“You don’t have to be the one who kills him,” I say.
Rafferty’s eyes flash up to mine, not to make sure I mean it, to make sure I understand it. I do. This isn’t mercy.
He turns.
He doesn’t grandstand.
He doesn’t monologue.
He steps in close the way men do who have had to touch bad things and not flinch. He chooses a small tool from the table—a short length of steel with no romance to it.
He speaks one sentence in the old language he learned at a kitchen table, the kind that sounds like prayer even when it’s not. Then he gives the man in the chair an ending that’s acceptable for what he stole. No theater. No mess we can’t clean. No chance of waking up.
The room exhales.
Rafferty sets the tool down. He rests his palms on the edge of the table and breathes like a man back on a road he forgot existed. When he turns, he looks ten years older and ten years lighter.
“I’ll dispose of him,” he says. “No one will know.”
“They’ll know,” I say. “They just won’t be able to prove it.”
“That’s enough.”
“It is.”
We stand there for a moment in the hard light and the old building with the river listening.
“You should go,” he says finally. “She needs your face.”
“She has it,” I say. “I’m just keeping it attached.”
He almost smiles. “Go, boss.”
I leave him to his work because he’s good at it and because I trust him again. The night outside is the same as the night I walked in, which is always kind of insulting after something momentous happens. Tiernan is a length of shadow leaning on the car.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
“Done,” I say.
“You did it?”
“Raff did.”
“Good,” Tiernan says, meaning all of it.
We drive back without music or words. The city is a spine of light and dark. When we pull in, the men on the block melt back into not being seen.
Inside, the house smells like laundry and lemon and the last of the night. I strip in the hall and leave the jacket where I won’t have to see it in the morning. I slip into our room with the quiet you learn when you grew up with brothers and a grandmother who could hear lies from the next street over.
She’s still awake. Barely. Her eyes open when the floorboard in front of the window complains, the one Tiernan never got around to fixing because I like knowing where people step.
“You came back,” she says, as if there was a chance I didn’t.
“Always,” I say, and unlock the cuffs, then climb in.
She makes space without moving, a trick I will never stop respecting. I fit in behind her and pull her tight enough to make sure her bones remember me. My mouth finds the back of her neck. Her hand finds my forearm and pins it where it belongs.
“Did you…?” She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to.
