42. Maeve
MAEVE
For as long as I have been alive, other people have decided what I was for.
My father decided I was a price, and he paid it to buy himself a season of peace.
My brother decided I was a spark, struck once and thrown at whatever he most wanted to watch burn.
Not one of them ever handed me the choosing of it.
And now Yakov had lowered his gun and stepped back into the dark and given me the one thing no one in my blood had ever thought I should hold, which was the right to decide for myself what would be done with the man who had ruined us all.
Declan felt the ground go out from under his last idea, because he is quick, quicker than anyone ever gave him credit for being, except me.
A hostage is only worth the gun that might go off over her, and Yakov had just carried that threat out of the room.
So Declan did what a drowning man does when the water finally closes over the last of his plans.
He reached for the one he had been holding back for exactly this.
He lifted his arm off me and stepped back, and he made it slow, so that every man in the building could see he had let me go. Then he turned his own gun around in his grip and held it out to me, handle first, the way you offer a blade to someone you trust to know which end is which.
"Go on, Maevie." His voice was gentle, warm, the voice from ten thousand ordinary mornings at our mother's table.
"Take it. You want to. You have wanted to since the night you finally understood.
I gave you a war you were never meant to win and a marriage you were never meant to survive, and here you are, alive, and here I am, and there is Da, watching.
Every man in this room already knows what I am.
So take the gun. Be what he made you. Be what I made you.
Finish it, and stop pretending you were ever anything but this. "
And God forgive me, I took it. My fingers closed on the grip before my mind had finished forming the word no, because a hand trained since it was sixteen does not wait to be told.
The weight of it was familiar and it was terrible.
He stood three feet from me, unarmed and beaten, and I have never once in my life had a cleaner reason to end a man.
Everything in me leaned toward the doing of it.
He was right, and that was the unbearable part.
He was right about all of it, and I had wanted this since the night the drive gave me his name.
Then I saw it whole, the last confidence trick of a man who had run them his entire life.
He did not want to live. He had known since Yakov walked me through that door wired that he was not walking back out.
The one thing left that he could still take was the choosing of who ended him, and he wanted it to be me.
A sister who kills her own brother with their father watching is not a woman who won anything.
She is a weapon that went off. She is the exact thing he had sworn I was since we were children, proven true at last in front of everyone he could gather to see it, and he would go down into the cold knowing he had remade me in his own shape on the way.
He was not asking me to kill him. He was asking me to become him.
"You want me to shoot you," I said, and my voice held, which surprised us both.
"You want me to be the thing you made, so that even dead, you would have won.
" I looked at the gun in my hand, and then at my brother, and I let him watch me follow him all the way down to the bottom of it.
"No, Declan. I am going to do something so much worse.
I am going to tell everyone in this room exactly what you are, and then I am going to let you live in it. "
I crouched, set the gun on the boards between us, and straightened back up with nothing in my hands.
Then I turned my back on him, which is a thing you can do to a man only once you have stopped being afraid of him, and I said the rest to the room instead, to both crews, the hard Irish faces and the harder Russian ones, and to my father most of all.
"You have all been told a story tonight," I said.
"Declan Donnelly, the mastermind. The one who almost took the whole coast. The clever son who set two empires at each other's throats and nearly strolled off with the wreckage.
It is a fine tale. He wrote every word of it himself.
" I let that settle. "Here is the true one. "
"He did not outthink anybody. He found a rich man who wanted our water, and he sold it to him, and he sold you along with it.
" I looked at the Donnelly men who had spent years bleeding for his name.
"Every box you lifted, every risk you swallowed, you did it to make a developer richer and to buy my brother a seat at a table where men like us are only ever the help.
He did not build a kingdom. He was hired for one.
He was Gideon Marsh's errand boy in a well-cut coat, and the errand was to set fire to his own house so a stranger in a tower could pave the ash. "
"A boy named Damir went into the ground so a delivery schedule would stay quiet.
