Page 54 of Crown of Thorns

"I love you," he says. "That's separate from the rest. That needs to be clear."

"I know that too."

And I do. I know that the love is real. I also know that the foundation beneath it is built on something that will require reckoning. That the moment of truth is coming. That when it arrives, I'll have to make a choice about whether the current love can survive the original deception.

The car moves through the rain. And I'm thinking about Roisín. About what she wants to tell me. About what operational strategy could possibly require a private conversation.

Tomorrow will change everything. But for now, in this moment, I'm still in the space where I can pretend the future is manageable. Where I can believe that all the pieces can fit together if we're careful enough.

By tomorrow evening, I'll know how wrong that belief is.

Chapter twenty-nine

The Real World

Renny

Séan O'Donnell caught me in the corridor after the Thursday briefing. The old guard moved differently than Lorcan's generation—slower, more deliberate, every step carrying the memory of a time when the corridors held different dangers.

"I didn't vote for this marriage," he said. His voice was low, private—the register of a man who'd learned that walls in the Gallagher compound had institutional memory. "Padraig asked my counsel and I told him it was a mistake. Bringing an outsider into the structure. A woman with no operational history. No understanding of what the machine requires."

I waited. The corridor was empty. The afternoon light came through the bay windows at the angle that made the dust motes visible—all the invisible particles of a house that had been accumulating secrets for thirty years.

"I'm starting to see why Padraig did it." Séan looked at me with eyes that had watched three decades of Gallagher leadership. "You're not what I expected. You're better. And that's the thing that worries me—because the ones who are better than expected are the ones this machine tries hardest to break."

He left. I stood in the corridor with the dust motes and the bay light and the specific weight of a compliment that felt more like a warning.

The air smelled like burnt sugar. I was three blocks from the clinic when it hit—a concussion that rolled through my chest and stripped sound from the world. Car alarms punched through the silence afterward, raw and insistent. Sirens threaded the Dublin evening.

I ran.

My feet knew the path before my brain caught up. The pub was on Baggot Street. Lorcan had mentioned it once—a Gallagher holding, three stories of dark wood and deeper money. I'd never been inside.

The front was caved in. Glass lay in geometric patterns across the pavement. Smoke pulled upward in thick fingers.

A woman sat on the curb holding her arm at the wrong angle. No blood yet—the shock hadn't worn off. I dropped beside her, my hands already moving through assessment. Dislocated shoulder, maybe fractured. The bone pointed where it shouldn't. She stared at nothing.

"Look at me," I said. My voice was steady. That was the crisis thing—you became what people needed, and the panic waited. "Siobhan?"

Recognition cut through the assessment even as my hands kept moving. "It's Renny. Look at me—can you hear me?"

She blinked. Once. Twice. "It was just... there was music, and then—"

"I know." I caught the arm gently, supporting it. "Can you stand? We're going to move away from the building."

She stood. She could move. That was good. I guided her to the opposite side of the street where the light was better and the debris didn't fall. Other people emerged from the smoke, stunned, coughing, some bleeding. My vet training didn't quite cover triage, but the basics were the same. Airway, circulation, consciousness. I directed a man with a head wound to sit down. I told someone with singed hair to move downwind. I found a woman who was hyperventilating and told her to breathe slower, deeper, count with me.

One. Two. Three.

The emergency services arrived in layers. Paramedics. Gardaí. Then the bigger presence—unmarked cars, men in dark coats who moved with the kind of confidence that came from knowing everyone answered to them.

Lorcan.

He emerged from the smoke like something born from it. His face was carved from cold stone. He was wearing a dress shirt that was worth more than my first car, and it was immaculate because this wasn't panic for him. This was work.

His eyes found me in the crowd. For one moment—just one—something like relief crossed his features. Then he turned away.

"Secure the perimeter," he said to the man beside him. Dec, his lieutenant. His voice was flat, technical. "Nobody leaves until statements are given. Get the injured to St Vincent's. Give the Gardaí names and addresses. Tell them we'll cooperate fully."