Page 59 of Crown of Thorns

By the end, I know everything.

By the end, Conor can't see out of either eye. His left arm is at an angle that suggests the radius is broken in at least two places. When he tries to stand, his legs won't support him. Dec brings him water. This is the mercy—we're not animals. We don't leave them in the chair without care.

"You can tell the Doyles," I say, "that this is what defection costs. Tell them the next person who touches what's ours will need identification for burial."

Dec doesn't react. This is routine for him. He's been Lorcan Byrne's right hand for twelve years. He's seen me slowly become the thing I married into, and he's accepted it the way he accepts rain and traffic and all the other inconveniences of breathing.

I walk out of the warehouse and into the Dublin night.

The air is cold. Autumn is coming, the season when the light fails earlier and the darkness lives in the streets like something solid. My shirt is clean. My hands are clean. There's blood on my shoes that will wash off. There's blood in my mouth from where I bit my cheek during the work. That's the only evidence on me.

The car ride home takes twenty minutes. Dec drives. I sit in the back and watch Dublin slide past the windows. Businessmen hurrying home. A couple kissing under a streetlight. A woman pushing a pram at six in the evening because her baby won't sleep. The normal world, moving through its night like it always does.

She stepped out of that world the day she married me.

I'm not sure when exactly I stopped trying to step back in.

The house is dark when I arrive. The staff won't come until morning—it's Mrs. Fahey's night off. The silence is complete and comfortable. I climb the stairs to the master bedroom.

She's waiting.

Renny is sitting on the edge of the bed in a t-shirt and nothing else. Her legs are bare. Her feet don't touch the ground. She has a book in her lap that she's not reading—the pages don't turn, and her eyes focus somewhere through the wall, toward the place where I've been all night.

When I enter, she looks up.

She doesn't ask where I've been. She doesn't ask what happened. She stands and walks toward me like I'm not wearing another man's blood on my clothes.

"Your hands," she says.

She takes them without asking. Her fingers are gentle—cool and steady. She examines my knuckles with the same professional attention she'd give a horse's injury. No judgment. No flinching. Just assessment.

She finds the broken skin over my first two knuckles. The swelling starting across the back of my hand. The small lacerations where teeth cut through skin. She traces each one like she's reading a story in Braille.

"Anything broken?" she asks.

"No."

She turns my hands over. Studies my palms. Checks the joints methodically. She's a veterinarian examining a specimen, and I am perfectly still because I understand what this is. This is her way of touching violence and choosing to stay. This is her way of saying: I see what you are. I'm not leaving.

My chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with physical pain.

"Ice," she says finally. "And antiseptic. You should've washed the blood off."

"I'll do it now."

She nods and releases me. She sits back on the bed and watches as I go to the bathroom and run the water hot. I watch the blood spiral down the drain. My own and Conor Maguire's, mixing into nothing. The soap is expensive—something Renny chose, something that smells like jasmine and restraint.

When I come back, she's still sitting on the edge of the mattress.

I stand before her. Close enough that she has to tilt her head to look up at me.

"I handled the situation," I tell her. "It's resolved."

"I know."

"There's going to be more. The Doyles won't stop."

"I know that too."