“For me, not for cargo.”
“Yes.”
I nod once. The lobby shooter was a fast kill if I took the bait and walked into it. The road team was the real net if I left on schedule and lived through the first attempt. Redundancy, layered pressure, clean-up teams ready. Patrick paid for certainty tonight.
He almost had it.
My phone vibrates again with messages from three men I usually trust to handle things without touching me after midnight. I read all of them anyway. One outer distributor of Patrick’s hasmoved cash through a church restoration fund. Another lost a safe house in Raheny and burned the ledger before leaving. A broker tied to cross-border crews has gone dark after a call routed through Belfast. Small movements on paper, loud ones in context.
Patrick is contracting outside blood now, and that means he feels the floor moving under him.
Good.
I look at the dried blood in the lines of my hands and let the rage settle where I can use it. For years I gave him too much room in my head and not enough in my sights. I let old grief steer me. I let old assumptions harden into facts. I buried the wrong men after Eva and called it justice, then I built a life on top of that mistake and told myself the foundation would hold.
It did not hold.
He killed Eva. He sent Saoirse into my house. He kept a hand on her throat even when she was carrying my child. He put a shooter in my lobby and another team on the road, and if she had not walked back into my life and stood in front of me when the gun came up, my mother would be burying me before the week ends.
I rest both forearms on my knees and make the promise in silence, the kind that matters.
No more partial measures. No more warnings. No more cutting lanes and waiting for him to panic himself into a mistake. I am going to end him, and I am going to do it so completely that no one spends the next ten years pretending he might come back through a side door.
The clock on the wall keeps moving. One hour. Then another.
Maeve arrives first, hair tied back badly, coat over pajamas, eyes scanning my face before she asks a question. My mother comes ten minutes later and sits beside me in the quiet way she uses when panic is already in the room and adding words would only feed it. She puts a clean shirt in my lap, tells me to change, then holds my gaze until I do.
No one says the worst thing out loud.
Maeve paces for a while, then she gets a call and steps into the hall to take it. The door shuts after her, and the room settles into lamp light, the soft rattle of the vent, and my mother watching me from the chair across the table.
I sit with my elbows on my knees and stare at my hands.
The blood is gone now. Soap took it. Hot water took it. A nurse gave me a brush and I scrubbed until my skin reddened, and still I can feel the weight of her slipping when the shot hit.
My mother reaches for the teapot someone left in the room, checks it, finds it cold, and sets it back down. “You’re shaking,” she says.
“I’m fine.”
She gives me a tired look. “You were saying that at twelve with a split lip and two loose teeth.”
I lean back and close my eyes for a second. “This isn’t the same.”
“No,” she says. “It’s worse, and you’re older, which means you think silence is strength.”
I open my eyes and look at her. “I don’t have anything useful to say right now.”
“You don’t need to be useful all the time, Cillian.”
I let out a breath and look toward the door, toward the corridor where Fallon’s people are working and where every minute stretches longer than it should. “She came back after what I did, and she stood in front of me.”
My mother nods once. “I know.”
“I threw her out.”
“I know that too.”
“I should’ve seen it sooner. I should’ve read him sooner. I should’ve read her sooner. I should’ve...” My voice cuts roughly on the word, and I drag a hand over my face. “I put her right back in his line.”