There she is, I thought.There's the Madigan.
"Drive," I told Cormac.
He was already driving.
24
SIENNA
It was Cormac who stitched me.
I'd assumed it would be Tiernan. Tiernan was the one who fed people and fussed over people and had, in the days since I came, appointed himself the keeper of whether I slept and ate and stopped bleeding. But Tiernan was downstairs with Ronan and the steel box and three phones going at once, running down whatever a family like this runs down after four men try to kill you in daylight and one of them succeeds at part of it. And Cormac, it turned out, was the one who did the bodies. Living ones. The patching.
"Sit," he said, in the kitchen at two in the morning, pointing at a chair under the good light.
I sat.
He'd laid it all out already on a clean towel before I came down, because of course he had. Saline, suture kit, the good thread, the lidocaine, scissors, gauze, everything squared off at right angles like the gun parts I'd watched him fuss over the day before. The man organized violence and its aftermath with the same flat care. I found I didn't hate it. After years of patching myself in gas station bathrooms with whatever I had, there wassomething I didn't have a word for in watching someone lay out the right tools to put me back together.
"It needs stitches," he said. "Eight, maybe ten. The lidocaine'll sting going in and then you won't feel the rest." He checked my face, flat. "Or you take nothing and you feel all of it. Some people want to feel it. I won't talk you out of either."
"Numb it," I said. "I've felt enough of my own blood for one lifetime."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth that on another man would have been the ghost of a smile and on Cormac was just a fact passing through. He nodded and got to work.
He was good. Better than good. He cleaned the cut with a thoroughness that should have hurt more than it did, and his hands were steady, certain, and completely without hesitation. I sat in the two a.m. quiet of a strange kitchen and let a dangerous man hold my arm under a lamp, and I thought about how strange it was that this felt safer than anything had in longer than I could remember.
He didn't talk while he worked, which I'd stopped expecting him to. Cormac spent words the way he spent everything, only when the thing would fall down without them. The rest of the time he was quiet and total, taking up exactly as much room as the task in front of him needed and not an inch more.
So the quiet didn't bother me. What bothered me was the other thing.
It reached me before I had a name for it, the way the wrong street in Galway had. His hands were clinical. Every motion was the motion the work required and not one degree more. But somewhere around the fourth stitch, the air in the kitchen changed temperature. It wasn't the radiator and it wasn't me. When I let myself actually look at him, I caught it. The thing he worked so hard to keep out of his hands had gone somewhere else instead. It had gone into how still he'd become. Into the factthat he was breathing carefully. Into the half second too long his fingers rested against the inside of my wrist when he turned my arm to the light, the same half second I'd felt the morning before, when he set the strap to my ribs and pretended he hadn't.
Oh,I thought.There it is again.
I should have said nothing. Fifteen years of saying nothing kept me alive. But I was wrung out and stitched up, and a man had died that afternoon with my thumb in his eye. I was tired of being the only one in every room who knew exactly what was happening and pretended she didn't.
"You can stop holding your breath," I said. "I'm not going to break."
His hands went still on my arm.
He didn't look up. He stayed exactly where he was, bent over my forearm with the thread in his fingers, and the stillness changed quality, went from the stillness of a man concentrating to the stillness of a man standing at the edge of something he'd spent his whole life not stepping off.
Then he looked up, and I wished he hadn't, because Cormac with the door open was not a thing I was ready for. His eyes were dark, so dark the lamp found no color in them at all, the kind that took everything in and handed nothing back. Up close, for once, they were handing something back anyway.
"I've done this a hundred times," he said. Quiet. Flat. The voice he used when the words were load-bearing. "Stitched men up. Worse than this. I've had my hands inside people, Sienna. I've held a man's life in them, literally, and kept my pulse under sixty doing it." His thumb moved once against the inside of my wrist, where he could feel exactly what my pulse was doing, which was not staying under anything. "Steady hands. It's the only thing I've ever been reliably good at. Stillness. Not feeling the thing while I do the thing."
"Cormac."
"Today there was a knife in your arm." He said it with no weight on it at all, which was what made it terrible, the flatness laid over the top of the thing underneath. "And I stopped being able to think. First time in twenty years. Ronan called the burn and I had the car moving before my brain caught up, because some part of me had already worked out that whatever happened on that street, you were coming off it alive, and everything else, the records, the plan, the three of us, was negotiable." He set the thread down. "Nothing's negotiable for me. That's the whole job. That's what I am. And then there was you, and suddenly everything was."
The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere below us a phone rang and stopped.
"That's not a thing I get to have," he said. "Do you understand? A man who feels what I felt today gets people killed. Gets you killed. The steadiness is the only reason any of you are still breathing, and you're the one thing in the world that takes it from me." He looked at my wrist, at his own thumb still resting against my pulse like he'd forgotten it was his to move. "So no. Whatever this is. I can't."
He took his hand back.
And the worst part, the part I'd think about for a long time after, was that he finished the stitches. He picked the thread back up and his hands came back to dead steady, like he'd reached inside himself and switched something off at the wall. He closed the last four sutures clean and even and perfect, and the only sign that any of it had happened was that he didn't look at my face again, not once, the whole rest of the time his hands were on me.