“I’m close enough to survive,” I retort, my voice trembling.
“That wasn't the assignment. Don't forget who brought you out of the gutter. Don't forget who you belong to.”
The words are a weight I carry into the morning.
The truth is my father’s fracturing. Two of his outer distributors defect, citing the "instability" of his leadership. Another tries to stay loyal and finds its main carrier blocked from the port by a sudden, inexplicable technical review. Cillian doesn't celebrate. He just turns the page.
“You’re cornering him,” I say one evening, watching him sift through a mountain of acquisition papers.
“I’m removing variables,” he replies without looking up.
“And when there are none left?”
“Then he makes a mistake. And then I end it.”
Patrick feels the noose. His calls shift from calculated to volatile, the sound of a man watching his empire dissolve in a compliance audit.
“You think he’ll spare you when the lead starts flying?” Patrick demands. “You think he’ll care about the way you taste when he finds out you were my eyes in his house?”
“You’re the one escalating,” I whisper, the burner phone hot against my ear.
“Test me, Saoirse. I can send him every message. Every recording. I can burn you down with a single click.”
I hang up, my hands shaking so violently, I nearly drop the phone.
That night, Cillian pulls me into his bedroom with a silent, heavy urgency. He doesn't ask about the tension in my shoulders or the way I won't meet his eyes. He just undresses me with a slow reverence and kisses me as if he has all the time in the world, as if there aren't men with rifles sitting in vans three miles away.
I let him. I want to be lost in the wreck of him.
The pill sits in the drawer of my nightstand. I take it every morning like a ritual, a small white shield against a future I can't afford. I set alarms. I count the days. I have been doing this for years. I am not a girl who makes mistakes.
But war rearranges the clock. Meetings bleed into midnights. Strategy sessions blur into dawn. Twice I wake up in his sheets and have to scramble for a burner call before I even remember my own name. Once I take it late. Once, staring at the little whitebox, I realize with a cold, hollow dread that I can't remember if I took it at all.
I tell myself it’s fine, the stress is playing tricks on my memory.
Two weeks into the escalation, the nausea hits at night. Sleep doesn’t hold. Heat drags me out of it, a sudden rush from stomach to throat, and I’m upright before I’m fully conscious, hand over my mouth, feet hitting cold floor as I move down the hall. I make it to the bathroom, lock the door, and drop to my knees as my body folds in on itself without permission.
It’s fast and humiliating, loud in a house that never feels empty, and when it’s over, I stay there with my forehead pressed to porcelain, breathing through my mouth while my pulse thunders in my ears.
This isn’t nerves. I’ve lived on nerves for weeks.
I rinse, sit back on my heels, and stare at my reflection. My skin looks sallow, my eyes ringed darker than I remember, and for a second I tell myself it’s exhaustion, that I haven’t slept more than four hours at a time since Roarke’s funeral.
The thought doesn’t settle.
I walk back to my room and shut the door quietly, then cross to the shelf and slide the hollowed book from its place. The burner rests inside like it always does, cold and waiting. I power it on and the screen lights immediately.
Two messages.
You’re slipping.
Where is he moving next?
My thumb hovers only a moment before I press call.
He answers on the first ring. “Took you long enough.”
“I was asleep.”