Tiernan whistles once, low. Roisin’s mouth doesn’t move. Her eyes, though—there’s a flare of something there that reads likeit’s about time.
“Claim,” Rafferty repeats. He steeples his fingers, a gesture he stole from a man who died for less. “You’re gonna marry the Italian’s daughter.”
“Yes.” I should be panicking at the loss of my freedom, at the way I’m going to have to adjust and change my entire life. But all I can think about is the way she felt like she belonged to me.
“You’re twenty-four.”
I almost laugh. Almost. “I can count.”
He ignores it. “You’ve met her twice.”
“Once,” I correct.
“And you think walking into a room with Don Marco Moretti to announce you’ve fallen in—what—lust?” He waves a hand like either one is an oil spill. “You think that ends in anything but me upgrading my blood pressure medication?”
I breathe through the urge to put both hands on the desk and push the past off it onto the floor. “I think it ends in a truce the families and the Church both understand: rings and optics that aren’t able to be denied. Moretti’s daughter stays out of the convent and he doesn’t lose face with any of the powers that be. We keep Boston from turning into fireworks and funerals and no innocents die.”
“And the girl?” he asks, like he’s checking if I remember she’s a person.
“She knows our world better than any outsider might. She’ll make a powerful queen for our family.”
Tiernan scratches his jaw. “You’re drafting a life where she’s happy about this, before knowing anything for certain.”
“Someone has to.” I unclench my fists. “Someone who knows what a locked door is for.”
That lands where I want it to. Rafferty’s eyes flick to the crucifix and back. He remembers the brochure on this very desk, the one with the sunshine and the mountains and Blackvine Ridge written like a vacation instead of a lesson with teeth.
“Careful,” he says, voice roughening. “Watch your tread.”
“Why?” My voice stays even, the way the chaplain at Blackvine taught me to answer the question he wanted and not the one he asked. “Because the last time I did as I was told you and my father put me on a plane to Colorado and called it making me a man?”
Rafferty’s breath leaves him like it got shoved. He grips the edge of the desk hard enough to pale his knuckles. “I’ve apologized?—”
“To the mirror,” I say. “Never to me.”
“It was supposed to be a place that made our boys hard,” he bites out, each consonant a clipped bruise. “Give you what this world requires. I didn’t know what it was.”
“But you knew enough,” I answer. “You knew the doors would lock and I wouldn’t escape. You knew men would come out different. You hoped different meant useful.” I let that hang, the way the cold hung in those dorms before dawn. “Don’t talk to me about cleanup like it’s a noble thing you do for love. You clean so you don’t have to live with the guilt of the monster you’ve turned me into.”
He looks at me for a long time. His chest rises once, tight, like the air’s cost him extra. “It worked,” he says at last, flat as a shut drawer.
“Sure,” I say, and let my eyes go as empty as they learned to be at Blackvine. “It worked. I’m even more ruthless than you or my Da could ever have imagined.”
We stand in that for a beat. Tiernan’s Zippo clicks, open-shut, open-shut. Roisin’s heel taps the rung. The radiator hisses like a snake swallowed a pipe.
No one moves for long, tense seconds.
Roisin hops off the radiator first, breaking the toxic taste of masculine energy around us. “What do you need?” she asks me, as if the rest of it can be shoveled into a hole we’ll seed with daisies later.
“A ring,” I say automatically, then tilt my head. “I want her to know that she’s mine, and that I’ll take whatever bullets come our way as long as she remains in her place at my side.”
Roisin’s eyes brighten. “I know a woman in the North End who works in dark silver and Irish charm—Ogham marks and all. She has stock and she owes me a favor. I know exactly what you need and can have it here in twenty.”
Rafferty exhales like a man being dragged toward sanity. “If we do this, it’s not a pub crawl we can control. It’s linen and quiet expectations and five courses that we can’t turn away from. You will not posture.”
“I’ll be a gentleman,” I say. I’m good at war, but I’m good at the other stuff, too.
“You’ll be steady.” His gaze narrows. “And if Don Marco tries to get under your skin—if he needles you about your age, your mother, or even fuckin’ Colorado—you do not take the bait. You do not stand. You do not raise your voice. You let me talk first, and when it’s your turn you say exactly what we agree and nothing more.”
