Page 63 of Crown of Thorns

She will come back or she will not.

If she comes back because I went to her and made the logic sound reasonable, she comes back to a man who has learned nothing. To a man who responded to the exposure of his manipulation by deploying more manipulation. To a man whose love is indistinguishable from his control.

If she comes back on her own terms, if she walks through the gate because she has processed the betrayal and decided, with full knowledge, that the man on the other side of it is worth the cost of staying, then she comes back to something real. Something that is not built on my architecture.

I do not know if she will come back.

The not-knowing is the worst thing I have ever endured. Worse than Padraig’s death, which was finite and could be grieved. Worse than the succession, which was dangerous but had a terminus. This has no terminus. This is the ongoing, daily uncertainty of a man who cannot control the outcome and has been forced, for the first time in his adult life, to wait.

I hate waiting. I am not built for it. Every instinct says: act. Deploy. Solve. The operational mind runs contingency plans in my sleep, scenarios, approaches, the words that would work, the gestures that would land.

I let the contingency plans run. I do not act on them.

The study holds its silence. The bay is dark. The phone sits on the desk, silent, and I do not call because calling would be the operational response and I am trying, for the first time, to be something other than operational.

I am trying to be the man she thought I was before she found the letters.

I am not sure that man exists. But I am learning that the trying might be the only thing I can offer her that is not contaminated by strategy.

The night passes. I do not sleep. The compound holds its breath around me, the institutional patience of a building that has outlived every crisis and will outlive this one. The hallway is quiet. Her absence is architectural, it lives in the spaces she occupied, in the kitchen where her tea sits untouched in the cabinet, in the bedroom where her side of the bed holds the specific cold of a surface no one has warmed in six days.

Dawn comes. The grey Dublin light through the bay window. Another day. Another set of operational decisions that do not include her.

I sit at the desk and I wait. Not patiently. Not with grace. But with the deliberate, terrible discipline of a man who is choosing, for the first time, to trust someone else’s timeline instead of imposing his own.

Chapter thirty-four

The Informant

Renny

Séan O'Donnell has been coming to the house for three weeks to advise Lorcan on estate management. He's old guard. Sixty-something, with the weathered face of a man who's been in the family business for forty years. He takes tea in the library. He smells like pipe tobacco and whiskey.

He also, apparently, sells information to the Doyles.

I've been back at Blackrock House for two weeks when I find out about Séan O'Donnell.

I find out at 10 PM on a Tuesday when Lorcan comes to find me in the study. The room is quiet. The lamp is warm. I'm reading a paper on equine tendon repair because the distance of academia feels safer than looking at my own life right now.

He behind him.

"O'Donnell is gone," he says.

I look up. His face is completely blank. The voice is flat. Operative voice.

"What do you mean, gone?"

"I mean he was selling information to the Doyles about our movements. Shipment dates. Warehouse locations. Territory coverage. Dec traced the communications this morning."

My book closes without me remembering closing it. "What did you do?"

"What needed to be done."

"Lorcan—"

"Don't." He sits across from me. The distance between us is suddenly the size of a room. "Don't ask me to explain. Don't ask me to justify. He betrayed the family. The punishment was carried out."

The word "punishment" hangs in the air like something with weight.