23. Ronan
RONAN
"We're burned," I said into my collar, and then I had about four seconds before the street told me how badly.
It told me fast. The car at the end of the lane popped both front doors at once, which no innocent car ever did, and two men came out of it moving with the unhurried economy of men who'd done this before.
Not running. Walking, fast, hands already inside their coats.
Behind us, the wool shop doorway I'd just walked Sienna out of had a third man in it now, filling it, and he hadn't been there sixty seconds ago.
Boxed. Front and back. On a street too narrow to run sideways out of.
They knew.
The thought went through me cold and clean and I put it away, because there was no time for it. There was time for exactly one thing, getting her out of the box before it closed, and everything else could wait until everyone in it was still breathing.
"Wall side," I said. "Move, goddamn it."
Sienna moved. That was the thing about her, the thing I'd think about later when I had room to think about anything.
She didn't freeze. She didn't ask and she didn't waste a half second on disbelief.
She had the box read before I finished telling her about it, and she went for the gap I made toward the shop wall, low and fast, the steel record box clamped against her chest under one arm like she'd rehearsed running with it.
The man in the shop doorway came for her.
He was big and committed, and he made the mistake every big committed man makes, which was assuming the smaller person in front of him was the easier problem.
He reached for her with both hands. She didn't pull back the way the body wants to.
She stepped into it. Dropped her shoulder, took his reach past her, and drove the hard edge of the steel box up under his chin with everything her legs gave her.
Something in his face came apart. He went down sitting, which is the worst way down, the way that means the lights went out before the body got the message.
She was already past him.
Trained, Cormac had said, reading her file at six that morning.
Not military. Trained. He'd said it flat, no color on it, and I'd taken it as information.
Watching it was another thing entirely. Watching it, I understood that all the years I'd spent imagining her surviving had pictured the wrong thing.
I'd pictured her hiding. She hadn't been hiding. She'd been getting ready.
Then the first shot went, and there was no more time for understanding anything.
It came from the two at the car, and it was suppressed, which told me the last useful thing I'd learn for a while.
Men who suppressed their weapons on a public street in daylight were men with the kind of backing that made noise disappear afterward.
Professionals. Funded. Here for a reason worth the exposure.
The round went wide and chipped stone off the wall a foot from Sienna's head, and she dropped without being told. I put two of my own back down the lane to make them honest, and that bought us the second we needed, because that was when Cormac arrived.
He arrived the way Cormac did everything, completely and without warning.
The second car came around the bottom of the lane at a speed that street had never seen, and Tiernan was out the passenger window before it stopped, laying fire down the lane in a tight controlled pattern that wasn't trying to hit anyone so much as trying to make them want to be somewhere else.
The two from the car decided somewhere else was a fine idea and broke for cover.
"In, in, in," Tiernan shouted, and I had my hand on Sienna's collar. I ran her toward the car and she was running by herself, the box still locked against her ribs. We were maybe ten feet from the door when the fourth man came out of the alley between the shops.
I'd missed him. That's the truth and I'll carry it. Four seconds is not enough time to count a street. I counted three, and there were four.
He came out of the alley low and fast with a blade, because a blade doesn't jam and a blade doesn't make noise. He went for her, because she was the one with the box, the one who mattered, the one their whole morning was built around.
He got her.
Not clean. She turned into it the way she'd turned into the first one, trying to take it on the meat of her arm instead of anywhere it would kill her.
She mostly managed it, which is the only reason I'm not writing this differently.
The blade went across her forearm instead of her throat.
She made a sound, short and bitten off. She didn't drop the box and she didn't drop herself.
She got her good hand into his face, her thumb where a thumb does the most damage, and he screamed.
That was the first noise any of them made.
I reached them a half second later, and I was not cold anymore.
The job wanted him alive to question. The job could go to hell.
I don't remember the next part as well as I should.
I remember it in pieces. His wrist in my hand and the wrong angle I put it at.
The wall, his head, the specific give of a man being stopped.
