CHAPTER 24
THE WAKING
POV: RONAN
Frank Holloway asks me to tell her he’s sorry.
He asks it when her footsteps are gone from the top of the stairs.
When the steel door has swung almost shut behind her.
When it’s just the three of us in the Crypt, him and me and the man by the wall, and the servers humming, and two years of his daughter pinned to the corkboard looking down at him.
“Tell her,” he says. “Please. Tell her I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
He looks up at me. His face is wet. He opens his mouth.
Nothing comes out.
He’s a gambler to the end. He can’t make himself put down a bet he knows he’s already lost.
“That’s what I thought,” I say.
I don’t make it long. She didn’t ask for long. She asked me not to tell her how, and I won’t, because there’s nothing to tell. One shot. Close. The way you’d put down something old and sick in a barn.
The man by the wall doesn’t flinch.
After, I stand in front of the folding chair for a minute.
I think about a hospital room twenty-two years ago. A man holding a baby with all that black hair and doing arithmetic.
I think I’ve done arithmetic about her too. For two years. Every night in that chair by the servers. Different numbers.
The man by the wall clears his throat. “Quincy, boss?”
“No,” I say. “Not next to Declan.”
“Where?”
I think about it.
“Ashes,” I say. “Take him to the crematorium in Braintree. The one we use. Then take the ashes out past the harbor islands and put them in the water.”
“Any reason?”
“She stood on a bridge once and counted to three hundred and forty,” I say. “Let the water have him.”
***
She’s in the chapel for three hours.
I don’t go out to her. I watch. Bottom row, center.
She stands in front of the altar for the first hour without moving.
Then she sits on the prie-dieu with her back to the altar rail.
At one point, she takes the gauze off her left wrist and looks at the torn skin underneath for a long time, and then wraps it back up again, neatly, better than the doctor did.
She doesn’t pray. I know what she looks like when she prays. I watched her do it for two years.
This is something else.
At two o’clock, Rosa brings her soup on a tray. Rosa has never carried a tray to the chapel in eleven years. She sets it on the front pew and touches Mae’s shoulder and comes back to the house wiping her eyes on her apron.
Mae eats the soup.
All of it.
Rule two.
***
At eleven that night, she comes to bed.
She’s washed her hair. She’s in the black silk. The gauze on her wrists is fresh and white. Her lip has gone down a little, but the bruise on her cheek has spread into purple along the bone, and when she lies down on her side of the bed, facing me, the lamp catches it.
I want to kill Liam Kavanagh again.
I lie on my back and look at the ceiling.
“Was it quick?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything?”
I think about lying. I don’t.
“He asked me to tell you he was sorry.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. “Was he?”
“No.”
She breathes out through her nose. It’s almost a laugh. It isn’t.
“Thank you,” she says. “For not lying.”
I don’t answer that.
The house is quiet around us. The radiators tick. Outside, a car passes slowly on Louisburg Square, and its lights slide across the ceiling, and are gone.
She reaches over and puts her fingertip on the corner of my mouth.
On the scar.
“You said another night,” she says.
I close my eyes.
Her finger doesn’t move. It just rests there, at the top of it, where it starts. Waiting.
She waited a long time for the bridge. Two years. She waited through a hundred confessions and never said it. Then she stood in front of my mother’s altar and gave it to me whole.
I owe her one.
“I was fourteen,” I say.
Her finger stays still.
“My mother used to let me play the piano. The one upstairs, in the music room. She taught me. She’d sit on the bench beside me in the afternoons after school and we’d play duets.
Badly. She was worse than me. She used to laugh when she missed a note.
” I breathe. “My father wanted me at the docks. Every afternoon. Learning the business. Learning the men. He said a Draven doesn’t sit at a piano like a girl. ”
“And you kept playing.”
“I kept playing. One afternoon he came home early. He came up the stairs and found us at the bench. Four hands. Some Christmas carol. She was laughing.” I open my eyes and look at the ceiling.
“He didn’t say anything. He just walked over and hit me.
Backhand. Once. He wore a signet ring. His father’s. Heavy gold, with a crest.”
Her finger moves. Down. Slowly. Along the line of the scar, from my lip to my jaw.
“It opened my face,” I say. “All the way to the bone. There was blood on the keys. My mother screamed. He took her by the arm and walked her out of the room, and I sat there at the piano with my hand over my face and blood running through my fingers, and I heard them on the stairs, and I didn’t hear her laugh again for about a year. ”
Her finger stops at my jaw.
“I never played again,” I say. “She had the piano covered. It’s been under that sheet for twenty-one years.”
The radiator ticks.
“I touched middle C,” she says quietly. “The first week I was here. It’s out of tune.”
