Tiernan nodded.
The car stopped.
Across the narrow street stood a bar with brick walls and a plain sign over the door.
Madigan's.
My family's name. I'd looked at it on a bottle in my study my whole life. Now it was over a door in Chicago, and I thought about a girl of fifteen running through the dark with the sea at her back, and about everything that had happened between that night and this one, and I made a promise.
Not to her. Not yet.
To myself.
I won't let her down again.
"Right," I said. "Let's go."
7
SIENNA
Wednesday prep was the same as every other day's prep.
I told myself that about six times between waking up and opening.
Stock check. Order sheet. Polish the glasses that didn't need polishing, because my hands needed a job. Wipe the bar top that was already clean. Put the music on low, something my mother would have liked, because that's what I play when I'm nervous and want to feel less alone. I wasn't nervous. I was thorough. Work the opening checklist the way I work it every day. Item by item. Nothing skipped.
Normal Wednesday.
Completely normal Wednesday.
I hadn't slept well. Fine. I hadn't slept well in years, and I'd built a working relationship with the gray of running on too little, the way other people build one with bad weather. I dress for it. I move slower. I make no decisions I don't have to make.
I made one decision last night.
To stay.
I still wasn't sure it was the right one, and I'd stopped trying to be, because certainty was a thing I'd learned to distrust. Certainty was what pointed me at the Kerrigans all those years.Certainty was what kept me in Chicago building something half shrine and half surveillance op and calling it a life.
I was tired of being certain.
Maybe that was all last night was. Exhaustion in the costume of wisdom.
Or maybe not. Maybe a man with blue eyes had sat at my bar, drank my father's whiskey, and said someone was still thinking about them. Maybe something in all those years of certainty had shifted. And maybe I needed to know why before I did anything at all.
I was polishing the same glass for the third time when the door opened.
I didn't look up right away. You don't jump every time a door opens, or you spend your whole life jumping. I set the glass down, reached for the next, and looked up in the unhurried way of a woman with nowhere to be and nothing to prove.
Three men.
My hands went still on the glass.
The blue-eyed one from last night. Tiernan. I had his name now. I'd found it in my files in the small hours. He gave me that easy grin like we were old friends and not a woman and the man who'd conned his way into her bar, and the worst part was that some traitor corner of me was glad to see it. He'd gotten under the wire once already, in Chicago, before I knew to guard against him. Knowing his name didn't fix it. If anything it made it worse. Beside him, the careful dark-haired one, whose name I'd found too. Cormac Harrington. Ronan Kerrigan's enforcer since they were boys in Dunraven together.
And in front of them both, Ronan Kerrigan.
I had files on him. Photographs, some recent, some not. I'd built a picture of this man from the outside over the years, the way a person builds a picture of anything they can't get close to, out of fragments and inference and the things people say abouta man when they don't think anyone who matters is listening. I knew his height and his history and the shape of his reputation, and how his family had run since his father died and left him the whole weight of it.
