21. Tiernan
TIERNAN
The house changed the morning we left for Galway.
That wasn't unusual. The good houses did it, the ones lived in long enough to have a mood.
The Kerrigan estate had held a particular kind of quiet the whole time Sienna was under its roof.
A settling quiet. The sound of four people slowly deciding to trust the same air.
I liked it more than I wanted to look at directly, because liking a thing had a way of making it matter, and things that mattered had a way of getting taken.
That morning the quiet had teeth in it.
I felt it before I hit the bottom of the stairs.
The house had gone operational overnight, the way it did maybe twice a year, when the business stopped being phone calls and ledgers and turned into something with a body count attached.
You could smell it. Gun oil and coffee and the ozone tang of men who'd stopped sleeping and started planning.
Cormac was in the kitchen when I came in, which was the first sign.
Cormac did not sit in the kitchen. Every man in this house kept to his own den, Ronan to his study, Cormac to the dining room and its long table covered in everything he'd pulled apart for a week.
I was the one without a fixed room, because my work moved between them, the holding of the threads, and you can't hold threads sitting still.
But there he was at the counter with three handguns broken down on a folded towel, cleaning each piece with the slow indifferent care of a man doing something his hands could do without his head.
"You're off your patch," I said.
"I'm aware."
"There's eggs if you want them."
"I don't."
I made them anyway. Nobody in this house turned down my eggs and meant it, Cormac least of all, though he'd go to the grave before he'd say so.
Six eggs, the good butter, the heel of yesterday's bread going crisp in the pan, because waste was a sin my mother beat out of me before I was tall enough to reach the hob.
I cooked because it was four hours to Galway and nobody in this house was going to eat once we were moving, and a man who didn't eat made worse decisions than a man who did.
I'd watched that truth play out enough times to treat it like scripture.
Cormac reassembled the first gun without watching his hands do it. I'd known him twenty years and it still unsettled me a little, the way his hands knew machinery the way mine knew a room full of people.
"How bad," I said. Not really a question.
"Don't know yet." He set the gun down and started on the second. "That's the problem."
That was the problem. We'd spent a week learning that someone had been watching the estate since before Sienna arrived.
That they'd likely followed me back from Chicago, which was a thing I carried around in my chest like a swallowed stone and would keep carrying until I did something about it.
And the one move that could change the shape of all of it, the original records her father buried with a Galway solicitor a lifetime ago, was also the one that put her back in the open where whoever was watching could get a clean look.
We were going to walk her toward the exact people who wanted her dead, because it was the only way to find out who they were.
I cracked the last egg harder than it needed and told myself it was an accident. Christ, I hated the plan. I hated it and couldn't build a better one, which was the worst kind of hating a thing.
Ronan came in next, dressed the way he dressed when the day required things of him. Dark, plain, nothing that caught light or held memory. He'd shaved. His jaw was set in the particular way it got when he'd decided something in the night and hadn't enjoyed deciding it.
"She up?" I asked.
"Since five." He poured coffee and didn't drink it. He held it the way he held everything he wasn't ready to commit to. "She's in the dining room with Cormac's maps."
"Of course she is."
"She rerouted us." Flat, but there was something under it. "Three times off the motorway. She's right every time. I checked." He turned to the window, to the gray coming up over the cliffs. "She's planned this drive half her life and didn't know it."
Neither of us said anything to that. There was nothing to say that wouldn't make it heavier.
"Boston's set?" I asked, because somebody had to say a normal working thing out loud or the three of us were going to stand there being haunted until the eggs went cold, and cold eggs are a crime I don't commit.
"Sheridans have two men in Galway by noon and a house outside the city if we need to go to ground." Ronan finally drank some of the coffee. "Declan offered four. I took two. I don't like owing him more than that."
"You don't like owing anyone."
"No." He set the cup down. "But if this goes wrong, the Sheridans are the only people on earth I'd trust to pull us out of it. I'd rather owe Declan a favor than bury one of us because I was too proud to make a phone call."
