I tell myself it's because there's nothing to say. Elena is family. She's been family since we were children. She took the news about Siobhan with grace. There's no reason to read anything into a late-night text from a woman who's been in my life for twenty years.
No reason at all.
I roll over. Close my eyes. Sleep comes eventually — thin, restless, the kind that doesn't restore anything. When I wake in the dark, I don't remember what I dreamed. Only the feeling it left behind — warm, unsettling, like a hand pressed against glass.
The penthouse is silent. Cold. The city moves thirty floors below, indifferent to the man staring at his ceiling, and I think about my father standing at his window with his scotch, watching the street, counting hours. He loved a woman, and it destroyed him. He loved a woman, and it destroyed her. The lesson is clear. The lesson has been clear for fifteen years.
Tomorrow it won't be.
That's either the best thing that's happened to me in fifteen years, or the most dangerous.
I close my eyes.
I don't sleep again.
Chapter 6
Siobhan
The Wedding
* * *
The back of St. Demetrios smells like incense and old wood and the particular brand of tension that comes from putting fifty armed people in a house of God and asking them to behave.
I stand at the entrance in ivory silk, the dress Nico chose, and I catalog the room the way Cormac taught me: exits first, threats second, allies third. Two doors — the main entrance behind me and a side door near the altar that leads to the sacristy. Security in dark suits lining the walls, earpieces catching candlelight every time someone shifts. Greek side, left. Irish side, right. The Romanos scattered through both like hedged bets. The candles are real but the men guarding them are carrying Glocks under their suit jackets, and there's something deeply absurd about getting married in a building where the flower arrangements were checked for explosives this morning.
I should be terrified. Iamterrified. But terror and I are old friends, and we've reached an understanding: it gets to live in my stomach, and I get to ignore it.
Cormac sits in the front row, green eyes locked on the altar like he's calculating the distance between his fist and the groom. He wore Da's tie — I recognize the pattern, navy with thin gold stripes, and the sight of it punches me in a place I thought I'd armored. He wore it for me. Cormac, who hasn't mentioned our father in three months, put on his tie to walk into a Greek church and watch his sister marry a man he doesn't trust. That's love, in the O'Brien language. Wordless. Stubborn. Dressed in someone else's clothes.
Declan beside him, hand resting on his thigh, which is casual if you don't know what lives under his jacket, terrifying if you do. Finn is calm, legs crossed, looking like he's at a business meeting rather than a wedding. Ronan has a hymnal open on his lap and he's drawing in the margins because that's what Ronan does when he can't leave a room he doesn't want to be in.
My father is not here.
I notice the way I notice weather — a fact of the landscape, expected and impersonal. Padraig O'Brien approved this marriage from a prison payphone and moved on to his next piece of business before I'd left the room. He didn't call this morning. He won't call tonight. I am a transaction that has been completed, and completed transactions don't require follow-up.
There's no empty chair in the front row with his name on it. No phone propped on a pew, no speakerphone crackling with his voice the way it did at Elysium. He was present for the deal. He's absent for the ceremony. That tells me everything I need to know about the difference between a father and a businessman, and which one Padraig O'Brien chose to be.
I should feel something about that. I don't. Or maybe I do, but it's buried so deep and so old that it doesn't register as pain anymore. It registers as architecture — load bearing, structural. The absence of my father is a wall I built my spine against. I'm standing straighter because of it.
No one is walking me down this aisle. No one is giving me away, because I'm not anyone's to give.
If I'm marrying a stranger, I'll walk myself to him.
The music shifts to something classical, Greek, a string arrangement I don't recognize. Every head turns.
I walk.
The aisle at St. Demetrios is not long, somewhere around thirty feet, maybe less. It feels infinite. I keep my eyes forward, my shoulders back, and my pace steady. I don't look at the families or the security or the candles. I look at Nico.
He stands at the altar in a dark suit that fits him the way weapons fit soldiers — precisely, inevitably. Dark hair with silver threading the temples, more visible in the candlelight than it was at Elysium. His jaw is set. His hands are at his sides. The scar on his left hand is thin, pale, and runs from his index finger to his wrist, catching the light. I've never noticed it before. It looks old. It looks like it has a story, and the story isn't kind.
And his eyes. Gold in this light, warm in a way that doesn't match anything else about him. He watches me approach with his full attention — the same focused, consuming attention he gave me in his office, except there's something different now. Something cracked.
I'm ten feet away when I see it. His chest rises — a breath that's deeper than the one before it, a fraction of a second where the mask slips and what's underneath isn't the cold strategist or the calculated king. It's a man watching a woman walk toward him in a white dress, and the look on his face is not control.
It's awe.