Page 36 of Crown of Thorns

"The pretending is the last thing that's mine," I said. "So I'll keep it."

Roisín studied me. The assessment was different from the men's, no territorial evaluation, no power hierarchy calculation. Woman to woman. Recognising something in the other that the room didn't have the vocabulary to name.

"Good," she said. "Keep it. And when you're ready to stop pretending, about anything, call me."

She touched my arm. The gesture was light, controlled, carrying the diplomatic precision of a woman who understood that physical contact at an event like this was observed and catalogued by everyone with a line of sight. The touch said: we've met. The touch said: this matters. The touch said: I am either the most dangerous person in this room or the most useful, and neither of us will know which until you decide what you want.

She walked away. The room absorbed her, the crowd, the chandeliers, the swirl-patterned carpet. I watched her disappear into a conversation with a man I recognised from the broadsheets: a property developer whose portfolio intersected with both Gallagher and Doyle interests.

Lorcan's hand found my back again. He'd been watching. Of course he'd been watching, the surveillance infrastructure was his instinct, not just his protocol. His hand was heavier than before. The thumb didn't move. The touch communicated ownership with a clarity that said he'd seen the conversation with Roisín and understood exactly what it represented: a channel opening between his wife and his rival's daughter that existed outside his control.

"Making friends?"

"Making observations."

His jaw tightened. The micro-expression I'd learned to read, not anger, assessment. The operational mind processing a variable it hadn't fully accounted for.

I let his hand stay on my back. The weight of it, possessive, protective, carrying the residual intensity of the study three nights ago, was complicated. Everything about him was complicated. The man who worshipped my freckles and destroyed my independence. The man who held me through his own vulnerability and maintained surveillance on my phone calls.

The function continued. The chandeliers blazed. In my pocket, my phone held Roisín Doyle's number, entered during our conversation with the casual efficiency of a woman who'd been exchanging contacts at events like this since she was old enough to hold a champagne flute.

Olive branch or trap. Possibly both. I'd decide later. For now, I had a number I hadn't told Lorcan about, and the having was its own small revolution, the first piece of information in five months that belonged entirely to me.

Chapter twenty-one

The Breeding Ground

Renny

I noticed the disappearances on a Monday.

Month five bleeding into month six. The spring had loosened winter's grip enough to let grey morning light into the corridors, and the house felt fractionally less like a bunker and fractionally more like the institutional residence it had been designed to be. I'd been living in it long enough now to know its rhythms — the shift changes, the kitchen schedules, the particular ebb and flow of personnel that moved through the compound with the regulated consistency of an organism maintaining its functions.

The groundskeeper was first. A man named Tomás who'd been maintaining the gardens since Padraig's era — steady, quiet, the kind of worker who becomes invisible through consistency. I'd started talking to him in month two, during the morning walks I'd adopted as a substitute for the coastal walks I'd lost with the clinic. He knew the plants. I knew the plants from a different angle — veterinary pharmacology overlapped with botanical knowledge in ways that made our conversations genuinely useful. He'd shown me the herb garden Mrs. Fahey maintained behind the kitchen wall, and we'd discussed the medicinal properties of the foxglove that grew along the south-facing boundary.

On Monday, Tomás wasn't there. The garden was maintained — someone had trimmed the hedges — but the person doing the trimming was younger, unfamiliar, working with the careful efficiency of a replacement who'd been briefed on the protocols but hadn't absorbed the rhythm of the place.

I asked Mrs. Fahey.

"Transferred to the Cork property. Lorcan felt his skills were better suited to the bloodstock grounds."

The explanation was reasonable. The timing was suspicious. Tomás had been transferred the week after I'd mentioned to Lorcan, during one of our evening briefings, that the groundskeeper had excellent knowledge of the property's boundary walls and drainage systems. Information I'd offered as conversation. Information that had been, apparently, received as a threat assessment.

I filed it.

The second disappearance was subtler. A woman named Cara who worked in the administrative office attached to the compound — mid-twenties, efficient, with the particular warmth of someone who hadn't yet learned to mute her personality to match her employer's operational temperature. She'd started bringing me tea in the library, unprompted, and the tea had evolved into brief conversations about Dublin — she was from Drumcondra, she had a sister in Galway, she'd studied business at DCU and ended up in the Gallagher administrative structure through a cousin's recommendation.

The conversations were small. The connections were real. She was the first person in the house who talked to me as if I were a woman her age rather than a title or a strategic variable.

After two weeks, Cara was reassigned to the Waterford office. The explanation — "staffing needs" — came from Dec, not Lorcan, which meant the decision had been made at a level that required distance from the person making it. Lorcan wanted the removal but didn't want his fingerprints on it. The distinction was itself a form of data.

The third disappearance confirmed the pattern.

A council member's wife — Moira, older, with the particular social intelligence of a woman who'd navigated Dublin's criminal ecosystem for decades. She'd invited me to lunch. I'd accepted. The lunch was pleasant, informative, the kind of social exchange that builds alliance through the currency of shared experience. She'd told me about her own early years in the organisation, the isolation, the surveillance, the gradual accommodation that she'd learned to call adaptation and that I recognised, with clinical precision, as a form of institutionalisation.

Three days after the lunch, Moira's husband was reassigned to oversee the Limerick operation. The family relocated. Moira texted to apologise for cancelling our second meeting. The text was careful. The carefulness told me she'd been told why they were relocating and had decided that maintaining contact with me was a risk she wasn't willing to take.

Three connections. Three removals. The interval between each was consistent, five to eight days after the connection became visible. The method was identical: reassignment, relocation, strategic justification. No confrontation. No prohibition. Just the quiet elimination of every relationship I formed outside the household's inner circle.