Chapter 24
SAOIRSE
It’s very quiet. Fire pops softly in the grate, Patrick’s chains drag once on the wood floor as he shifts his weight, and Cillian stands at my side with blood on his cuff and a fresh bandage around his hand, watching me instead of watching the man who raised me.
Gavin is breathing too fast behind him. Maeve’s jaw is set.
Declan looks ready to end this himself if I hesitate.
I don’t.
Patrick looks older than he did in my head all these years, and that unsettles me more than the blood on his mouth.
He is not larger than the room. He is not the force that bent every life around him.
He is a tired man in ruined clothes with mud on his boots and my mother’s death still on his hands.
“Daughter,” he says again, trying for control, trying for history.
“My name is Saoirse,” I answer.
His eyes narrow, then soften in that false way I know too well. “You’re upset, and you’ve been manipulated. He took advantage of your confusion. He always wanted what was mine.”
I almost laugh, but the sound would come out wrong. “You still think this is about territory.”
“This is about survival,” he snaps, and for a second the old voice comes through, the one that could fill a room and make men stand straighter. “I taught you that. I kept you alive. I made you useful in a world that eats girls like you.”
“You made me useful to you.”
He shifts his focus to my stomach, and the look is brief but I see it. Calculation. Ownership. Future leverage already forming.
Cillian takes one step forward, and I put my hand on his wrist without looking at him.
“Let me do this,” I say.
He goes still, then nods once.
Patrick sees that and smiles with blood in his teeth. “There he is. The gentleman king, letting the woman make the ugly choice so his hands stay clean.”
Cillian’s voice is calm. “My hands are not clean.”
“No,” Patrick says and turns back to me, “but his lies wear better than mine.”
The words hit old bruises, old instincts, old training, and I feel all of it rise in me at once. Fear. Grief. Anger. Shame. Love. I could drown in any one of them if I let myself. I don’t let myself.
I step away from Cillian and into the center of the room.
“You want to talk about lies?” I say. “Good. Let’s do that while everyone can hear.”
Patrick’s mouth tightens.
“You told me my mother slipped and hit her head when I was twelve, and I saw bruises on her wrists.” My voice is steady now, and I keep it there. “You told me she was unstable when she tried to leave. You told me she forced your hand. You told me grief made men hard and I should learn from it.”
No one moves.
“You stood beside her coffin and told me Cillian killed her, and I built my life around that story. I carried your rage for years. I walked into another man’s house for you.
I lied for you. I watched for you. I became what you trained me to be, and every time I flinched from what that meant, you called it weakness. ”
Patrick’s eyes sharpen. “I gave you purpose.”
“You gave me a target.”
He opens his mouth, but I keep going.
“You killed my mother before you ever sent me after Cillian. You killed her when she tried to leave with me, and then you killed her again every year after by forcing me to love the story that covered it.”
The silence in the room changes. It is not waiting anymore. It is witness.
Patrick straightens as much as the cuffs allow. “You think shooting me fixes that?”
“No,” I say. “Nothing fixes it.”
I turn and look at Cillian.
He is watching me with the same stillness he had in the chapel, in the hospital, on the day he finally listened, and there is no instruction in his face. No pressure. No claim. Only trust and the cost of it.
I hold out my hand.
“Your gun.”
Maeve sucks in a breath, but Cillian does not hesitate. He reaches to his back, draws, checks the chamber in one smooth motion, then places the pistol in my palm grip-first.
The weight settles into my hand like something I have known all my life and hate for exactly that reason.
Patrick watches the exchange, and for the first time tonight I see something close to uncertainty cross his face.
“Saoirse,” he says, and his voice changes, lower now, almost intimate, the voice he used when he wanted obedience disguised as concern.
“Listen to me. If you do this for him, you’ll regret it.
Men like him make women carry their sins and call it love. ”
I raise the gun and sight center chest.
“I’m not doing this for him.”
His breathing shifts.
“I’m doing this for my mother,” I say. “I’m doing this for the girl you raised on fear and called loyalty. I’m doing this for every time you killed me and expected me to stand up smiling.”