Sean Rafferty, who carried me on his shoulders when I was small enough to need carrying, took a bullet meant for me, fired by a man my brother had sent to end us.
And for what? Not a throne. A finder's fee.
Declan sold every last one of us for a percentage, to a man who was always going to throw him in the harbor the moment he stopped being useful, and he was too in love with the sound of his own cleverness to notice that he had never been the player. He had always been the mark."
I turned back to him. The warmth had drained out of his face, all of it, and what was left underneath was younger and worse.
I had taken from him the one thing he could not survive the loss of, and it had never been his life.
It was the myth. It was being the cleverest man in the room, and I had just stood in front of everyone he had left and called him cheap.
"That is what you are, Declan," I said, and I said it softly now, only to him.
"Not a king. A tool that spent its whole life believing it was the hand that held it.
You are going to live a long time in a very small room, and every single day of it you are going to wake up knowing that the last thing your family ever learned about you is the price you went for. "
For the first time in the whole of his life, my brother reached for a word and found the drawer empty.
I watched him do it. I watched the man who had talked his way out of every room he was ever cornered in open his mouth and discover that the truth had gotten there ahead of him and carried out all the furniture.
Because there was nothing left in him to say, he did the only thing his kind has left when the words run dry. He moved.
He lunged, not at me but at the weapon I had set down between us, because a man stripped of his story will always reach for the last argument he owns.
He never touched it. The shot came from behind me, a single flat crack, unhurried and exact, and Declan stopped in the middle of his own motion and folded down onto the wood as though someone had quietly cut the strings that had held him upright his whole life.
I turned. One of Marsh's men stood with a pistol still level and his face wiped clean of anything at all, the quiet one, the man no one in the room had looked at twice all night, because not being looked at twice was the whole of his trade.
He had not fired to save me. He would not have crossed the floor to pull me out of the water.
He had fired because Declan on the ground with his mask off and his mouth open was a loose end, and loose ends were the work he had been paid to tidy all through these long months, the overdose that was never an overdose, the witness who was already a corpse before we reached him.
He put my brother down the way he had put down every other thing Marsh could not afford to leave breathing, calmly, the way you might wipe down a counter at closing.
And there was the last cruelty of the night, folded around the only mercy it had left to give.
Declan died as the thing he had in truth always been, something his paymaster used and discarded the instant it turned into a risk.
He did not fall by my hand, or by Yakov's, who had wanted it for weeks and set it down anyway, or by our father's, who stood across the room with his old pistol still gripped in a fist gone bloodless and would now never have to spend the rest of his nights wondering whether he could have fired on his own son.
No one who had ever loved my brother had to carry him out of that building.
Marsh, without once meaning to spare us anything, had lifted even that weight off us, simply by being exactly what he was.
Anzor had the cleaner before the man could think to spend the pistol a second time, one huge hand swallowing both of his until the pistol fell, and the quiet one went still in the particular way of a person who has just run his own odds and not liked the total.
He was alive, and that was worth more than he could know.
Everything Marsh had spent a year burying was written into that man, every staged accident and every vanished name, and now he belonged to us whole and breathing and out of places to hide.
I did not go to Marsh, finished and cornered against his own glass.
I did not go to Yakov, though I could feel him at the edge of the dark, holding the door the way he had sworn he would.
I went to my brother. I knelt on the cold planks beside the body of the boy who had taught me to pick a lock and had lied to me for the rest of my life, and I looked at his face, which had finally stopped performing, and I waited to feel the thing I had been bracing against since the beginning.
It never arrived. There was no grief with teeth in it.
There was no triumph, and there was no relief.
There was only a wide and ringing hollow where a brother used to stand, and beneath it, so quiet I nearly walked past it, the strangest thing I have ever felt over a dead man.
I was free. He had spent his whole life shaping me into a weapon, and in the last minute of his, with everyone he had loved and everyone he had betrayed there to see it, I had refused to go off.
Whatever I was going to be after this, I was not the thing he made.
I had laid it down, and I was still standing, and for the first time in my life what came next was mine to write.