Chapter 27 #3
"Trouble when he followed those other two. But good."
"Irish loved him."
"Rory loved all of them."
Her hands tightened around the steering wheel.
"That's why he ran."
I didn't correct the name.
Coming from Brigid, it belonged there.
"He thought leaving made everyone safer."
"Aye."
Brigid parked behind the pub.
"His mother used to say that boy could turn guilt into a profession."
A faint smile touched my mouth.
"That sounds familiar."
"Don't let him."
I looked at her.
She finally turned toward me.
"Don't let him make loving you another reason to punish himself."
The words struck deeper than I expected.
I didn't ask how much she had noticed.
Brigid Kelleher seemed to notice everything eventually.
"I can't make that decision for him."
Her expression softened.
"Good answer."
We entered through the rear door and found Irish already waiting near the cellar stairs with Eamon.
His gaze found mine immediately, passing over neither Brigid nor the doorway before settling on me with an instinctive certainty that sent something warm and dangerous moving beneath my ribs.
I didn't have time to examine what that reaction meant, particularly when every new discovery seemed to be pulling us deeper into Declan's secrets, but I couldn't quite pretend I hadn't felt it either.
The cellar lay beneath the oldest part of The Blackthorn, accessed by narrow stone stairs polished smooth by generations of boots.
Brigid switched on a line of modern lights, revealing barrel racks, storage shelves, old masonry, and a rear wall so thick I understood immediately why Declan would have chosen it.
"Third bay," she said.
We counted the bays until we reached the third.
Eamon crouched beside the wall.
"Second stone."
There were several ways to interpret Declan's instruction because the second stone could have meant the second from the floor, the corner, or the edge of the bay, and for several seconds I studied the masonry without knowing which reference point he had intended.
Then the mortar caught my attention. One rectangular stone near knee height had a joint that differed only slightly from the surrounding work, not newer enough to be obvious but cleaner and more carefully finished than the stones beside it.
I crouched next to Eamon and pointed toward it. "That one."
Irish stood behind us.
"You sure?"
"No."
Eamon smiled faintly.
"Definitely spending too much time with her."
Irish muttered something.
I traced the mortar.
"There's a gap behind it."
Eamon found an old tool from Brigid's repair shelf and worked gently around the edge. The stone shifted after less than a minute.
Irish stopped breathing.
Eamon pulled it free.
Behind the wall sat a narrow metal box wrapped in deteriorating oilcloth.
Nobody moved.
For fifteen years, people had walked above this cellar drinking, laughing, celebrating birthdays, mourning funerals, and complaining about weather while a dead man's evidence waited inside a wall beneath their feet.
Eamon looked at Irish.
"Yours."
Irish crouched beside the opening, and his hands hesitated over the box before finally settling around it and pulling it free.
The deteriorating oilcloth crumbled slightly beneath his fingers, exposing a dull metal document case with rust beginning around one hinge.
If we were right, this was Finn's packet, or at least the evidence Declan had trusted his youngest son to preserve if anything happened to him—another layer of insurance against the silence Harrow's people had tried to impose on the O'Brien family.
Irish held the case against his knees for several seconds before looking toward me. "Back to the house."
I nodded, and nobody suggested opening it in the cellar, not even Brigid.
Whatever waited inside had remained hidden for fifteen years; another short drive wasn't going to change that.
We had barely started climbing the stairs when my phone vibrated with a message from Hawkeye, and the photograph that filled the screen immediately shifted my attention from the past back to the danger still moving around us.
Saint Brigid's appeared through long-range glass, the chapel standing beyond a black SUV while Owen Vale waited beside it.
Behind him, two women dressed in gray clothing were being moved toward a van.
My stomach tightened as I turned the phone toward Irish, and whatever emotion Finn's case had pulled across his face disappeared beneath something much colder as he studied the image.
The grief was still there, along with the son, brother, and man who had finally allowed himself to return home, but the person studying Owen Vale through Hawkeye's photograph was unmistakably Irish—quiet, controlled, and dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with losing control.
"Call Trigger," he said.
I was already doing it.
Whatever Declan had hidden in the wall beneath The Blackthorn had survived fifteen years.
The people inside Saint Brigid's might not have fifteen hours.