It was a strange thing to leave a daughter, and it never once fit the man I'd hunted. Cathal didn't grieve anyone. Cathal vanished into the smoke and stayed gone. Whoever my father meant had stayed close enough to weep at the graves. But I was too tired and too certain to chase the wrinkle of it right then, so I folded it away with the rest.
When I stood up, my legs held, which surprised me. I packed the letter with the ledgers, closed the box, and put my face back on, the dry one, the one that gave nothing away. Ronan turned around when he heard me move. He didn't ask. Whatever he saw, he let it be mine.
"You good?" he said.
"No," I said. "But I'm functional."
"That'll do."
We went back down the narrow stair into the gray.
And that was when it went wrong, because I felt it before I saw it, the way I'd felt the weather turning my whole childhood. The street had the wrong number of people in it. There'd been an old man on the corner when we went in, feeding gulls. He was gone. The bench he'd been on was empty, and a car that hadn'tbeen there before sat at the far end with its engine running and nobody getting in or out of it.
I didn't slow down. The years had taught me you never slow down. I kept my pace exactly the same and put my hand flat against Ronan's back, two taps, the signal Cormac had drilled into all of us in the kitchen the day before like it was nothing, like it was a fire drill.
"We've got company," I said, low and pleasant, like I was telling him about the weather. "Don't look. Two o'clock. Engine running."
Ronan didn't look.
"Cormac," he said into his collar. "We're burned."
23
RONAN
"We're burned," I said into my collar, and then I had about four seconds before the street told me how badly.
It told me fast. The car at the end of the lane popped both front doors at once, which no innocent car ever did, and two men came out of it moving with the unhurried economy of men who'd done this before. Not running. Walking, fast, hands already inside their coats. Behind us, the wool shop doorway I'd just walked Sienna out of had a third man in it now, filling it, and he hadn't been there sixty seconds ago.
Boxed. Front and back. On a street too narrow to run sideways out of.
They knew.
The thought went through me cold and clean and I put it away, because there was no time for it. There was time for exactly one thing, getting her out of the box before it closed, and everything else could wait until everyone in it was still breathing.
"Wall side," I said. "Move, goddamn it."
Sienna moved. That was the thing about her, the thing I'd think about later when I had room to think about anything. She didn't freeze. She didn't ask and she didn't waste a half second on disbelief. She had the box read before I finished telling herabout it, and she went for the gap I made toward the shop wall, low and fast, the steel record box clamped against her chest under one arm like she'd rehearsed running with it.
The man in the shop doorway came for her.
He was big and committed, and he made the mistake every big committed man makes, which was assuming the smaller person in front of him was the easier problem. He reached for her with both hands. She didn't pull back the way the body wants to. She stepped into it. Dropped her shoulder, took his reach past her, and drove the hard edge of the steel box up under his chin with everything her legs gave her.
Something in his face came apart. He went down sitting, which is the worst way down, the way that means the lights went out before the body got the message.
She was already past him.
Trained, Cormac had said, reading her file at six that morning. Not military. Trained. He'd said it flat, no color on it, and I'd taken it as information. Watching it was another thing entirely. Watching it, I understood that all the years I'd spent imagining her surviving had pictured the wrong thing. I'd pictured her hiding. She hadn't been hiding. She'd been getting ready.
Then the first shot went, and there was no more time for understanding anything.
It came from the two at the car, and it was suppressed, which told me the last useful thing I'd learn for a while. Men who suppressed their weapons on a public street in daylight were men with the kind of backing that made noise disappear afterward. Professionals. Funded. Here for a reason worth the exposure.
The round went wide and chipped stone off the wall a foot from Sienna's head, and she dropped without being told. I put two of my own back down the lane to make them honest, andthat bought us the second we needed, because that was when Cormac arrived.
He arrived the way Cormac did everything, completely and without warning. The second car came around the bottom of the lane at a speed that street had never seen, and Tiernan was out the passenger window before it stopped, laying fire down the lane in a tight controlled pattern that wasn't trying to hit anyone so much as trying to make them want to be somewhere else. The two from the car decided somewhere else was a fine idea and broke for cover.
"In, in, in," Tiernan shouted, and I had my hand on Sienna's collar. I ran her toward the car and she was running by herself, the box still locked against her ribs. We were maybe ten feet from the door when the fourth man came out of the alley between the shops.