“I know. I heard it on the kitchen camera.”
She takes her finger away.
Then she leans over me, in the dark, and puts her mouth where her finger was. At the corner of my lip. She kisses the top of the scar. Then a little lower. And lower. All the way down the line of it to my jaw, slowly, the way she sang the In Paradisum, one word at a time.
I lie still and let her.
When she gets to the end, she stays there with her lips against the hinge of my jaw, and I feel her breathe.
“Ronan.”
“Mm.”
“I want to ask you for something.”
“Anything.”
She lifts her head. The lamp is behind her and I can’t see her face well. Just the shape of it. The bruise, dark along her cheek.
“The night you left the box,” she says. “In my cell. You stood by my bed and I was asleep.”
“Yes.”
“What did you want to do?”
I don’t answer right away.
“Tell me,” she says. “You don’t lie to me now. You said.”
“I wanted to wake you up,” I say. “Not with the box. With me. I wanted you to wake up already mine. Already full of me. Not knowing when it started.”
She’s very still above me.
“Wake me like that,” she says.
The room goes quiet.
“Mae.”
“Tonight. Tomorrow. Whenever you want. I’ll be asleep. I want you to do what you wanted to do in my cell.” Her voice is steady. A little rough. “I want to wake up already yours.”
I look at her for a long time in the dark.
“You’ll be asleep,” I say.
“I know.”
“You won’t be able to say no.”
“I’m saying yes now. I’m saying it with my eyes open.” She takes my bandaged hand and presses it flat over her heart, the way I held mine over hers on the altar. “Yes, Ronan. Wake me.”
Under my palm, her heart is going fast. Not afraid.
Something else.
“All right, dove,” I say.
She lies back down on her side, facing me. She closes her eyes. She’s asleep inside ten minutes. Her breathing slows. Her lips part. Her hand falls open on the sheet between us.
I don’t sleep.
I lie beside her and watch her for five hours.
***
At four-ten, I move.
The room is black. The radiators have gone quiet. Snow is falling again outside, soft against the glass. She’s on her side, turned toward me, one hand tucked under her cheek, the way I watched her sleep in the cell for two years. The black silk has ridden up over her hip in the night.
I ease the covers back.
She doesn’t stir.
I put my hand on her hip. Her skin is warm with sleep. I slide my palm down over the curve of her thigh and back up, slowly, the way you’d touch something you’ve wanted to touch for two years and finally can.
She sighs. Doesn’t wake.
I turn her gently onto her back. She goes where I move her, soft and heavy and trusting, one arm falling above her head on the pillow. Her face turns toward me. Her lips part.
I push the silk up. I part her knees with my hand. I lower my mouth to her.
I go slowly. Slower than the wedding night. Slower than anything. I taste her the way I watched her pray, patient, devout, until she’s wet under my tongue, and her hips begin to shift, small, unconscious, and her breathing changes.
Still asleep.
She makes a small sound in her throat. Almost a word.
I rise over her. I brace myself above her on my forearms. I push into her.
Slow. An inch at a time. She’s slick and warm and tight around me, and she takes me in her sleep with a long, low sigh that I feel all the way down my spine.
I’m all the way inside her when her eyes open.
She looks up at me in the dark.
She doesn’t startle. She doesn’t pull away. She looks at me for one long second, confused, soft, heavy-lidded, and I watch her understand where she is.
Who’s inside her.
What she asked for.
Her face opens. Her arms come up around my neck.
“Oh,” she breathes. “Oh. You—”
“You said wake you.”
“Yes.” Her voice is thick with sleep. Her hips lift into me. “Yes. Don’t stop.”
I don’t stop.
I move in her slowly, deep, the whole length of me, and she moves with me, still half in her dream.
Her nails drag down my back over the heart and the fire.
She says my name against my shoulder. She says it again.
She wraps her legs around me and pulls me in, and I feel her wake up the rest of the way, her body tightening around mine, her breath going short.
“More,” she says.
I give her more.
She comes with her face pressed into my neck and her teeth in my shoulder, shaking, and I follow her down, deep inside her, with my hand in her hair and her name in my mouth.
After, I don’t move. I stay inside her. I stay on top of her with my weight on my elbows and my forehead against hers, and we breathe together in the dark while the snow ticks on the window.
She laughs. Very softly. A little broken.
“Was that what you wanted?” she asks. “In the cell?”
“That’s what I wanted.”
“Was it as good?”
“It was better.”
“Why?”
“Because this time you asked.”
She’s quiet. Her fingers move in my hair.
Then she turns her head on the pillow so her mouth is at my ear, and I feel her smile against my skin.
“Next time,” she whispers, “don’t be gentle.”