I pull Saoirse tighter behind the altar base and angle my body over her while Nikolas reloads, calmly and quickly. The guests are where they were told to go if anything happened, which is why we gave out every detail weeks ago and called it privacy. Small ceremony. Family only. Remote chapel on the coast. Predictable route. Predictable hour. Predictable soft target.
Patrick heard exactly what I wanted him to hear.
The truth sat under it.
Every staff hand was vetted. Every flower delivery was stripped and scanned. Every musician is mine. Two of the “caterers” are Nikolas’s shooters from Belfast, and the old groundskeeper trimming hedges since dawn had run enforcement for my uncle Declan before I was old enough to hold a gun. We laid cameras in the tree line, pressure alerts on the rear wall, and staggered teams under civilian clothes across the house and chapel grounds. We leaked the layout, but we rebuilt the lanes.
Patrick got the invitation and walked into a box.
Shots crack from the vestibule, then stop, then start again in shorter, controlled bursts. That rhythm tells me my men have line of sight and the attackers are trying to push through cover they expected to own already.
Maeve crawls toward us on her elbows, hair half-fallen from its pins, face flushed and furious. “Mam’s fine. Declan’s fine. Father Byrne is swearing in Latin.”
“Good,” I say.
She glares. “You call this good?”
“Compared to Plan B, yes.”
Her mouth opens, then another burst hits the side windows and she ducks reflexively. “I hate that you planned enough for a Plan B.”
“I planned enough for a Plan D.”
That shuts her up for half a second, which is a family record.
Nikolas leans out, fires twice, then drops back. “Front team’s collapsing them inward. Three at the doors, one on the bell path, and I’ve got movement in the graveyard wall gap.”
“Mine or theirs?”
“Too fast to tell.”
Saoirse wipes blood from the side of her cheek with the back of her hand, not hers, and looks toward the side transept. “Gavin won’t waste men on a straight breach if he knows he’s outgunned,” she says. “He’ll try for hostage leverage if he can’t get a clean shot at you.”
Declan hears that from the pew line and snarls, “Let him try.”
I glance over and catch him crouched behind carved oak in a dark suit, tie gone, pistol steady in both hands like he never left the old days. My mother sits lower beside him, one hand on Maeve’s shoulder, calm enough to shame everyone in the room.
She meets my eyes and says, “End it quickly.”
“I intend to.”
The next thirty seconds come in pieces.
A flash at the side corridor.
Conall shouting from the rear.
A body hitting stone.
Nikolas swearing once and shifting left.
Then one of Patrick’s men breaks from the smoke near the vestibule and runs the center aisle with a compact rifle up, desperate and fast, and he almost gets a line on me before three of mine cut him down from different angles. He folds across the pews, momentum carrying him into polished wood and flowers and white ribbons that were still tied when this started.
So much for peaceful.
I rise just enough to look past the altar base and take in the doorway. We built overlapping fire lanes from the choir loft and the sacristy passage, and Patrick’s shooters are finding every one of them the hard way. He sent professionals, I’ll give him that. They came in timed waves, they staggered the first shots, and they used the wedding blast to split attention. A month ago, that might have bought them enough confusion to get me.
A month ago, Patrick still had a machine.