She nods and not much else. “I have to tell her mother,” she says eventually. “I have to—” The rest breaks off. “Do not tell me to let you handle it.”
“I wouldn’t,” I say. “I only want to be in the room when you don’t want to be alone.”
Her mouth twitches. “You ruin most rooms you’re in.”
“I’ll stand in a corner,” I say. It wins me nothing, but it doesn’t lose me more.
I leave her to the calls. I go back to work that isn’t work, to ordering the night into columns and names. The day lurches forward. The kitchen, because it is a kitchen, still has to boil stock and slice onions and set mise in neat trays as if the world outside isn’t bleeding.
Just before noon the hostess knocks on my makeshift upstairs office and hands me Aoife’s phone. “She asked me to bring this to you,” she says, wary around the edges, as if the phone might explode in her palm. “Voicemail came in three minutes ago. From Siobhan.”
I thumb the screen, hit play, put it to my ear. Her voice is too bright, too fast.
“I saw something,” Siobhan says, breathless. “And I think they know I did. I’m afraid I’m next.”
The message ends with the small, wet click of a swallowed sob. I stare through the window at the alley I’ve turned into a floodlit stage and feel the old, familiar cold come climbing back up my spine.
I go to Aoife immediately. She wipes her face with the heel of her hand and lets out a small sound that might be a laugh if it weren’t so tired. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, hoarse.
“You don’t have to do anything tonight.”
“That’s not how your world works.”
“My world can wait when yours needs to breathe.”
She searches me for the trap. I try to be a room without corners.
Before she can answer, a sharp quick footfall hits the hall. The nanny appears in the doorway, cheeks flushed above the white collar of her uniform and the kind of calm on her face that tells you there’s very little calm behind it.
“Sir,” she says, and glances at Aoife, then back to me because I am the one she is paid to alarm. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but—” She swallows. “Liam isn’t in his bed.”
Everything in me turns to ice and then to motion. I am standing before I know I’ve stood. “Start again,” I say. “Every word.”
“I went to turn the page of the book I’d left on his nightstand,” Niamh says, fighting to keep her voice steady. “Hewas asleep ten minutes before, I swear it. I took the wash to the linen closet, came back, and—he wasn’t there. His window’s still latched, but the little door to the service corridor is open. I didn’t leave it that way.” Her eyes plead for absolution and for orders in the same breath. “I’ve called for Seamus. He’s checking the stair.”
Aoife is already moving, color gone. “No,” she says, to the world, to the night, to the set of choices gathering like wolves.
“Lock the exterior doors,” I tell Niamh, and my voice is not loud but it travels. “No one in. No one out. Seamus checks the service stairs. Brigid gets eyes on every bed in the nursery wing. Callum pulls the cameras for the last twenty minutes and feeds them to my phone.” I turn to Aoife. “We’ll find him.”
“I’m coming,” she says, not waiting for my permission because it isn’t mine to give.
We run the corridor together, the portraits strobing in our peripheral vision, the house suddenly too big and too full of places a boy could fit. At the landing I taste metal again. It isn’t the letter this time. It’s the simple, ancient copper of fear.
Liam’s room door stands open, lamplight soft on the whale-print duvet. A sock on the rug like a white flag. A book fallen spines-up on the floor, small and earnest.Tales of Cú Chulainn. The bed is a question. The bed is an accusation. The bed is empty.
24
DECLAN
For a breath I hear nothing in the world, not the alarms switching over, not the footsteps of men running, not the breath torn from Aoife where she grips the frame with both hands as if strength can be dragged out of varnished wood and fed back into the body. I touch the sheet with two fingers, find heat still lingering there, and the heat tells me I am late by minutes, not hours, which is both blessing and blade.
“Close the house,” I say, and the order goes out like a current. “Every gate sealed, staff contained to the blue salon, keys collected, radios up. Kieran, take the south wall. Eddie, the garage. Seamus, the cameras in the nanny wing first, the old nursery suite, then the eastern path. Call a locksmith and have every exterior and service lock rekeyed by dawn, window latches included.”
Aoife’s lips move without sound, then sound returns and it is a small ragged “No,” and then another, harder, “No,” and she steps into the room as if the bed might change its mind and give her back the child it was holding twenty minutes ago. I catch her shoulders before she tears the covers apart for the fourth time, the movement of someone drowning not someone searching,and I press my mouth close to her ear because anything louder will break her.
“I will bring him back,” I tell her, steady because I must be, because anything less than steady is failure. “Stay in the house, stay where I can find you, give Seamus your phone, let him mirror it to the feed and keep it on you, answer when I call.”
She twists to face me and the look in her eyes would burn a church to the foundations. “Do not tell me to stay still.”
