He laughs without humor. “Would it have stopped you if you had?”
I picture her palm against the lattice, the way she said yes like she invented the word for me to try. My answer takes half a breath and exactly no thought. “No.”
Rafferty goes very still. You can feel it in the room when a man decides the next thing he says better be the right thing. “Of course not,” he says finally. “Because you saw a girl dressed as a saint and decided to pull her down out of the painting and put your mouth on her until the gold leaf flaked and you saw the ruin underneath.”
“You make me sound sloppy,” I say. “I wasn’t.”We weren’t.
“Don’t split hairs.” He scrubs a hand over his mouth. “You broke the truce, Cayce.”
“No,” I say, and my voice doesn’t rise. It digs in. “The truce is a handshake that says we don’t put holes in each other in public. I didn’t break that.”
“You spotted their daughter and?—”
“I met a woman who could make up her own mind,” I cut in, and I don’t apologize for it. “And she did.”
Rafferty’s gaze slams into mine. For a beat, there’s nothing in the room but that and the slow hiss of the old radiator at Roisin’s hip.
“They’re our enemy,” he says at last, resorting to catechism.
“So is half of the goddamn country,” I answer, because I’ve done my homework since I learned to read. “But that’s a boardroom word. It’s not what happened in the confessional.”
His nostrils flare. “You think I care what happened in the confessional? I care what happens after. I care about the sit-down I now have to schedule and the mess I have to mop so you don’t start a war because you were—what—making memories?”
Tiernan’s Zippo clicks open and shut, open and shut. Roisin doesn’t blink.
“Say it plain,” I tell Rafferty. “You…they…are furious I touched their biggest bargaining chip.”
Rafferty bares his teeth. “She was valuable. Untouched. Promised to God for the optics—I don’t give a damn to be honest—she was Moretti’s prized possession. Now she’s damaged goods.” He spits the words like they offend him in his own mouth. “And every man in an old suit is going to ask me what I plan to do about the Shannon boy who can’t keep his fly zipped when the city’s peace is riding on it.”
There it is. Plain.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“What I always do,” he snaps. “Clean up your goddamn mess, boy.”
He says it like a prayer. Like penance and bleach and everything poisonous.
“Specifics,” I say, even though I know all the definitions. “Tell me exactly what you’re going to do.”
“Pull footage from every source I can find. Lean on a dean to do our bidding. Offer a donation for amnesia where it applies.” He lifts a hand, two fingers. “Or remove the variable.”
He means the girl. He doesn’t say it. He knows better than to say that to me. I’ve already acted out of character where she’s concerned. He’ll know that.
“No,” I say. “She’s not a variable you can eliminate.”
Rafferty takes two quiet steps back and finally goes to the desk, palm on the blotter, body angling to make a point and argue. Tiernan stays in the corner, half my conscience, half ready to jump down our uncle’s throat with a blade just to make me happy. Roisin’s boots hook the radiator run while her eyes track between us like she’s running sums. But she’s not. She’s gauging when and where the fists will fly and what the cost of peace will be.
“Then you tell me,” Rafferty says, voice level, “how I keep us out of a headline and out of a morgue.”
“You don’t erase her,” I say. “The Church loves a fallen woman story more than God. If you scrub it, they’ll write a worse one. If you threaten, they’ll pray louder. The only way out is through.”
“And your solution?”
My mind races for a half a second. Then a flash of a face and a story I heard every night as a child. “I have to claim her.”
The room gets very, very quiet.
“At the sit-down,” I add, because the how matters. “The same way Pops claimed Nan back in the day. Take a wife to prevent a war.”
