Page 87 of Crown of Thorns

"From who?"

"Someone inside. Someone with access to Lorcan's rotation charts. Someone Lorcan trusts."

The car moves through the rain. Toward safety. Away from the truth I'm about to hunt.

"Keep talking," I tell Roisín. "Tell me it all."

Outside, the city is dark and wet and full of men who want me dead.

Inside this car, I'm already three moves ahead of them.

Chapter forty-four

The Stranger

Dec

I've known Lorcan Byrne for twelve years. I know the way he takes his coffee—black, no sugar. I know the way he moves through a room with the deliberate control of a man who's learned that power is visible in stillness, in the economy of gesture. I know the sound of his voice when he's making a decision—measured, cold, the kind of voice that precedes violence because the violence is already decided and he's simply explaining it to you. I know the sound it makes when he's already determined an outcome and is merely informing you of what's been orchestrated, managed, controlled.

I know his tells. The way his jaw tightens before he delivers bad news. The way he touches his ring finger when he's calculating options. The way he goes still before he gives an order that will result in someone's death.

I don't know the man who walked into the Leeson Street safe house at 14:47.

This man is a stranger, and he's terrifying.

This man has blood up to his wrists. Not metaphorically. Literally. The arterial spray is dark and the palms are slick with it and it's soaked into the cuffs of his shirt. His dress shirt is the one he was wearing this morning—charcoal, expensive, tailored. It's now soaked through with someone else's vital fluid. The blood is still wet. He came here directly. He came here without stopping to clean or compose himself, and then at some point in the last ten minutes, he cleaned his hands and changed his shirt, which suggests a level of deliberation that's somehow more terrifying than if he'd simply arrived looking like he'd walked through an abattoir.

His eyes are wrong. They're too bright, too laser-focused, aimed at a point that might be Renny or might be something beyond her, some target in the middle distance that only he can see. The pupils are blown. He's running on pure adrenaline and rage and something else I don't have a word for.

"Where," he says. Not a question. A demand. His voice is controlled. Controlled is worse than rage. Rage is honest and predictable. Controlled is the moment before an apocalypse. Controlled is the sound of a man who's decided something irrevocable and is simply executing it now.

Renny is pale. She's sitting on the edge of the safe house sofa and she's composed in that clinical way she has—the way a veterinarian is composed while suturing a wound. But I can see the tremor in her hands. I can see the way her eyes are tracking his movements like he might combust. She was nearly killed today. She was in that community center and there were professional assassins and they nearly got her, nearly erased her, and the only reason she's alive is timing and angle and the fact that Cillian was positioned correctly. She was nearly killed today. The community center attack was professional, coordinated, nearly successful. If Cillian had been thirty seconds slower, if the angles had been different, if chance had tilted differently,

Renny would be dead.

"Safe house on Leeson Street," Cillian reports. His voice is steady, but even he's unsettled. Cillian has been with Lorcan longer than I have. He's seen violence. He's perpetrated violence. But this is different. "The shooters are contained. We have them contained."

"Names," Lorcan says.

"Mikel Donnelly and Brian Shaughnessy."

"Find out who sent them,' he says"

I watch Lorcan process this. I watch the moment when he decides what happens next. The decision takes maybe two seconds. The execution will take much longer.

"Lorcan," I say quietly. I shouldn't speak. Operationally, I shouldn't speak. But I'm watching this man and I'm not recognizing anything in him that I've recognized for twelve years.

His head turns. His eyes find mine and there's nothing in them. There's no warmth, no calculation, no strategy. There's just absence and behind the absence is something that looks like hunger.

"Dec," he says, and the way he says my name is like watching a blade turn in light.

"The Doyle compound is protected. We move on them now, the Doyles consolidate. We end up in a war we can't control."

"Then we don't control it," Lorcan says. "We burn it."

This isn't strategy. This isn't the careful mathematics of power that Lorcan's built his entire reign on—the calculations that Padraig taught him, the long game, the setup that takes years and yields influence that compounds like interest. This is something primal, something that operates on a frequency I haven't heard from him before. This is protection that's stopped being strategic and started being visceral. This is a man who watched his wife nearly get killed and is now enacting consequences that will reshape the Dublin underworld.

I'm watching him decide to burn a city because one woman was in a room where bullets were flying.