The room he showed me to was at the end of the second-floor corridor. It faced the sea.
Of course it faced the sea.
"Extra blankets in the wardrobe," Ronan said from the doorway. He didn't come in. "The heating's old, so if it gets cold, there's a fire. Cormac laid one before you got here. It just needs lighting."
I stood in the middle of the room and watched the gray October water beyond the window.
"Ronan," I said.
He waited.
I turned around. "I need you to understand something."
"All right."
"I'm not here because I trust you," I said. "I'm here because I'm tired of being wrong about things, and I'd rather be wrong somewhere with more information than wrong in Chicago with less." I held his gaze. "That's the only reason I'm here."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"I know," he said. "That's enough for now."
He pulled the door closed behind him.
I stood in the room that faced the sea, in the house I'd spent fifteen years staying away from to keep the people in it breathing, and I set my bag on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed to look out at the water.
The same water. The same horizon. The same light that didn't happen anywhere else, thin and silver and falling on the sea like it had something to apologize for.
I hadn't stood this close to it in all that time. I'd put a continent and an ocean and a whole invented life between me and it. I'd been careful, so careful, and here it was anyway, breathing against the cliffs below this house the exact way it breathed against the cliffs below mine.
That was the thing about the sea. It didn't care where you'd run to. It sounded the same everywhere.
And the stone did what stone always did, carried the sound up through itself, so that if you put your ear to the wall of a house like this you heard the ocean through two feet of rock. I did it as a child. Pressed my cheek to the cold stone of the hallway outside my parents' room and listened to the water move under the world.
I did it again before I knew I'd crossed the room. Cheek to the wall. Eyes shut.
And then I wasn't in this house at all.
Smoke. My father's hand over my mouth, salt and fear, his voice a growl.With me, princess.
The walls coming down, two hundred years of them, and the people inside them coming down too, and the orange light through the narrow windows that was nothing like the light my mother used to paint.
A door in the wall I'd never seen. A door he opened without pausing, because he built it, because some part of him had always known a night like this was coming for us and had made me a way out of it years before I needed one.
The black of the passage. His body steering mine when words were too loud to risk. And through the plaster, the men. Calling to each other in accents I couldn't place, not Irish, not anything, and moving.
That was the part that never let go of me in all the years after, the part I understood before I understood anything else. They moved like they had the floor plan. They weren't searching. They went straight for the wings where we slept, past every room that didn't matter, fast and sure, the way a person only moves through a house someone has walked you through first.
Someone drew them a map.
Someone we trusted opened our doors.
I breathed. The wall was cold against my cheek. This wall. This house. Not that one.
The room under the foundation, built for one. His hands prying mine off his collar.Stay here.
The blood at his temple, and a thing in his eyes I'd never once seen in all my life of reading that face. Then the door clanking shut and the dark, and the sound of my home dying over my head, the gunfire and the shouting and the silences that came after sounds that should never have gone quiet.
And then him. Stumbling. Something dragging. The lock turned from the outside, and me with the iron bar set in my stance the way he'd drilled me every morning for a year, and the door opening on a man already falling.
