But I was tired. Past the muscle, into the bone, into whatever lies under the bone. The longest two days of a life that's had some long ones, and a woman asleep in a room across the house, and I was done.
"I need sleep," I said, standing. "We'll get into the rest in the morning. I've got a thousand more questions and right now I can't hold a one."
"Course." Byron rose with me. "Get your rest. We've got time now."
I came around the table to him.
I meant to give him something small. A hand on the shoulder, a half-grip, the careful thing a man offers a father he isn't sure of. That was the plan.
It didn't survive contact.
The second my arms went around him and his came around me, the years came up out of the ground at once. He was solid and real andthere,breathing, his hand rising to the back of my head the way it had when I was a boy. I held my father in the corner of that impossible house and felt something I'd hauled since I was a teenager finally set itself down. I hadn't known how much I needed it. I'd been the man who needs nothing so long I'd let myself forget it was a lie. I needed this. Had for half my life.
And somewhere in the middle of it, before I let go, I decided.
Whatever this was—the program, the brothers, the stolen billions, the whole impossible machine of it—it was mine now. He'd said so, and holding him, I finally understood he'd meant it as a gift, not a sentence. I'd move heaven and earth before I let any of it fall. Before Trueborn went to Craine or any man like him. Before one of those fourteen who share my blood and my name got sold off like a page in a folder. Before anybody took my father a second time. I'd spend my own life before I'd watch Dominion Hall come down.
I decided it the way I decide everything. Like it was already true.
When I let go of him, I felt lighter than I have ever felt. Lighter than after a kill, lighter than at the graves, lighter than anything—a clean light, nothing owed and nothing buried under it. I smiled. I don't do that much. It sat strange and good on my face.
I pulled Tommy in, too, and held my brother hard. He laughed into my shoulder and called me an old bastard. For a breath, we were boys in a barn with chocolate on our hands and the whole world still out ahead of us.
Then, I left them, and walked the long way back through the sleeping house, past the stern old faces I understood a little better now, to the room at the far end.
She was where I'd left her. Dark hair across the pillow, breathing slow and easy. The first domino. The runaway bride in the blaze of ivory who'd looked across a Charleston street and turned the whole course of my life before either of us knew it. Everything since traced back to her, to that one impossible moment. I wouldn't trade a second of it—not the blood, not the grief, none of it—because all of it had carried me here. To this room. To her.
I eased into the bed. She stirred and found me in her sleep, fit herself against me without waking. I put my arm around her and held the one clean thing this poisoned world had ever handed me.
I'd marry her. I knew it plain as I knew my own name.
If she’d have a man like me—hard, with a body count and a graveyard in his past and a family full of secrets I'm only starting to learn the shape of—then, I'd spend whatever's left of me making sure she never once regrets walking out of that church and into my arms.
I'd ask her when the dust settles. When her family's whole and Craine's handled and the world quits tipping over every few hours.
I'd ask her. And I already knew, in the place where I keep the things I'm certain of, what she'd say.
I closed my eyes.
For the first time in longer than I can remember, the noise in my head went quiet—not because I'd fed it blood, but because I'd finally, somehow, come home.
EPILOGUE
MARY CATHERINE
Ihad come a long way to wake up in this room. Longer than the miles.
The light in Dublin arrived sideways—soft and diffuse, the sky outside a pale, silver-gray that was somehow not gloomy but alive, charged with the luminous quality of a country that had learned to make beauty out of weather.
The window was tall, the old Georgian kind. Beyond it, the rooftops ran in their irregular brick rows toward a horizon that was greener than I'd expected, even here in the city. For a moment—just one suspended moment before the rest of the morning arrived—I lay still and let it be exactly what it was.
We were in Dublin.
Brock's arm was around me, heavy and warm. I turned toward him and found him already awake, watching me with those dark eyes doing the thing they always did—present, seeing me.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning,” he said.
