For one second, something flickers across his face. Hurt. Real hurt. Then the anger closes over it.
“Don’t,” he says.
I keep going anyway, crying now and hating it and unable to stop. “I know what I’ve done. I know I made a weapon of your trust and then stood here wanting things I didn’t deserve. I know saying I love you doesn’t fix anything, and I’m not saying it to save myself. I’m saying it since I won’t lie to you again.”
His voice comes out low and lethal. “Pack your things.”
I freeze.
“Cillian.”
“Pack your things,” he repeats, louder now, and he points toward the door without taking his eyes off me. “You’re leaving tonight.”
My chest caves in around the air I’m trying to pull. “Please listen to me.”
“I listened.” He takes one step back and opens the distance between us like he cannot stand the sight of me close. “I listened while you told me my bed, my house, my men, and my dead were all fair ground for your father to reach through you.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you did.”
I wipe at my face and fail to steady my hands. “If I leave tonight, he’ll come for me.”
He laughs once, cold and furious. “Then maybe you should’ve thought of that before you came through my gate under a false name.”
I stare at him, and the last small hope I carried into this room dies where I stand.
He opens the study door and doesn’t look at me when he speaks. “Pack,” he says. “Get out.”
18
SAOIRSE
Two months later
I think I’m having a girl, and I would die keeping her safe from the ghosts of my old life.
The thought comes to me in the morning while I stand at the tiny sink in a rented flat over a locksmith’s shop, one hand braced on the counter and the other spread low over my stomach, where there is still more promise than proof to anyone else’s eye. I have no science for it, no sign anyone could point to and call certainty, still the feeling sits in me hard and clear, and I trust it more than I trust most people.
Two months ago, I walked out of Cillian’s house with a suitcase in one hand and my throat raw from trying not to make a sound.
Maeve followed me as far as the front steps and swore at her brother under her breath while she shoved cash into my coat pocket, then his mother gripped my face between both hands and told me to keep moving, to eat when I could, and to stop looking over my shoulder long enough to cross the drive without falling. I remember the gravel under my shoes, the cold aircutting through the heat of crying, and the way the front door stayed open behind me while no one called me back.
He never came out.
I made the gate before my knees started shaking, and I kept walking until the road bent and the house lights disappeared behind trees. At the bus stop near the old chapel wall, I stood under a broken shelter and threw up into wet leaves while a truck hissed past and sprayed the curb.
My phone buzzed in my bag twice that night, both numbers unknown, and I didn’t answer either.
I knew my father would move fast once Cillian cut me loose, and I knew he would assume two things at once, that I had failed him and that I had learned enough to become dangerous. He was right on both counts, so I did what he taught me to do when a route burned and the next one had to be built before dawn.
I disappeared in layers.
First the burner. I took it apart in a public restroom at a motorway service station, thumb shaking while I pried off the backing with a coin and snapped the SIM in half between my teeth and fingers. I dropped the pieces into three bins in three different places, then I carried the shell in my pocket until sunrise and fed it to a metal drum fire behind a closed fish stall near the quay, holding it with tongs I stole off a crate until the plastic curled and blackened and the screen burst.
I watched it melt all the way down.
After that, I changed names twice in eight days, used cash until it hurt, slept in one hostel, two guest rooms, and the back office of a woman in Limerick who used to clean books for men whoclaimed they ran import companies and wine clubs. She knew me by my mother’s maiden name, she took one look at my face and said, “You’ve brought a war to my doorstep,” then gave me tea and a lock for the inside of the room anyway.
