Page 58 of Crown of Thorns

I should move. I should stand. I should walk to the bedroom and collect my things and call a number, any number, the practice, the cottage in Galway that still stands empty with my name on the deed, and begin the process of excision.

I do not move.

The not-moving is not paralysis. It is the body’s recognition that every direction carries cost, and the diagnostic mind that usually calculates trajectory has gone offline. No treatment plan. No differential. No structured approach to what comes next. Just a woman on a floor in the dark, and the specific, terrible knowledge that the man she loves is a wound she cannot reach.

When the light finally changes, the grey Dublin dawn, seeping through the north-facing glass like a reluctant witness. I stand. My legs hold. My hands have stopped shaking. The gross motor function has returned, and the clinical mind is flickering back online, tentative, testing its own instruments the way I test a stethoscope after dropping it.

I do not go to the bedroom. I do not collect my things. I go to the kitchen and I fill the kettle because the ritual of boiling water is the smallest unit of function I can manage, and function, any function, however minimal, is the first step in rebuilding a diagnostic framework from the wreckage.

The kettle clicks. The steam rises. I stand at the counter and I wait for the clinical mind to tell me what comes next.

It does not answer.

For the first time in eleven years of practice, the clinical mind has nothing to offer. No protocol. No pathway. No structured approach to the damage.

I pour the water. I drink the tea. I sit with the silence and the grey light and the specific, irreducible fact that I am in love with a man who concealed the truth of how my father died, and neither the love nor the concealment will dissolve under analysis.

Both are true. Both are permanent. The diagnostic framework cannot reconcile them.

I am the wound, and the wound does not heal on command.

Chapter thirty-one

The Unleashing

Lorcan

Fury lives in the small bones of the hand.

I know this now. I'm looking at my knuckles and thinking about anatomy—how the phalanges are delicate things, easy to break if you don't know what you're doing. I know what I'm doing. I've always known.

The man we brought to the abandoned warehouse on Smithfield is named Conor Maguire. He moved product for the Doyles. He arranged the arson. He knew it would happen during service hours, knew the place would be full. Dec identified him six hours after the explosion. One phone call was enough. One word.

Now he's sitting in a chair that's bolted to the concrete floor.

"Tell me," I say, "about the payment."

His jaw is already swollen. Dec worked him over before I arrived—softening, they call it. Making sure the subject is cooperative. Conor's left eye is nearly shut. His breathing is labored. Three ribs, maybe four, are probably broken.

He spits blood. It lands near my shoe.

I don't move. I stand very still and let the silence work. Silence is a weapon if you know how to use it. If you've had fifteen years to practice.

"Go to hell," he says.

Dec moves. He's fast—pivots from his position against the far wall and crosses the space in three strides. His fist comes up and connects with Conor's stomach. The sound is wet. Conor gasps like a fish pulled from water.

"I'll ask again," I say. My voice is quiet. Clinical. "Who paid you. How much. When did the arrangement start."

Conor coughs. There's pink foam on his lips now. Internal bleeding, maybe. I watch with the professional detachment of someone assessing a wound. "Roisín knows... nothing," he manages.

Interesting. He's worried about the Doyle's daughter. He's not worried about me. He's not worried about Dec.

He's worried about what I might do to someone he cares about.

"That's good information," I tell him. "But it's not what I asked."

The next hour is methodical. Conor tells me what he knows. The Doyles paid five thousand euros. The arrangement started eight months ago. Three different people approached him—a middle man, a supplier, and someone who called herself Maggie but probably isn't. He doesn't have her real name. He doesn't have her location. He has coordinates for a dead drop that's been used twice.