Page 67 of Crown of Thorns

"And now?" she asks. "What happens to him now?"

"We kept him alive until the interrogation was complete. Then Dec handled it"

"Handled it."

"Yes."

She closes her eyes for a moment. Just a moment. Just enough time to process what she's hearing. What she's accepting.

"I want to go home," she says.

We drive back to the house in silence. She sits beside me and she doesn't touch me and she doesn't speak. Her hands are folded in her lap. Her face is turned toward the window. She's processing. She's integrating. She's making space inside herself for what she's witnessed.

When we arrive, she goes directly to the bedroom.

I give her time alone. I pour whiskey in the library and I don't drink it. I hold it and I think about the moment I told her. I think about the choice to tell her the truth rather than let her keep imagining it. I think about the second I realized she wasn't going to break.

The architecture broke in that moment.

The fundamental fault line opened.

For months, I've been moving her toward this. Incrementally. The pub explosion. The interrogation of Conor Maguire. The steady introduction to the machinery of my world. I've been testing her capacity to stay, to accept, to become.

And she has.

She's become exactly what I needed her to be.

The realization doesn't feel like victory. It feels like something else. Something darker.

I've changed her. I've bent her toward violence and taught her that compassion is a luxury and shown her that the world is made of decisions that destroy people. And she's absorbed all of it. She's made it part of her understanding of what's necessary.

And now I can't undo it.

That's the thing they don't tell you about molding people—once you've done it, you can't reshape them back into what they were. Once you've opened their eyes to brutality and they've accepted it, there's no going back to innocence.

I did that. I made that choice for her.

I can feel the weight of it.

At 2 AM, I go to the bedroom. She's sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing. She doesn't look at me when I enter. She's wearing one of my shirts. Her feet are bare. She's reduced to the smallest version of herself.

The silence of the house at this hour is complete. Dublin sleeps three stories below us. No traffic. No voices. Just the small sounds of an old building settling. The creak of the radiator. The hum of the fridge in the distant kitchen.

I sit beside her. I don't touch her. I let the silence work.

She's cataloging something in her mind. I can see it in the way her eyes focus on the wall. She's processing anatomy. Damage assessment. The clinical breakdown of what she witnessed. She's using her professional training to create distance from the emotional truth of what she saw.

That's survival. That's the first sign that she's going to be able to carry this.

The realization breaks something in me.

"I can feel it changing," she says finally. "The way I think. The way I see things. I'm becoming someone else, and I can see it happening, but I can't stop it."

"Do you want to stop it?"

She turns to me. "I don't know. That's what terrifies me. I don't know if I want to stop it anymore."

The words land like a blade.