Tiernan's voice very close, saying Ronan, she's in, she's in the car, we have to go, and the words taking longer than they should have to mean anything.
The part of me that ran the family and made the cold decisions had stepped out of the room and left someone older and worse in charge.
Someone who'd waited a long time to find her and watched her bleed inside the first week.
Cormac put his hand on my chest. Just his hand. Flat. And he said one word, my name, in the flat voice, and it reached me where the shouting hadn't.
I got in the car.
We moved before the door shut. Cormac drove it like he'd stolen it, which in fairness he had.
Three turns in four seconds, and then we were out of the lanes and into traffic.
He dropped us instantly to the exact speed of every other car on the road, because the thing that gets you caught is going fast, and Cormac had never once in his life done the thing that gets you caught.
In the back seat, Sienna had her good hand clamped over the cut and her face was the gray-white of shock held off by willpower and nothing else. The steel box was still in her lap. She did not let go of it. Through all of it, she did not let go of it.
"Let me see," I said.
"It's not deep." Her voice was steady and wrong. "It's long, not deep. Looks worse than it is."
"Let me see anyway."
She let me peel her hand back. She was right, which I hated, because it meant she knew exactly how to take a blade, which meant somebody had cut her before and she'd learned from it.
Long and shallow, bleeding hard the way arms do, ugly but not the kind of ugly that takes a person from you.
Tiernan had already passed back the kit from under the seat without being asked.
I put pressure on it and she let me, and she watched my face while I did it with an expression I couldn't read and didn't have the room to try.
"You killed him," she said. Not a question. "The one in the alley."
"Yes."
She nodded slowly. "Good."
Nobody said anything for a while after that. Cormac drove. The city thinned out and gave way to gray country, and the adrenaline let go of all of us in stages, the way it does, leaving the shakes and the cold and the slow return of the ability to think past the next four seconds.
And the thought I'd put away on the street came back. There was room for it now, and it was worse than it had been out there with no time to hold it.
They knew.
Not guessed. Not stumbled onto us. They'd had a kill team set on a solicitor's office in Galway, suppressed and funded and four men deep, waiting.
There was exactly one way to know we'd be at Hartigan and Burke this morning, and it wasn't luck and it wasn't surveillance, because we'd run countersurveillance the whole drive and Cormac didn't miss things on a drive. Somebody told them.
Somebody who knew the plan.
The plan lived in four places. The dining room of my house. The heads of the four people in this car. The mouth of an old solicitor who'd guarded a dead man's secret all this time and had no reason on earth to sell it now. And Boston.
We'd given the Sheridans the date and the target so they could put two men in Galway and a house at our backs.
They were the one door in the whole thing that opened outward, away from the four of us, away from an old man with nothing to gain.
I did the arithmetic the way you do when you don't want the answer, ruling out the names you'd die for until you're left holding the one you can stand to lose.
It left me holding Declan Sheridan. Who knew my father.
Who was the last ally the poison hadn't taken.
The math didn't care about any of that. The math just pointed.
I found Cormac in the mirror. He was already there. He'd done the same arithmetic, faster, and his face had the stillness it got when the conclusion was bad and he'd accepted it before the rest of us got there. He'd landed where I landed. Boston.
"Don't," Sienna said quietly from the back seat. She'd been watching both of us. Of course she had. "Whatever you're about to decide about your people in Boston. Don't. Not yet. That's exactly what it wants."
She held up the box with her good hand, her bad arm bleeding through the dressing in my lap.
"It came from inside," she said. "My father told me that twenty minutes ago in a letter.
So it's true, and we're going to have to live in it for a while.
" Her jaw set. "But we read the numbers first. We don't accuse.
We don't burn the house down guessing. We read the numbers, and we let them give us the name. "
I took her in. Bleeding, gray, too thin and too sharp, holding the thing four men had just died trying to take, telling the three most dangerous men in the west of Ireland to keep their heads.
There she is, I thought. There's the Madigan.
"Drive," I told Cormac.
He was already driving.