I was still shaking when Ronan rose up over me, broad and dark and finally, finally done waiting, and I got both hands on him and pulled.
"Now," I said. "Ronan. Now."
"I know." His forehead came to mine. "I've got you. I've had you the whole time."
He notched himself against me and pushed in slowly, a lifetime of restraint in how careful he made himself be. The stretch of it, the thick blunt fullness of him, dragged a moan out of both of us. He gave me all of it by degrees, watching my face the whole way in, and then he moved, deep and unhurried and then not unhurried at all, the bed rocking with it, his control coming apart the deeper he got. Tiernan stayed at my mouth and my breast with a low filthy run of praise, and when he reached down and put his fingers on my clit while Ronan filled me, I made a sound that had Cormac going still as stone in the chair.
"Wait until you see her go," Tiernan told him, wrecked, conversational, not taking his eyes off me.
"Enough," Cormac said, rough. It wasn't a no. It was a man at the very edge of his own discipline, and every one of us heard exactly what it was.
I came again with Ronan buried deep and Tiernan's fingers working me and both their names in my mouth, clenching down hard enough that Ronan's hips stuttered. He dropped his head to my shoulder and breathed to hold himself together. The line between one and the next went soft. I heard myself saying things I never said to anyone, please and yes and don't stop and their names like something close to prayer, and not one cell of me watched the exits.
That was the part I'd keep. Not the heat of it, though God, the heat of it. The part where I lay open and wrecked and filled ina house full of dangerous men, one of them watching me come undone from six feet away with everything he held back roaring in the set of his jaw, and I felt, the whole length of it, completely safe. The word I'd sworn off an hour ago at the dinner table, and there it was anyway.
When I turned my head again, Cormac was on his feet.
I didn't reach for him. Reaching was the surest way to send him back behind the wall, and I'd learned the shape of it well enough by now to let it stand. I only let him see that I saw him. That the door, when he was ready for it, opened from my side too.
Something surfaced in him that wasn't the flat nothing he wore for the world. Want, badly held. And under it the other thing, the one he'd named in the kitchen with his thumb on my pulse, the one he still wouldn't let into his hands. Not the refusal from that night, though. A different word this time. Later.
He held my eyes one beat longer. Then he stepped back, soft and deliberate, and drew the door not quite shut behind him, leaving it open a hand's width, which from Cormac was as good as a vow.
Ronan's rhythm gentled, finding me again, and I let the last of it take me, the whole table of it, every good thing I'd sworn I would never risk having because having was only ever a longer road to losing. He followed me over with my name against my throat. Tiernan gathered us both in, and for a while nobody said anything at all.
After, there was the tangle of it. Ronan's arm a dead weight across my middle, his breath gone slow in my hair. Tiernan on my other side drawing idle lines up and down my spine and humming something tuneless, pleased with himself. The fire ticked down. The sea past the glass, steady and endless, and for the length of that one night, I let it be nothing but the sea.
I should have known better.Fifteen years should have taught me. A person doesn't get to think the word home at a dark window in this life without the dark deciding to answer.
But I didn't know yet.
That night I slept boneless in a tangle of them, in a house full of people who knew my name, without one ear open for the first time since I was fifteen, and dreamed of nothing at all.
34
SIENNA
For the first time in longer than I could name, I'd slept past the light. No part of me had stayed up listening for the door. The gray Dunraven morning was already full in the window, and for four seconds I lay in a warm bed in a house full of people who knew my name, and let myself have the thing I'd let myself have at the window the night before. The word. Home.
Then Cormac knocked, once, and I knew from the single knock that it was over.
He was in the dining room when I came down, and Ronan was already there, and Tiernan, and none of them were eating. Cormac had a chair pulled up to the wall under the east windows and he was standing on it, which was so unlike him, so undignified, that the wrongness of it hit me before I understood what he was doing. He had a small black thing in his gloved hand, no bigger than a coat button, and he looked at it the way he looked at the worst conclusions.
"It was in the cornice," he said, not turning around. "I've swept this room a hundred times for anything that broadcasts, and it never flagged, because it doesn't broadcast. No signal for my gear to find. What flagged was the plaster. There's a seam up here that doesn't match the rest of the run, a repair somebodymade and skimmed over clean, and it bothered me for a week before I let myself climb up and find out why." He stepped down off the chair, careful, and held the little black button out on his gloved palm so I could see it. "Older than the system I installed. Older than the one before it. By the dust and the gauge of the wire I put it at a decade and a half, maybe more. It doesn't transmit at all. It feeds down a hardline run through two hundred years of stone to somewhere that isn't this house. Nothing I scan for touches a buried wire. You'd only ever find this by knowing the wall was wrong."
The room tilted, very slightly, the way it had at the dining table when he turned the ledger to me.
"It watched the dinner," I said. My voice came out flat. "Last night. The lamb. The candles." Me at the window, thinking I was home.
"It watched everything," Cormac said. "All that time. Every plan made at this table. Every word." He closed his gloved hand around it. "This is how they knew Galway. Not a leak. Not one of us. This. They've been in the room the whole time. We ran countersurveillance against an enemy who was already inside the walls before we were born."
I should have felt the floor go out from under me. Some of me did. But the years teach a person to put the falling in a box and deal with the standing first, so I put it in the box, and I made myself look at the thing Cormac held and think.
The camera was that old, in the wall of the Kerrigan dining room, and there had been exactly one window in all that time when anyone outside this family had the run of this house. The alliance. Back when my family and theirs were stitched together by an arrangement made over recordings in the study downstairs, close enough that Madigan people moved through these rooms like their own. Someone my father trusted stood in this room with the ease of a friend and left this behind inthe plaster. Which meant whoever burned my home down was welcomed into this one first. They didn't pick a side. They stood in the gap between the two families the whole time, a hand in each, waiting for the day it paid to pull.
And it cleared Boston in the same breath. Whatever told them about Galway told them from inside this room, years deep, long before Declan Sheridan's men ever rode toward that street to stand at our backs. I looked at Ronan and watched the arithmetic run through him the other direction, watched him land on the four calls he hadn't answered, the ally he was three days from cutting loose because the enemy had built the math to point that way. He'd wanted it to be Boston too, back then, because an ocean away is the easiest kind of enemy to have. The enemy had counted on exactly that. Left a camera in the plaster and let us spend our fear on the last friend we had.
"It was never Boston," he said. Low. To me.
