“No,” I say. “Nothing fixes it.”
I turn and look at Cillian.
He is watching me with the same stillness he had in the chapel, in the hospital, on the day he finally listened, and there is no instruction in his face. No pressure. No claim. Only trust and the cost of it.
I hold out my hand.
“Your gun.”
Maeve sucks in a breath, but Cillian does not hesitate. He reaches to his back, draws, checks the chamber in one smooth motion, then places the pistol in my palm grip-first.
The weight settles into my hand like something I have known all my life and hate for exactly that reason.
Patrick watches the exchange, and for the first time tonight I see something close to uncertainty cross his face. “Saoirse,” he says, and his voice changes, lower now, almost intimate, the voice he used when he wanted obedience disguised as concern. “Listen to me. If you do this for him, you’ll regret it. Men like him make women carry their sins and call it love.”
I raise the gun and sight center chest.
“I’m not doing this for him.”
His breathing shifts.
“I’m doing this for my mother,” I say. “I’m doing this for the girl you raised on fear and called loyalty. I’m doing this for every time you killed me and expected me to stand up smiling.”
The words land and stay there.
Patrick stares at me for a long moment, and then something in him settles. The performance drops. The excuses stop. He looks tired again, but now there is something else in it, a hard, old pride that has nothing left to bargain with.
“If you’re going to do it,” he says quietly, “do it straight.”
Declan’s eyes flick to me, surprised.
Patrick lifts his chin and squares his shoulders as far as the chains allow. He does not beg. He does not spit another lie. He does not ask for mercy he never gave.
I give him the only honor he ever taught me by accident. I let him face it.
“For my mother,” I say.
I fire once.
The shot cracks through the room and is gone. Patrick jerks back, and then he goes still, head turned slightly, blood spreading dark across his shirt. No second shot is needed.
My ears ring. My hand shakes once after, not before.
Cillian is beside me immediately, taking the gun gently from my fingers, setting it away, one hand at my back and the other bracing my elbow as if he knows my knees might go and wants me to choose whether they do. I stay standing.
Behind us, Gavin starts making a thin, panicked sound through his teeth, and Declan turns on him so fast, the man chokes it off.
Maeve moves first. She crosses the room, wraps both arms around me carefully around the places that still ache, and presses her face to my hair.
“It’s done,” she says into my temple. “It’s done.”
I close my eyes and let that be true for one breath.
Then I pull back and look at Gavin.
He shrinks before I even speak.
“Take him,” I say, my voice rough now. “He answers for what he did too, but not tonight. I won’t give him the same weight.”