I nodded. He removed his hand. We returned to the map.
Late night. The Hook.
Morven came. She did not come to the manor – she came here, to the Hook, where I had been sleeping three nights a week since the abduction. She came through the front door at eleven and found me in the training room upstairs.
The training room was a converted store room with a heavy bag and a bench and a space heater that rattled and a window that looked out over the harbour. I was on the floor. The planning application was spread around me – annotated pages, pencil notes, the Syndicate lease, a printout of the trust registry that Cillian had sent over at six. I was working through it the way I worked through everything: slowly, methodically, with the patience of a man who had learned that brute force was less useful than understanding.
She sat beside me. She did not ask about the Hook or the distance or the three nights I had not come home. She brought biscuits. She brought a Thermos of tea. She sat on the cold floor beside me and she opened the Thermos and poured two cups and she was warm and close and she smelled of the manor – woodsmoke and cold stone and the lavender soap she used – and the Hook smelled of old lager and the sea and the smell of her in this space was a collision of the two places that mattered most to me.
We sat in silence for a long time. I read. She drank her tea. Her shoulder was against mine.
“I don’t want to lose it,” I said.
“The Hook or us?”
The question was quiet and it was direct and it was the question I had been unable to ask myself because asking it meant admitting that the distance was not strategic, it was fear. I was afraid. I had been the one they took. The weak point in the house. The one who could be carried out of it. And the fear said: remove yourself, and the removal will protect them, and the protection is worth the loneliness.
But the loneliness was not worth it. It was hollowing me out. And Morven was sitting on the cold floor of the Hook’s training room with her shoulder against mine and biscuits and a Thermos and the quiet, steady refusal to let me disappear.
“Both,” I said.
“Then stop sleeping here and come home.”
I looked at her. She looked at me. The space heater rattled. The harbour lights moved on the water outside the window.
What followed was quiet and close. She took my hand and put it on her waist and moved into me and the planning application pages crumpled beneath us and neither of us cared. It was the intimacy of a man who does not ask for comfort and a woman who has stopped waiting for him to ask. She held me andI held her and we said with our bodies what we should have been saying for weeks:you are not the weakness. You are the reason any of this is worth protecting.
I came home that night. I did not leave again.
The following morning. Rona found it.
She was running the shell company trace – the six Ardmore subsidiaries, the property chain, the corporate structure – and she found a seventh property. Not a Syndicate site. A residential address in Cairndhu.
She looked it up. Cross-referenced it against the Syndicate’s records, the council tax registry, the electoral roll.
The address was a flat on the outskirts of Cairndhu. A small flat. The kind of flat a man allows himself when he has been exiled from everything he had.
Duncan Mackie’s flat.
She brought this to Lachlan’s study at seven in the morning. The room went silent.
Mackie owned the building Morven’s father lived in.
CHAPTER 14
Morven’s Father
MORVEN
The flat is exactly the size of what a man allows himself when he is trying to be smaller than he was. I stood in the doorway and let myself feel how much I still loved him, because denying it did not make it smaller.
Duncan’s flat. A ground-floor rental on the Cairndhu outskirts, past the harbour, past the last of the terraced streets, in the row of post-war council blocks that faced the estuary with their backs to the town. The building was clean but tired – pebble-dashed walls, metal-framed windows, a communal entrance that smelled of damp carpet and the disinfectant someone used on the stairs.
I had not been here before. I had known the address since the Winter Wager – Lachlan had told me where Duncan had been placed, in the controlled, neutral language he used for operational matters that were also personal. Duncan’s exile. His condition of release. The flat, the sobriety requirement, themonthly check-ins with Cillian that served as both welfare visits and surveillance.
I had not come. For three months, I had not come, and the not-coming was its own kind of statement – a daughter learning that the distance she had always needed was finally available, and the availability did not feel like freedom. It felt like an empty space where the obligation used to be.
But Mackie owned this building. And Mackie had sent a man to Duncan’s door. And the empty space was suddenly a breach point.
