Chapter 12 Killian #2
"No. You're describing what happened and expressing regret about the loss of control.
That's different." He pauses. Considers.
The analytical machinery is running, but it's processing something other than data—it's processing me, and for once the scrutiny doesn't make me want to put my fist through a wall.
"An apology implies you wouldn't do it again.
Can you tell me that? Can you promise me that the next time you get angry, you won't grab a knife? "
The honesty of the question pins me to the seat.
"I don't know," I say. "I want to. But I've been the man who loses control my entire life, and wanting to stop hasn't been enough before."
The admission hangs in the car. The treatment plant hums. A security light on the target building cycles off and on, off and on, marking time in intervals of dark and bright.
"Then we don't build this on promises you can't keep," he says. His voice is quiet but carries the structural integrity of something load-bearing. "We build it on a different foundation."
"What foundation?"
"Transparency." He shifts in the seat. Faces me fully.
In the dark, the distance between us feels nonexistent.
"If we do this—if we operate as a unit, not just in this car but in the penthouse, in our families, in this war—there are no more secrets.
No hidden motives. No calculations I don't share and no violence you don't warn me about.
You tell me everything. I tell you everything. That is the price."
"Everything," I repeat.
"Everything."
The word is absolute. It asks for more than operational intelligence or strategic disclosure.
It asks for the things I keep in the locked rooms—the fear that I'm my father, the suspicion that violence is all I'll ever be, the word keep that has been sitting in my chest since the kitchen, steady as a second heartbeat.
I extend my hand.
He looks at it. My hand—scarred, split, the tape residue still visible on my knuckles from the heavy bag. The hand that has broken bones and held weapons and gripped his jaw hard enough to bruise. It hangs in the space between us, and the offer it carries is not a business transaction.
He takes it.
His palm against mine is a study in contrasts that my body registers at a frequency below language.
His skin is smooth—not soft, there's a difference, the smoothness of a surface that has been maintained rather than one that has never been tested.
My skin is rough in the way that concrete is rough, the texture of accumulated damage.
His grip is firm. Precise. The grip of a man who knows exactly how much pressure to apply and applies exactly that much.
The contact holds.
One second. Two. The heat transfers between our palms—my hand running hot the way my body runs hot, his hand cooler, steadier, the thermoregulation of a system that prioritizes efficiency over output. His fingers tighten. A fraction. Enough to feel.
It feels like an anchor.
I let go.
He lets go.
The absence of contact registers as a specific kind of cold—not temperature but vacancy, the negative space where his hand was, imprinted on my palm like a photograph.
"Movement," he says.
I look at the target building.
A car pulls into the loading dock—a dark SUV, late model, windows blacked out. The headlights die. A figure exits the driver's side. Average build. Dark jacket. He moves to the entrance and punches a code into a keypad I can barely see from this distance.
A second figure exits the passenger side.
Taller. Heavier. He walks with the rolling gait of a man whose knees have absorbed decades of hard ground, and something about the silhouette—the specific hunch of the shoulders, the way the left hand stays in the jacket pocket while the right swings free—triggers a recognition response so deep in my nervous system that it bypasses cognition entirely and arrives as a physical sensation.
I know that walk.
The figure passes under the security light, and the illumination catches his face for two seconds—long enough.
The jaw, heavy and squared. The broken capillaries across the nose. The white hair, thick, combed back from a forehead lined with decades of loyalty and silence.
Seamus Maguire.
My father's oldest friend. My godfather.
The man who held me at my christening and taught me to tie my shoes and sat at our kitchen table every Sunday for the first fifteen years of my life eating my mother's soda bread and telling stories about the old country that made Rory laugh so hard he'd choke on his milk.
Uncle Seamus.
"Killian." Alessandro's voice is a blade in the dark. "Do you know him?"
I can't speak. My throat has sealed. The recognition is still cascading through my system—memory after memory detonating in sequence like charges set along a demolition line.
Seamus at the pub. Seamus at my mother's funeral.
Seamus pressing a fifty-euro note into my hand on my eighteenth birthday and saying, You're the future of this family, boy. Don't let anyone tell you different.
Seamus walking into a building to meet a Russian lieutenant.
The SUV's first figure reappears in the loading dock entrance.
He lights a cigarette, and the flare of the lighter illuminates sharp Slavic features, a shaved head, a tattoo on the neck that I've seen in intelligence photos.
A lieutenant. Middle management. The kind of man who doesn't make decisions but facilitates them.
Seamus Maguire, my godfather, is meeting with the enemy that is trying to destroy my family.
The betrayal is a blade between my ribs—not sharp, not clean, but serrated, and it goes in slow.
"Killian." Alessandro's voice again. Closer. His hand is on my forearm. The contact is grounding—five points of pressure, deliberate, the same intentional touch he used on the handshake. "Killian, look at me. We need to leave. We have the intel. We need to—"
The red dot appears on his chest.
Small. Steady. Laser-precise.
A circle of light no bigger than a dime, sitting on the left side of his sternum, directly over the heart—the Kevlar would catch the round, but the placement tells me the shooter isn't aiming for the vest. The shooter is aiming for the gap.
The two-inch window between the vest panel and the armhole where the fabric thins and the plate doesn't cover.
"Don't move." My voice comes out flat. Mechanical. The grief over Seamus vaporizes, replaced by something older and faster—the operational wiring that takes over when the threat is immediate and the person beside me is in the crosshairs.
Alessandro follows my gaze. Sees the dot. His breath catches—a single, involuntary hitch—and then his body goes still with the discipline of a man who has been trained to freeze when targeted.
The dot holds steady on his chest.
Someone is watching us. Someone who knew we'd be here, at this location, at this hour. Someone who has been three steps ahead of us since the first coin was placed in a dead man's mouth.
My hand moves to the Glock on my hip.
No. Too slow. If I draw, the shooter fires.
The dot doesn't waver.
There is no time to think. No time to calculate. There is only the dot, and the heart beating beneath it, and the absolute certainty that I will not let it stop.
"Get down!"
I throw myself across the center console. I tackle him, my weight slamming into his chest, shoving him down into the footwell just as the windshield shatters.
Crack.
The bullet punches through the glass, tearing a hole through the leather headrest where Alessandro’s head was a fraction of a second ago. The sound is deafening in the confined space. Glass sprays over us like diamonds.
"Drive!" Alessandro shouts from the floor, his hand already reaching for the gear shift. "Drive!"
I scramble back into the driver's seat, keeping my head low below the dash. I slam the car into reverse. Tires scream against the wet asphalt. We spin out, gravel spraying, another shot pinging off the rear fender with a metallic clang.
I stomp on the gas. The Volvo lurches forward, fishtailing wildly before gripping the road. We tear out of the lot, engine roaring, leaving the shattered glass and the betrayal behind us.
I risk a glance at the passenger seat. Alessandro is pulling himself up, brushing glass from his jacket. His face is pale, but his eyes are burning with a cold, hard fury.
He looks at me.
"You saved me," he says.
"They missed," I rasp, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
"No," he says. "They didn't miss. You moved."
I look back at the road. The red dot is gone, but it’s burned into my retina. And the face of the man who set us up is burned into my soul.
Seamus.
The war just came home.