Page 13 of Crown of Thorns

I left the library. Closed the door. Stood in the corridor.

In fourteen years, I'd never made an unforced error. I'd just made two in the same day, the building purchase, motivated by something I wouldn't name, and the answer, motivated by something I couldn't control. Both pointed to the same conclusion, and the conclusion was a threat larger than the Doyles, larger than the council, larger than the power vacuum Padraig's death had created.

The instrument was reading agricultural regulation. The instrument was asking questions. The instrument had grey eyes and steady hands and a mind that moved through problems with the same surgical efficiency I used to move through enemies.

I went to my study and poured a Jameson I wouldn't drink and sat in the dark and didn't think about her collarbones.

Chapter eight

The Wrong Instinct

Renny

Week five. A Tuesday. Overcast.

I'd settled into a routine that looked like acceptance and felt like reconnaissance. Morning tea with Mrs. Fahey. Two hours in the library reading everything I could find about the operation's legitimate business interests — property development, agricultural supply chains, the bloodstock farm in Cork that appeared in household accounts with a frequency that suggested it was more than a hobby. Afternoon phone call to Connolly, shorter every day. Evening in the sitting room with a veterinary journal that was becoming less a professional obligation and more a talisman — a physical object from a life that still existed. Somewhere.

I was in the kitchen at three forty-five when it happened.

Mrs. Fahey had gone to the shops. The house was in its mid-afternoon lull — quiet, populated but still, the particular hush of a building where most of the occupants worked late and slept later. I was at the table reviewing the clinic's quarterly accounts on my laptop when I heard the screaming.

Not adult screaming. A child.

I was moving before the thought formed. Through the kitchen, down the service corridor, through the back door into the courtyard where a cluster of bodies had gathered. Soldiers — Lorcan's men, the security rotation — standing in a half-circle around a woman on her knees who was holding a child. A boy. Three, maybe four years old. His face was scarlet. His lips were swelling. His breathing was a high, thin wheeze that I could hear from ten metres away.

Anaphylaxis.

I pushed through. Two fingers on the boy's pulse, airway check, breathing assessment — before anyone processed that I'd arrived. Rapid assessment: airway narrowing — the high-pitched inspiratory sound confirmed upper-airway obstruction, the laboured effort of air moving through a throat that was closing. Lips cyanotic. Skin flushed, hives spreading across his forearms. Pulse rapid, thready.

"What did he eat?"

The woman — grandmother, I'd learn later, wife of Séan O’Donnell, old guard — was incoherent. Wailing in a mix of English and Irish, clutching the boy's arm so tightly her knuckles were white. One of the soldiers was on his phone, shouting about an ambulance. Another had his hand on the grandmother's shoulder, trying to move her away from the child.

Wrong instincts. All of them. Combat triage: evacuate, contain, call backup. The right protocol for a gunshot wound. The wrong protocol for a four-year-old in anaphylactic shock. Moving the grandmother was wasting time. The ambulance was twenty minutes out. The child had ten.

"Stop. Everybody stop."

They stopped. Not because of my authority. Because of my voice — the voice I use when a horse is hemorrhaging and the owner is hysterical and the only thing standing between a dead animal and a live one is someone who can think clearly in the presence of blood.

"You." I pointed at the nearest soldier. Young. Wide-eyed. Hands steady despite the fear. "Go to the kitchen. The cabinet above the refrigerator. There's a first aid kit. Bring the entire kit. Run."

"You." Second soldier. "Call the ambulance back. Tell them paediatric anaphylaxis. Active airway compromise. Estimated age four. Tell them we need adrenaline and we need it now."

"Has he been prescribed an EpiPen? Any history of allergies?"

The grandmother couldn't answer. She was past language. I looked at the women gathering behind the soldiers, household staff, a few wives, faces I knew from the kitchen and the corridors.

"Does this child have allergies? Has anyone in this house seen this before?"

A voice from the back: "Peanuts. His mother keeps an EpiPen in her handbag. She's in town."

"Where's the handbag?"

"Upstairs. Third floor. Her room."

"Go. Bring the entire bag. Don't look for the pen, just bring the bag."

The first aid kit arrived. I went through it at speed, gauze, plasters, antiseptic wipes, nothing useful. No adrenaline. No antihistamine. A first aid kit stocked for scrapes and cuts in a house full of men who dealt in bullets and blades. I filed the irony and moved on.