Her bedroom had undergone a transformation that I could only describe as "aggressively optimistic." Mary had painted the walls a color she called terracotta sunrise, which meant orange. Very, very orange. The kind of orange that made you blink when you walked in. The kind of orange that probably registered on satellite imagery.
"It's warm," Maeve said when she first saw it, in the tone of someone trying very hard to find the right adjective.
"It's a war crime," Gregor said.
Mary crossed her arms over her chest. "It's terracotta."
Gregor added. "It's the color of construction barriers."
Mary had beamed. "Thank you."
"You are welcome," Gregor said, which was not what he had meant and everyone knew it.
The girl was eighteen, almost nineteen, and legally dead in the eyes of her father's syndicate. Which meant she was freer than she'd ever been, and she was operating at a speed that suggested she was trying to cram three years of missed adolescence into every twenty-four-hour period.
She ate cereal at midnight. She watched films with the subtitles on in languages she didn't speak because she "liked the aesthetic."
She had asked Blade, completely sincerely, if he had ever considered a career in modeling, and Blade had looked at her like he had been asked to defuse a bomb.
Maeve watched all of this with the haunted tenderness of an older sister trying not to hold too tightly.
I saw it from the kitchen doorway, from the armory hall, from the back terrace when Mary sat with Mac and pretended she knew what to do with a baby. Maeve's hands would hover. Her mouth would open and close. She'd bite the inside of her cheek and force herself to stay still while Mary figured it out—the right way to support a head, the right angle for a bottle—because she knew, on some level, that Mary needed to figure things out on her own.
But it cost her. I could see it costing her.
Family, I was learning, was a more complicated weapon than anything I'd ever been trained on.
I found Mary in the kitchen at two in the morning.
She was cross-legged on one of the marble island stools in oversized sweatpants and a band T-shirt for a group I'd never heard of, eating dry cereal straight from the box and typing on a laptop with the focus of someone defusing the bomb Blade had been imagining.
"Normal people sleep at this hour," I said, heading for the fridge.
"Normal people haven't been locked in an Irish mob house for their entire adolescence." She didn't look up. "I have catching up to do."
"Fair." I grabbed a water bottle and leaned against the counter. "What are we catching up on?"
"My future."
She hit the Enter key with a decisive thwack and spun the laptop around.
Boston University. Red and white logo. Below it, in very official type:
We are pleased to inform you...
I blinked. "Boston. As in America."
"The one in Lincolnshire is apparently less exciting. I checked." She popped another handful of cereal into her mouth. "I applied under my new name. The transcripts you lot got me held up. I start spring semester in January, but they've approved early housing. I can leave this week."
"Business Management and pre-law," I read off the screen. Then I looked at her. "You're going to legally dismantle organized crime."
"I figure if I'm going to spend my life hiding from a syndicate, I should know how to take one apart from the inside." She said it the way other people talked about gap years. “And I couldn’t get in for art.”
I laughed. I couldn't help it. The sound bounced off the marble and the copper pots and the quiet of a house that had never heard anything like Mary McCarthy.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because I came down here prepared to have a responsible older-brother-in-law conversation, and you've already handled every point I was going to make." I shook my head. "You've thought of everything."
