The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad #5)

by Tana French

Never, never ever, never never never again. Break that open the way superheroes burst handcuffs. Punch it in the face and watch it explode. My body my mind the way I dress the way I walk the way I talk, mine all mine.

Bright red bed linen, vintage poster of Max’s Kansas City: Julia. Old-looking patchwork quilt, poem written out poster-size in careful art-project calligraphy: Rebecca. Hanging mobile made of curled silver forks and spoons, good black-and-white photo that looked like a rock against low sky, till you looked twice and it was an old man’s profile: Holly. And Conway had been bang on about Selena: no dream catcher, but over her bed was a print of some medium-quality old oil, unicorn bending to drink at a dark lake by moonlight.

If I’ve learned one thing today, it’s that teenage girls make Moriarty look like a babe in the woods.”

“Come here,” Mackey said. Beckoned. Waited. In the end I moved in. He cupped a hand round the back of my neck. Gentle. Intent blue eyes, inches from mine. “If you’re right,” he said—no threat there, not scaring me, just telling me—“I’m going to kill you.”

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Something skitters across Holly’s mind: Julia in the glade a long time ago, the tender amused curl of her mouth, This isn’t forever. It snatches Holly’s breath: she was wrong. They are forever, a brief and mortal forever, a forever that will grow into their bones and be held inside them after it ends, intact, indestructible.