Page 65 of Crown of Thorns

"I don't think I'm smarter than you. I think I'm trained for a world you're just learning to navigate." He walks toward me. His hands are empty. But there's something in the set of his shoulders that reads as dangerous, even in stillness. "And I need you to understand something right now, while you're angry with me: when you put yourself at risk, you put me at risk. When you go to a church and light candles, you create patterns that people can track. And if people can track your patterns, they can use them."

"Like they used Séan O'Donnell?"

"If he was useful to them before, he won't be useful to them now."

The coldness of it. The finality.

"Is he dead?" I ask directly.

"Yes."

The word sits in the room like a stone dropped in still water. The ripples move outward, touching everything.

I can't look at him. I'm afraid if I look at him, I'll see the man who made a phone call and decided that someone would stop breathing. I'll see the machinery inside him that I've been slowly becoming compatible with, and I won't be able to pretend anymore that I'm anything except what he's making me.

"I'm going to bed," I say.

"Renny—"

"Don't. Just don't." I move toward the door. "I need to be alone."

He doesn't stop me. That's both the mercy and the problem. He's learned that I'm capable of making my own choices. That I don't want to be forced. That the seduction of this world works better if I'm allowed to walk into it willingly.

I climb the stairs alone.

The hallway outside the master bedroom is dark. The house is sleeping, and I'm not part of the sleep. I'm awake and walking and trying to figure out who I've become and whether it's reversible and whether I even want it to be.

I push open the door to the kitchen instead.

The kitchen is empty. Mrs. Fahey isn't there. It's Tuesday night—it's her night off. This is the safe space, the place where I come when the house feels like a trap. Where Mrs. Fahey makes tea and doesn't ask questions and lets me pretend that the life I'm living makes sense.

The kitchen is empty.

I sit at the table and I don't turn on the lights. I sit in the dark and I let myself understand something I've been avoiding: this is the cost Orla was telling me about. This moment. This understanding that the man I married is capable of ending a human life and then coming to me and asking me to be strategic about my church attendance because he wants to protect me.

That's the cost.

The loss of the person you were. The acceptance of what you're becoming. The moment where you realize that complicity isn't passive. It's active. It's a choice you make every time you stay.

I think about Séan O'Donnell. Sixty something. Pipe tobacco smell. The way he'd ask about my work with gentle curiosity. The way Mrs. Fahey made him biscuits. The way his hands shook slightly when he held his teacup.

He's gone now.

He made a choice, and the choice had a price, and Lorcan collected the price with the efficiency of someone who was trained to it. The problem is that Lorcan is also right. Séan knew the rules. He understood the consequences. He accepted the money and accepted the risk and now he's accepted the outcome.

But knowing that doesn't make it smaller.

I think about my hands. I think about the woman who could order violence if it meant protecting someone else. I think about how that woman is already living inside my skin, waiting for the moment when the choice becomes clear enough to stop refusing.

Outside, Dublin is sleeping. The stone is cool under my palms. The kitchen smells like the bread Mrs. Fahey made yesterday, yeast and salt and time. Inside, I am alone in an empty kitchen, and the woman I was is becoming unrecognizable.

I'm not sure which one of us is the real me anymore.

Maybe they both are. Maybe that's the answer Orla couldn't quite articulate.

Maybe we're all just some version of both, and staying means accepting that the woman I am now will do things the woman I was would never forgive. Maybe complicity and choice are the same thing when you're standing inside the machinery long enough.

The question is whether forgiveness is even possible when you're the one who has to forgive yourself.