Conall nods and drags him out with Murphy and Sten, and the door shuts behind them.
The room is quieter after that, but not peaceful. Peace is a thing that arrives later and asks to be trusted. This is only the first empty space where fear used to sit.
Father Byrne rises slowly from his chair, makes the sign of the cross over Patrick’s body, then looks at me. “Would you like me to pray for him?”
I think of my mother’s hands, flour on her wrists, voice low in a pantry, telling me to learn things men could not own.
“Yes,” I say. “Pray for her first.”
He nods.
Cillian guides me to the sofa, and I sit before my body can argue. My hands are cold. He kneels in front of me, big and blood-marked and careful, and rests both palms over my knees.
“You all right?” he asks.
It is an impossible question, and he knows it. I almost tell him that, but I look at his face and I am too tired to hide inside cleverness.
“No,” I say. “But I’m here.”
His mouth shifts, grief and relief and love all mixed in the line of it. “That’s enough.”
I touch the bandage on his hand. “You’re bleeding.”
“Occupational hazard.”
I huff a broken laugh, then it catches and turns into tears before I can stop it. He rises and pulls me into him, and I let him, face pressed to his shirt, my body shaking with the aftermath of a choice I wanted and hated and needed all at once.
“I thought I’d feel cleaner,” I whisper.
He holds me tighter, not crushing, just there. “You don’t have to feel anything on schedule.”
I breathe him in, salt and smoke and gun oil and the life I almost lost before I understood what it was.
When I pull back, I look him in the eyes and say the thing that matters now.
“I’m ready.”
He searches my face. “For what?”
“To build,” I say. “Not hide, not run, not survive from one room to the next. I’m ready to build with you, if you still want that with all of this in the middle of us.”
His answer comes without pause.
“I wanted you before I understood you. I loved you before I deserved to say it. And I want to build with you for as long as we get.”
I put my hand over his heart and nod. “Then we do it honestly.”
Maeve wipes at her face and mutters, “Good. Since the wedding reception is ruined and I’m not planning another one.”
That gets a real laugh out of me, small but real, and the sound of it changes the room more than prayer did.
Cillian kisses my forehead, then my mouth, slow and steady and without urgency, and when he pulls back he presses his brow to mine.
“It’s over,” he says.
I look past him at the fire, at his mother sitting straight-backed in silence, at Declan standing guard even now, at the door through which men carried out the ghost that shaped my life.
“No,” I say quietly. “It’s finished.”