Neither of them argued.
"She built a case," Cormac said. "I don't know how far she's got. But every arrow in it points at us. That's why she's here. Why the bar's here. Why she stayed last night instead of running. She's working toward something, and she isn't finished."
The car moved through the traffic. I looked at my hands and thought about a woman carrying grief and suspicion and years of slow, patient work, entirely alone.
Alone, and aimed at me. That was the part I made myself hold, more than the danger of it. Somewhere ahead of us a woman had spent the better part of her life building a case with my name at the end of it, and every hour she'd put into it, every year she'd gone without a life of her own, she'd spent on hating me. I'd been the shape of the enemy in a stranger's whole existence. She'd have pictured my face and gotten it wrong and hated the wrong face, and the wrongness of it didn't make the hate any less real, or any less earned by her lights. She'd earned it honestly, on the evidence she had. That was the thing thatundid me a little, in the back of that car. She wasn't wrong to hate the man she thought I was. She was only wrong about which man that was.
"We're careful how we do this," Cormac said. "Assume she's armed. Baseline. She's trained, she's lived on instinct a long time, and her instinct is going to read us as a threat." A beat. "You especially."
"Because she thinks I gave the order."
"Because you're the head of the family, and in her version of that night, that's what that means." He held my gaze. "I'm not saying don't go in. I'm saying go in slow."
"Noted."
"Ronan." His voice went even, which meant I wasn't going to like the next part. "She may not want to come back. Whatever we want this to be, whatever our fathers meant it to be, she gets a say. She's been out in the world a long time. She's built something. She's a person, not a thing we get to collect."
"I know what she is."
The edge in it filled the car. Tiernan found his window. Cormac held my look without a flicker, because Cormac never reacted to anything I didn't want him reacting to, which was one of several reasons he was still alive.
"I know," I said again, quieter. "You're right. I know."
He let it go.
The truth was I'd been thinking about it since the second Tiernan called. Not the strategy. Not the approach. What I owed her. What her years alone in the world, while I sat in my father's study failing to close a case, added up to as a debt. What kind of man walks up to a woman who's survived everything she has and tells her she's ours now, we'll take it from here.
I'd built a version of this moment in my head more times than I'd say, in the years before I knew there would ever be a moment. Not this one. A softer one, the one our fathers drewup, where two houses became one at a christening and a girl I'd never met grew into a life beside mine without either of us having to bleed for it. That version died on the cliffs with everyone else, and I'd buried it with the rest and told myself I'd made my peace with the burying. I hadn't. A man doesn't make peace with a thing like that. He just stops taking it out where anyone can see. And now the girl from the dead version was alive and grown and pouring whiskey in a city I'd never set foot in, and I was an hour from her door with nothing in my hands but the truth and a promise she had no reason on earth to believe.
I have never been good at wanting things out loud. It isn't in me. My father used to say I felt everything from half a mile off, like weather I could watch coming and never quite stand inside. He wasn't wrong. But I could feel this one from a mile off and closing fast, and for the first time since the cliffs, the weather wasn't grief. I didn't have a name for it yet. I'd have one before the day was done.
I didn't know if I was that man. I was about to find out.
"How do we play it," Tiernan said.
"Honest."
They both looked at me.
"We walk in. We tell her who we are. We don't pretend we don't know, and we don't give her the time to decide we're a threat before we've said a word." A beat. "She's had years of half a story pointing her the wrong way. The only thing I've got that changes that is the truth."
"She might shoot you," Cormac said.
"She might."
"I'm serious."
"So am I. If she shoots me, it'll be because she thinks she has a reason. So we make sure she doesn't have one."
Tiernan let out a slow breath. "Right. Walk into the bar of the woman who thinks we killed her family, and tell her we didn't. Easy."
"Nothing about this is easy," I said. "It's what we've got."
The car came off the highway and Chicago closed in. Narrower streets, older brick, the density of a neighborhood that grew up around something instead of being drawn from nothing. I didn't know this part of the city. I'd know it soon enough.
"One more thing," Cormac said. I turned to him. "Whatever she built here. The bar, the life, all of it. We don't touch it. We don't make her feel like we came to take something. Whatever happens next, that stays hers."
"Agreed."
