Cormac #2
Before we left him I put one more name to him, because loose threads are mine and this one had been hanging since Chicago.
The lab man. Her DNA contact, the one who'd gone dark her second week at the estate.
Sweeney's face did the small sick flinch of a man who'd stepped on something soft in the dark.
"The Yank," he said. "That was a tidy-up.
A few weeks back. I booked the travel for the crew, that's all.
I never asked what they were for." He didn't have to ask.
Men like Sweeney never did. So the contact was dead, snipped off the board in the same stretch of weeks the handler reached for everyone who'd ever touched her investigation.
I watched Sienna take it, the confirmation of a thing she'd half known since the missed check-ins, and add it to the rest, one more name on an account she had every intention of settling.
She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
The list just got one entry longer, and none of us were built to forget a list.
I let Sweeney live. People expected the other thing, and the expectation was useful, but a dead cutout teaches the handler we got to him, and a live terrified one who's been told to vanish teaches him nothing for a while.
I told Sweeney what would happen if he surfaced, in enough specific detail that he believed me, which wasn't hard, because I meant it.
Then we left him in the dark to think about his choices.
In the car going back, the gray country sliding by, nobody talked for a long while.
"It's him," Sienna said finally. Quiet. Not a question.
"Isn't it. That message. I'm sorry it had to be her father.
Nobody says that but family. Nobody grieves a man they meant to kill but the one who loved him even as he did it.
" She turned her father's ring on her thumb, around and around.
"Eamon's alive. I buried a story, not a man.
He's been out there my whole life, running this.
He just told me he's sorry, and that he'll take more than a ring. "
I could have softened it. Ronan, in the front, looked like he wanted to. I didn't, because softening it was the thing everyone always did for her, and it never once kept her safe.
"We don't know it's him," I said. "We know it's a man who knew your father, who grieves him, who has the old Madigan washes at his fingertips and the reach to walk a ring through my security.
That's not proof. That's a shape." I held her eyes in the mirror.
"But it's a shape the size of Eamon Brennan.
And we've got a string to pull now. So we pull it, we find out whose hand is on the other end, and then we'll know. "
She nodded slowly. She kept turning the ring.
We'd won the round. The local cell was blind now, their cutout was ours, the frame was coming apart in our hands a thread at a time, and the woman who'd walked into all of it three weeks ago aiming at the wrong family had just folded a man over a car and asked the right question without flinching.
But there was a handler out there who'd loved her family and burned it, who knew her by the private shape of her life, who'd kept her father's ring against his own skin for all those years before he gave it back, and who now, through a frightened man in a chair, had promised her that the next thing he took would not be a ring.
I drove. I watched the road. And for the first time in twenty years, I let myself think about the shape of a future where the steadiest thing I had to offer a person wasn't the wall I put between us, but the gun I put between her and the dark.
The hardest ones always arrived quietly.
I changed her dressing that night. The Galway street had pulled two of the stitches and the work wanted redoing, and nobody else in this house was putting their hands near a wound on her while I was still standing.
I trusted my hands over theirs. That was the line I told myself on the stairs.
My hands were the steady part of me. They'd been the steady part of me for twenty years.
It was the rest of me that wasn't steady.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the lamplight and gave me her arm without being asked, the way she'd learned to by now.
I knelt and cut the old dressing away, cleaned the line of it, threaded the needle, and my hands did the work sure and unhurried, no tremor in them she could see.
She watched me the whole time. She had a way of watching that wasn't waiting for anything, just taking the measure of a thing, and I felt it on the side of my face the way you feel heat off a fire you've turned your back on.
When I tied off the last of it and smoothed the tape down with my thumb, the job was done, and there was no reason left to kneel at her feet with my hand still resting on the inside of her forearm, where her pulse went slow and steady under my fingers.
I didn't stand up.
She didn't tell me to.
I looked up and she was already looking down.
The lamp got into the green of her eyes and turned it into something I'd built no defense against. Her good hand came off her knee and her fingers found the scar on my cheek.
Light. A question. The first time anyone had touched it on purpose for longer than I let myself count.
I turned my face into it before I decided to. Half an inch. Enough to feel her palm against the ruined side of me. Enough that all that stood between me and the thing I'd spent every day since swearing I would never take was the few inches I'd have to rise to take it.
Her breath changed. She'd have let me. With the day she had behind her and nothing left in the tank, she'd have let me, and that was the exact thing that got me up off the floor, because a man doesn't take a thing like that from a woman in the dark on the worst day of her year and call it anything but what it is.
I stood. I put the kit back in order with hands that, now that it was over, weren't quite right.
"Keep it dry," I said. Three words. All I trusted myself with.
"Cormac."
I stopped at the door. I didn't turn around. Turning around was a door I wasn't opening tonight.
"Not yet," I said. To the wood. To her. To myself.
Then I went out and shut it soft, the way a man closes a door on a room he fully intends to come back to.