“Plain enough,” I say. “I’m already taking his most valuable possession. I don’t need to rub it in.”
“And you won’t let your temper write checks your skull can’t cash,” he adds.
“I won’t,” I say. “But I also won’t let you—or anyone—use me or what happened like a mop to keep the floor clean.”
Rafferty rubs his chest. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” He glances at Roisin. She’s already fishing in her coat pocket, flicks an antacid onto the blotter. He ignores it. “You sound like your mother when she wanted to climb up on her soapbox and make us beg for forgiveness.”
“To be fair, she usually earned it,” Roisin says.
“Call the woman,” Rafferty tells her without looking away from me. “Go get the ring.”
“On it.” Roisin is already thumbing her phone. “Band size?”
I flex my hand and picture hers. “Small.”
Roisin lifts a brow and holds up her own hand—long fingers, thin. “Smaller than mine?”
“Close,” I say. “Shorter. Not thinner.”
She mutters, pockets the phone, and slips out, boots whispering down the stairs. The room settles around the three of us again, too quiet. Waiting.
Tiernan finally pushes off the wall. The Zippo does a last neat snick and disappears into his pocket. “And the black sedan last night?”
I give him a look.
“Yeah,” he says. “We pulled the plate. Moretti’s driver. I can scrub the footage of them loitering. Tell the dean it’s art students testing a light meter.”
“No scrubbing,” I say. “No favors they get to cash in later. No hacks that stink up the servers or leave a data trace. We run our own play: keep eyes on her from outside the cone—two bodies at a distance, trade shifts noon and sundown, never the same camera twice. If she’s with the roommate, you don’t crowd; if she’s alone at night, you follow to an entrance and stop. You do not touch her friends. You do not talk to her roommate…Prudence…unless there’s a threat on the sidewalk. If a threat shows, you put your hands where they can see them and say you’re campus security hired for event overflow until she’s in a lit space. That’s it.”
Tiernan nods, a slow, clean acknowledgment instead of his usual grin. “Copy.”
“And Tiernan,” I add, because the smell of bleach is in my mouth and I didn’t put it there, “you don’t go through their trash looking for leverage. I’m not starting this with a blackmail file. If someone comes for her, you handle them, not her.”
“Understood,” he says. It actually sounds like he means it.
Rafferty picks up a pen and signs something that has nothing to do with me. Power as handwriting in contracts that I want nothing to do with. He sets the pen down and looks at me like he’s measuring whether my spine’s the right mettle for this thing I’ve decided to carry.
“Friday,” he says. “Soft voices for those that can’t handle our chaos. Small knives so the guns don’t get drawn. You don’t blindside me because no matter what happens inside these walls, we’re family outside them.”
“I just did by announcing my upcoming nuptials,” I tell him. “I won’t do it again.”
He leans back against the desk, studying me with the face he wears for wake rooms and weddings. “If you tie our name to hers—theirs—you don’t get walk when it’s inconvenient.”
“I don’t walk,” I say, and every cell in me knows the bill for that promise. “I settle in. I wait for what’s mine.”
He snorts. “God help us all.”
“Maybe He will,” I say. “He was in the room last night.”
Rafferty’s mouth twitches. “Don’t.”
“I’m not joking.” I let him see it. The stubborn. The soft under it I don’t show men who count. “I used Halloween the way I always do—one night a year where I ask instead of take. I ask because you sent me somewhere that made taking a muscle memory and asking a thing of pain. If you hadn’t shipped me to Blackvine, I wouldn’t need the ritual. I wouldn’t have been in that booth at all.”
Silence. Then a sound that isn’t quite a laugh, isn’t quite a groan. He drags a hand down his face. “I told you,” he says, breathing heavier, “I didn’t know what that place was. It was supposed to make our boys hard. Give you the…hardness…this world demands.”
“It did,” I say.
He looks up sharply at the tone.
