I was not ready for him in person.
He was big, though big wasn't quite the word. Big means bulk, and this wasn't bulk. It was something structural, a frame built for a purpose. Dark hair going gray at the temples. A jaw like architecture. A nose broken once and set a little crooked, which should have softened him and somehow didn't.
And his eyes. I knew they were gray from the photographs, but the photographs hadn't caught the steadiness of them. Like looking at something that decided a long time ago not to be moved and had kept the promise ever since.
I'm not a woman who gets knocked sideways by a face. I built a career reading men as threats, and threats don't come with a pull attached. But something turned over low in me looking at him, something that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with the other thing, the one I'd shelved a long time ago as a luxury I couldn't afford. I marked it the way I mark everything. Then I caught myself doing it a second time, slower, taking longer over the shape of his mouth than the job required, and I made myself stop.
He looked at me like I was the end of a long search.
Because I was.
It landed somewhere it hurt. I set the glass down before I dropped it, put both palms flat on the bar, and waited.
They came to the bar. Of course they did.
Ronan took the stool dead across from me. The other two settled on either side of him. Nobody spoke for a moment, and I used it to make sure my face was doing what I needed it to do. Which was nothing. Giving nothing. Taking it all in and showing none of it.
"We're closed," I said.
"I know," Ronan said.
His voice was lower than I expected, and it carried the weight of a man who didn't spend more of it than he had to. The accent was thick, thicker than Tiernan's, more Dunraven in it, the kind that doesn't soften with years away.
"Door was unlocked," Tiernan said.
"I was expecting a delivery." I looked at him. "Not you."
His jaw shifted. Not quite guilt. Next door to it.
"You know who we are," Ronan said.
Not a question. I didn't treat it like one.
"I know who you are."
"Then you know why we're here."
"I know why I think you're here. Whether that matches your reason is still to be seen."
Something shifted in his eyes. Not surprise. More like recalibration, like he'd come ready for a list of things and this particular thing made him adjust.
"We're not here to threaten you," he said.
"That's a low bar."
Cormac made a sound that might have been the start of a laugh and put it away fast.
The scarred one. He still hadn't said a word, and he was the one I kept having to decide not to watch. There's a stillness that reads as safety and a stillness that reads as a held breath before something happens, and his was the second kind. I'd spent my whole life wary of the second kind. It didn't explain why my attention kept sliding back to find him, or why I had to keep calling it back like a dog that wouldn't heel.
Ronan didn't look away from me. "Fair," he said. "We're not here to threaten you. We're not here to take anything from you. And we're not here to make you do anything you don't want to do. We're here because you're alive, and we didn't know it, andwe should have. And the reason we didn't know is not the reason you think."
"That's a lot of things you're not here to do," I said. "What are you here to do?"
"Talk."
"About?"
"About what happened to your family." He held my gaze. "About what didn't happen. About all those years you've been aimed at us for something we didn't do, and what that means for both of us now."
