My father found the first trail in less than a week.
I knew the moment I saw the same silver hatchback pass the newsagent twice while I stood in line for water and crackers, and I knew the men in it were his before one of them stepped out and pretended to ask for directions. He was too polished for the street, too patient around the eyes, and he kept glancing at my hands instead of my face to see if I’d run.
I did.
I cut through the side lane, dropped my bag under a skip, climbed a service stair into a tailoring shop, and came out through the stockroom in a stolen apron with my hair pinned under a scarf and blood from a split knuckle drying on my wrist. By nightfall, I was on a train south with a cheap ticket bought in cash by a man who owed the Limerick woman three favors and never asked my name.
I have not stayed in one place longer than twelve days since.
The flat over the locksmith is my fourth address in two months, and it is the first one where I unpacked the baby things.
There are only three. A white vest no bigger than my hand, a pair of socks I bought after standing too long in front of a market stall, and a soft yellow blanket I found folded in a clearance basket and held to my face in the shop until I had to blink tears back before the cashier noticed. They sit in the top drawer under my work files, hidden and precious and absurdly small.
I am fourteen weeks now, almost fifteen by the dates I wrote down and checked twice, and the nausea has shifted from all-day punishment to sharp morning waves and random ambushes whenever coffee is too strong or someone nearby peels an orange. My body has started changing in ways I can no longer dismiss as stress. My breasts ache. My trousers fit differently by evening. I get tired so quickly that I hate myself for it, then I sleep curled around my own middle and wake with one hand there as if I am counting.
I have seen a doctor twice, both times under an alias.
The first clinic took cash and asked no questions worth fearing, and the second had an older woman with steady hands who looked at me over her glasses and said, “You’re running from someone,” while she pressed gel to my skin and turned the screen slightly away until she was sure I was ready to see. I heard the heartbeat before I understood what the sound was, fast and relentless, and I sat there with tears sliding into my hairline while she handed me tissues without ceremony and told me my blood pressure would not improve if I kept pretending I was made of wire.
She also told me to eat more protein, sleep longer, and stop surviving on toast.
I am trying.
Work came through the one skill I wish I had never learned so well.
I can read routes, I can spot false paperwork from one line item and a bad stamp, I can hear a man explain a shipment and tell where he is lying, and I know how criminal logistics bleed into legitimate infrastructure when enough money movesthrough the same docks long enough. Those things turn out to be useful in a private intelligence and compliance firm that officially serves insurers and port operators and unofficially takes contracts from anyone rich enough to want risk mapped before it reaches their front gate.
I got in by correcting a senior analyst during an interview.
He showed me a freight diversion report and called it opportunistic theft. I pointed out the timing of the customs flags, the mirrored shell registrations, and the insurance lapse structured to force a panic sale three weeks later, then told him he was looking at a coercive consolidation pattern run by someone who understood municipal enforcement windows and union pressure. He stared at me for ten seconds, asked where I trained, and I lied without blinking.
They hired me in forty-eight hours.
Now I sit in a glass office under another borrowed name and build profiles on men who think they are invisible, and in two months I have learned more than I wanted and less than I need. Patrick is still pushing hard through outer rings, and he is burning through crews faster than before, which means he is either desperate or preparing for something larger than route protection. Cillian has tightened his ports, rotated supervisors, replaced whole segments of his dock security, and started using layered approvals on manifests I used to see with one glance over a shoulder.
He adapted after I left.
The reports that cross my desk mention Byrne losses in small numbers and Patrick losses in louder ones, but the pattern under them is what keeps me awake. Patrick has stopped tryingto win territory cleanly. He is spending men to create noise while he shops for specialists in the gaps.
Three days ago, a subcontractor audit flagged payments from a construction front in Galway to a security consultant who does not exist on paper and yet has moved through two Balkan firms tied to vehicle-borne devices and one crew in Antwerp known for remote detonation jobs. I pulled the payment chain, cross-checked the shell directors, and found an old name buried under a newer passport file.
Keane.
The same engineer linked to Eva’s car bomb, the same ghost men whispered about after the garage blast and then stopped naming out loud.
I sat at my desk with the file open and cold spreading through my hands while the office around me kept clicking and ringing and talking about routine exposure reports. Then an hour later, another piece dropped in, a monitored call summary tied to a broker our firm tracks for extortion risk. One line, brief and ugly.
Priority contract. Byrne principal. Window soon. Payment doubled if completed before quarter close.
They are ordering a hit on Cillian, and from the routing and the names attached, it is not another dock scare, not cutters and noise and borrowed boys with bad aim. It is a real one, built by people who have done this before and been paid well enough to vanish after.
I close my laptop, press both hands to my stomach, and stand so fast, my chair rolls into the partition behind me. I know exactly where he’ll tell me to go if I walk back into his house, but I also know he dies if I don’t.
The sentence sits in my head all through the drive, and it still sits there when the taxi drops me two streets from the Byrne offices so I don’t arrive at his front gate looking like I came straight from a government car.
Rain has just passed, and the pavement is wet enough to catch the lights from shop signs and traffic signals. I pull my coat tighter across my stomach out of habit, then force my hand down. I’m not showing much yet, but I’ve started moving differently, and I hate that fear taught my body before joy had a chance to.
The folder under my arm is thin and ugly, plain brown card, no markings. Inside are copies, not originals. Names, times, a route adjustment, a payment chain that runs through two shell charities and a marine repair subcontractor Patrick used years ago when he wanted hands nobody could trace back to him. I could not bring more without burning the one source who still takes my calls.