"Why?" I said. My voice came out steadier than I deserved. "If you wanted leverage, you'd keep these. Why give them to me?"
"Because they're yours," he said. Simple. Like it wasn't a complicated answer. Like the only thing that mattered was that they belonged to me, so I should have them.
I held his eyes for a long moment. Then Tiernan, watching me with that warm, careful attention he'd worn the night before when he didn't know I was watching back. Then Cormac, taking stock the way he takes stock of everything, giving nothing back.
Then the phone on my bar.
I thought about all of it. The timeline on the wall upstairs. Every thread I'd pulled, every dead end I'd hit, and the slow creeping doubt that started somewhere in year twelve and never fully left, no matter how many times I told it to.
"Sit down," I said.
All three went still.
"I said sit down." I reached under the bar, pulled the Madigan twelve, and set it between us with three glasses, because my father always said you don't have a hardconversation without something worth drinking. "You've got one hour. Start talking."
Ronan's gaze dropped to the bottle.
His face shut on something I couldn't name, and I didn't try to.
He sat.
And Tiernan Rafferty, the man who'd walked into my bar the night before and drank my father's whiskey without letting on he was looking right at me, smiled, and it was the real one, the whole face in on it.
"Right then," he said. "Where do you want us to start?"
8
SIENNA
I poured three fingers for each of them and nothing for myself.
Deliberate. I needed my head clear and I needed the weight of the gesture. My father's whiskey, poured with my father's hospitality, which I'd inherited whether I asked for it or not. I was already running at a deficit from the night before. Whiskey on top of that was unwise, with a conversation coming that I'd built toward half my life.
Ronan considered the glass in front of him a moment before he picked it up.
He didn't drink. He just held it.
"Start with the alibi," I said. "That's where I'd start."
Cormac answered without a word. He reached into the bag at his feet, set a flat document folder on the bar, and slid it the length of the wood to me. Then he sat back and let me do the thing I'd spent years learning how to do.
I opened it.
I build cases. I know what a real one looks like and I know what a built one looks like, and the first thing I did, before anything else, was hunt for the build. An order of service, a funeral, Galway, dated. A photograph: the three of them and two older men I took for uncles, dark coats, outside a church, thetimestamp in the corner reading the night my family burned. Flight records. A hotel folio, four rooms, checkout the morning after. Signed statements from a family whose name I half knew off my father's old maps.
I went through it twice. I hunted for the seam, the too-clean edge, the detail trying a little too hard to be believed. I got very good at finding that. It wasn't there.
"You were six hundred kilometers away," I said. Not a question. The folder already answered it.
"All three of us," Ronan said. "Our fathers. Two uncles. A funeral for the family of an old associate." He still hadn't touched his whiskey. "That folder's been ready a long time."
"Ready for who?" I asked. "I didn't know you existed. Far as the world's concerned, everyone who'd care about your alibi died in that house."
"Not everyone." His voice was even. "You."
The bar was quiet around that word.
I picked up my water and took a long drink, then set it down and looked at the wall behind the bar, the way I do when I need a second to think without anyone watching me take it. My father's whiskey on the shelf. My bar. My Wednesday that had turned into something else.