That was as close as Ronan got to sentiment, and coming from him it landed like a speech.
The Sheridans were the last of it, the one old alliance the years of poison hadn't burned through.
Boston Irish who kept the Kerrigan name in their mouths like a clean word when keeping it cost them friends.
Declan Sheridan had known Ronan's father, had stood at the edge of a grave nobody else would be seen near.
There were maybe three people outside this house Ronan would put Sienna's safety in front of, and all three had the same surname and an ocean between us.
I plated the eggs and carried them through.
The dining room was Cormac's war, and Sienna walked into the middle of it like she'd been issued a rank.
She stood at the head of the table with her weight on both feet and her hands flat on a road map of the western counties, and she was so completely inside her own head that she didn't hear me come in, which almost never happened.
She heard everything. She heard people deciding to walk into a room before they'd finished deciding.
But she didn't hear me, because she was somewhere years back and a hundred miles west, and her face had gone to a place she didn't let it go when she knew she was watched.
I had a rule about her face. I'd made it early, somewhere around the second day, when I understood what I was dealing with.
I got to look at the version she performed as much as I wanted, the dry one, the careful one, the one that gave you exactly enough and not a grain more.
But the other one, the one underneath, I only got if she gave it to me.
Stealing it felt like the kind of thing you didn't come back from.
So I made noise with the plate.
She came back into herself between one breath and the next. It was a thing to watch even when you weren't supposed to be watching it. The spine straightened a half degree it hadn't known it dropped. The eyes cleared. The mouth found the line it lived on.
"You're staring," she said, not looking up.
"I'm delivering eggs. The staring's free."
"I'm not hungry."
"Didn't ask." I set the plate on the one corner of the table that didn't have a dead family's geography on it. "Four hours. You'll be glad of it around Athlone."
She considered the eggs like they were a problem she could solve, and then, because she was smarter than her pride, she picked up the fork and ate. I watched her do it without watching her do it, a skill you developed around her if you wanted to keep any dignity at all.
She set the fork down with the plate half gone and turned that look on me, the one she wore when she'd decided to stop performing for a minute because performing cost more than it was worth.
"You're quiet," she said. "You're never quiet."
"Working up to something."
"Don't."
"Too late." I came around to the corner of the table that didn't have her dead family's geography on it, and she turned on the stool to face me and didn't tell me to stop, which from Sienna was the same as a hand pulling me in.
I put my palm to the side of her neck, thumb along her jaw, and she let her eyes fall shut for exactly one second, which was her whole version of falling into a person.
"We're about to drive you to the worst people in the world," I said.
"I'd like it on the record that I have feelings about that. "
"Noted."
"Strong ones."
"Tiernan."
I kissed her. Not the careful kind. The kind with everything I didn't say loaded into it, the four hours of motorway and the man at the wall and the swallowed stone in my chest that kept telling me I was the one who'd led them to her.
She made a low sound and got a fist in my shirt and pulled, not away, in.
For a few seconds the operational house and the buried records and the whole grinding machine of the day went quiet, and there was just her, warm and alive and gripping me like she'd landed on the same conclusion I had, that we were both coming back from this and it wasn't up for discussion.
She pulled back first. She always would. She pressed her forehead to my sternum a second, breathing, then straightened the half degree that meant Sienna was back in the room.
"Hold that thought for four hours," she said.
"I'll hold it as long as you want," I said, meaning a good deal more than the morning. From the way she went still, she heard the more in it and decided, for once, not to bat it away.
Cormac came in behind me. He'd finished with the guns, and he had her vest over his arm, the low-profile one, the kind you wore under a coat and prayed you never tested. He set it on the table in front of her without a word, which was how Cormac said most things.
"I can dress myself," she said.
"You can." He picked it up again anyway and held it open. "Straps need setting to you. Do it once now or do it wrong in a car park in Galway."
She held his gaze a second longer than the moment required. Then she set down the fork, turned, and let him put it on her.