like the churchyard either, slow and deliberate because we'd finally stopped pretending attraction was an accident.
This kiss started with grief and turned into something more dangerous because Skye didn't try to erase what I had told her.
She didn't kiss me like she could heal me or make the past disappear.
She simply met me where I was, her hand still against my face while mine slid around her waist and pulled her closer.
I broke the kiss first and then moved so that our foreheads touched while my eyes remained closed.
"Skye."
"I know."
"You don't."
Her fingers slid into the hair at the back of my neck.
"Then tell me."
I forced myself to look at her.
"I don't want this because I'm falling apart."
"Good."
The answer caught me and her expression remained steady.
"Neither do I."
I stared at her.
"I want you," she said quietly. "I've wanted you since before either of us was sensible enough to admit it. What you told me tonight doesn't create that, and I'm not going to let you use grief as an excuse to pretend it does."
Despite everything, a laugh escaped me.
"Jesus Christ."
"What?"
"You're arguing with me about why you should be allowed to sleep with me."
"I'm clarifying."
"Of course you are."
Her mouth curved.
Then the humor softened.
"If you don't want this tonight, tell me."
I studied her face and saw that there was no demand reflected towards me.
No expectation that intimacy was owed because she'd listened to my confession or because we had crossed some emotional line neither of us could uncross.
I knew that I could say no and she would understand.
That knowledge was what made the answer easy.
"I want you."
Skye's breath changed.
"Are you sure?"
"Aye."
"Then stop looking at me like you're about to conduct a risk assessment."
"I conduct excellent risk assessments."
"You kissed me in an SUV full of bikers."
"Temporary lapse."
"Twice seems like a pattern."
I kissed her again before she could keep talking.
Her laugh disappeared against my mouth, and for a while the farmhouse, the investigation, Harrow, and every question waiting behind Da's study door moved beyond the edges of the room.
Skye's arms came around my shoulders, and I pulled her closer until the warmth of her body pressed through layers of clothing I suddenly resented.
Even then there was no hurry. I had spent too many years treating anything I wanted badly enough as something that could be taken, and tonight I didn't want fear deciding the pace.
My mouth moved from hers to the line of her jaw.
Skye exhaled softly.
"Bedroom?"
The question pulled me back and I looked up the stairs with the realization that my old room waited above us with every memory still attached to it.
"No."
She studied me.
I expected disappointment.
Instead, she asked, "The guest room at The Blackthorn?"
I almost said yes.
Then I looked through the kitchen toward the sitting room, the hall, the staircase, and the house I had spent fifteen years preserving while refusing to live inside it.
Something in me settled.
"Upstairs."
Her eyebrows lifted slightly.
"You sure?"
"No."
The honesty made her smile.
"But I want to be."
She took my hand without pulling or trying to decide the next step for me, simply waiting until I tightened my fingers around hers and led her upstairs.
Every step should have felt like walking deeper into the worst memory of my life.
Instead, Skye's hand remained in mine, warm and real, while the old staircase creaked beneath our feet and the photographs along the wall watched me return to a part of the house I hadn't been able to enter hours earlier.
My bedroom was smaller than I remembered.
That shouldn't have surprised me. Everything from childhood shrank when you returned as an adult.
The management company had covered the bed and furniture, but enough remained unchanged that I recognized the marks on the wardrobe where Finn and I had once thrown darts despite being explicitly forbidden.
An old shelf leaned slightly near the window.
The faded paint along one wall still showed where I'd hung posters Mam hated.
Skye stood just inside the doorway.
"You okay?"
I looked around before my eyes found her again.
"Aye."
She came closer slowly one step at a time.
I removed the dust sheet from the bed and laughed when it released enough dust to make both of us cough.
Skye covered her mouth.
"Very seductive."
"Shut up."
"Historic atmosphere."
"You're ruining it."
"You're the one who hasn't opened a window in fifteen years."
I kissed her because laughing inside that room felt almost as impossible as wanting her there, and somehow she had made both happen.