The words land and stay there.
Patrick stares at me for a long moment, and then something in him settles. The performance drops. The excuses stop. He looks tired again, but now there is something else in it, a hard, old pride that has nothing left to bargain with.
“If you’re going to do it,” he says quietly, “do it straight.”
Declan’s eyes flick to me, surprised.
Patrick lifts his chin and squares his shoulders as far as the chains allow. He does not beg. He does not spit another lie. He does not ask for mercy he never gave.
I give him the only honor he ever taught me by accident. I let him face it.
“For my mother,” I say.
I fire once.
The shot cracks through the room and is gone. Patrick jerks back, and then he goes still, head turned slightly, blood spreading dark across his shirt. No second shot is needed.
My ears ring. My hand shakes once after, not before.
Cillian is beside me immediately, taking the gun gently from my fingers, setting it away, one hand at my back and the other bracing my elbow as if he knows my knees might go and wants me to choose whether they do. I stay standing.
Behind us, Gavin starts making a thin, panicked sound through his teeth, and Declan turns on him so fast, the man chokes it off.
Maeve moves first. She crosses the room, wraps both arms around me carefully around the places that still ache, and presses her face to my hair.
“It’s done,” she says into my temple. “It’s done.”
I close my eyes and let that be true for one breath.
Then I pull back and look at Gavin.
He shrinks before I even speak.
“Take him,” I say, my voice rough now. “He answers for what he did too, but not tonight. I won’t give him the same weight.”
Conall nods and drags him out with Murphy and Sten, and the door shuts behind them.
The room is quieter after that, but not peaceful. Peace is a thing that arrives later and asks to be trusted. This is only the first empty space where fear used to sit.
Father Byrne rises slowly from his chair, makes the sign of the cross over Patrick’s body, then looks at me. “Would you like me to pray for him?”
I think of my mother’s hands, flour on her wrists, voice low in a pantry, telling me to learn things men could not own.
“Yes,” I say. “Pray for her first.”
He nods.
Cillian guides me to the sofa, and I sit before my body can argue. My hands are cold. He kneels in front of me, big and blood-marked and careful, and rests both palms over my knees.
“You all right?” he asks.
It is an impossible question, and he knows it. I almost tell him that, but I look at his face and I am too tired to hide inside cleverness.
“No,” I say. “But I’m here.”
His mouth shifts, grief and relief and love all mixed in the line of it. “That’s enough.”
I touch the bandage on his hand. “You’re bleeding.”
“Occupational hazard.”
I huff a broken laugh, then it catches and turns into tears before I can stop it. He rises and pulls me into him, and I let him, face pressed to his shirt, my body shaking with the aftermath of a choice I wanted and hated and needed all at once.
“I thought I’d feel cleaner,” I whisper.
He holds me tighter, not crushing, just there. “You don’t have to feel anything on schedule.”
I breathe him in, salt and smoke and gun oil and the life I almost lost before I understood what it was.
When I pull back, I look him in the eyes and say the thing that matters now.
“I’m ready.”
He searches my face. “For what?”
“To build,” I say. “Not hide, not run, not survive from one room to the next. I’m ready to build with you, if you still want that with all of this in the middle of us.”
His answer comes without pause.
“I wanted you before I understood you. I loved you before I deserved to say it. And I want to build with you for as long as we get.”
I put my hand over his heart and nod. “Then we do it honestly.”
Maeve wipes at her face and mutters, “Good. Since the wedding reception is ruined and I’m not planning another one.”
That gets a real laugh out of me, small but real, and the sound of it changes the room more than prayer did.
Cillian kisses my forehead, then my mouth, slow and steady and without urgency, and when he pulls back he presses his brow to mine.
“It’s over,” he says.
I look past him at the fire, at his mother sitting straight-backed in silence, at Declan standing guard even now, at the door through which men carried out the ghost that shaped my life.
“No,” I say quietly. “It’s finished.”
And this time, that feels better.