Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
KILLIAN
Something warm is pressed against my right side.
My first conscious thought is that I'm dying, and the warmth is whatever comes after.
My second thought is that heaven—or hell, depending on the paperwork—wouldn't smell like gun oil and expensive soap.
My third thought isn't a thought at all. It’s a physical recognition.
The weight and shape of another body occupying the same narrow stretch of furniture, fitted against my uninjured flank with a precision that suggests the person responsible solved the spatial problem the way they solve every problem: methodically, completely, and without wasting a single inch.
Alessandro.
I open my eyes.
The safehouse is dim, lit only by the grey morning light filtering through the cracks in the boarded-up windows. Dust motes dance in the shafts of light.
Alessandro’s face is four inches from mine.
In sleep, the composure hasn't just slipped—it's been dismantled entirely.
The sharp features have softened. The jaw, usually set to a tension that could crack walnuts, is slack.
His lips are parted, and his breathing moves through them in a rhythm so steady it could calibrate a metronome.
His dark hair, always combed back with architectural precision, has fallen across his forehead.
He looks young. He looks tired. He looks like a man who fell asleep beside another man's wound and didn't leave.
The stitches in my side announce themselves with a low, throbbing heat. I test the damage—a micro-contraction of the oblique muscle—and the pain responds with a bright, clean spike that travels from my hip to my shoulder.
The wound is closed. The bleeding has stopped. I'm alive because the man sleeping next to me put his finger inside my body and stitched me shut with skills he learned on a dead pig in the mountains.
His hand is on my wrist. Still. Loose fingers curled over the bone, the grip so light I could break it by breathing. He held on all night. Through the fever and the dark hours where my body was making its private calculations about survival—he held on.
I don't move.
I watch him breathe. I count the respirations.
I memorize the topography of his face without the mask: the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the slight asymmetry of his eyebrows, the small scar below his hairline on the right side that I've never noticed before.
A childhood scar, maybe. Something mundane.
Something that happened before anyone tried to kill him in a parking lot.
A possessiveness settles over me that has no strategic justification.
This man, in this room, on this couch. Mine.
The word surfaces from the same place it surfaced in the kitchen—the deep, prelingual cavern where I keep the things I can't say out loud.
Mine to protect. Mine to keep. Mine in a way that has nothing to do with the vow our fathers brokered and everything to do with the fact that he packed my wound with steady hands and fell asleep listening to my heartbeat.
His eyes open.
No transition. No fluttering. One moment he's asleep, and the next his irises are visible—dark, sharp, scanning the room in a single sweep before landing on me with an awareness that engages like a switch being thrown.
"Morning," I say. My voice is gravel.
"You're still alive."
"Disappointed?"
"Relieved." He says it without performance. A fact. His hand releases my wrist, and the absence of contact is something I feel in my pulse, a negative space where his fingers were. "How's the pain?"
"Manageable."
"On a scale of—"
"I said manageable."
His mouth does the thing—the almost-twitch, the suppressed reaction that lives in the micro-expressions he thinks he's hiding.
He sits up. The couch protests, springs groaning. The blanket falls, and the cold air of the safehouse rushes into the space between us. The morning is real now—harsh, smelling like dust and old wool and the iron ghost of the blood I lost on the kitchen floor.
He stands up. He stretches, his back cracking. He’s wearing his t-shirt and trousers, wrinkled from sleep. He looks disheveled. He looks real.
He goes to the kitchen. I hear the tap run—sputtering, the pipes protesting after months of disuse—and the sound of cabinets opening.
I get up.
The process is slow and humiliating. I roll onto my uninjured side, bracing my arm against the couch, levering upright in stages while the stitches pull and the wound sends telegrams of protest up and down my left flank. I grit my teeth against the spike of agony.
My feet find the floor. The wood is freezing through my socks. I look down at my left foot. The hole in the toe is still there.
I limp to the kitchen.
Alessandro has lined up the contents of the pantry on the counter. Three cans of kidney beans. A box of crackers that Rory stocked six months ago. A jar of peanut butter. A tin of instant coffee that might be older than I am.
"The nutritional value of this inventory is concerning," he says.
"Welcome to the Kavanagh hospitality experience."
He picks up a can of beans. He pulls the tab. The lid peels back with a sharp snap. He hands it to me with a spoon he found in the drawer. He opens a second one for himself.
We stand in the kitchen eating cold kidney beans out of cans while the grey light hardens through the boards and the river makes its patient noise behind the house.
The domesticity of it—two men in a safehouse eating canned food in silence—is so absurdly normal that it bends the context of everything around it.
We killed people last night. We were shot at.
I bled on the floor. He stitched me shut.
And now we're eating beans.
"Crackers?" he offers.
"How old?"
He checks the box. Reads the date. "Expired in March."
"Pass."
I make the coffee. The instant crystals dissolve into water that's barely warm—the safehouse doesn't have a kettle, just the tap. It tastes like mud and chemicals. Alessandro drinks it without complaint.
The man who drinks single-origin espresso is standing in a kitchen from 1971 drinking brown water.
He fits here. The observation lands without context. He just does.
"The table," he says.
We sit. The kitchen table is wood, scarred with cigarette burns and knife marks. Alessandro wipes a section clean with his sleeve. He lays out what we have.
His phone. The decoded message. A pen he found in the junk drawer, and a sheet of paper torn from a water-stained notebook.
"Chronology," he says. He writes fast. Clean, tight handwriting.
"The Russians initiate a destabilization campaign targeting both families simultaneously.
Marco is killed and staged with a Kavanagh coin.
Your men are killed and staged with Falcone silk.
A surveillance photo of Rory is sent to establish a personal threat vector. "
"The meeting location encoded in Béarlagair on Marco's phone. Someone with Kavanagh cultural access planted the file."
"Which leads us to the meeting site. Where we observed—" He pauses. He looks at me. The pen goes still. "Seamus Maguire."
Hearing the name makes it real again. In the car, I was bleeding and running on adrenaline. Here, in the quiet, the betrayal settles in my gut like lead.
Uncle Seamus. My godfather.
"He has access to the language," I say. My voice is flat.
"He's one of the seven. He's been part of the inner circle since before I was born.
Da trusts him with everything—territory maps, supply chains, troop movements.
If Seamus is compromised, then every piece of intelligence the Kavanagh clan has generated in the past two decades is in Russian hands. "
"Which explains the precision of the attacks," Alessandro says. He draws a line connecting Seamus to the warehouse hit. "They knew Marco's route. They knew the warehouse codes. They knew how to stage the coin and the tie with enough accuracy to be convincing."
"They didn't expect us to be looking at the same evidence at the same time."
"No." His pen stops. "They expected the truce to shatter. They expected you to kill me, or my family to retaliate against yours. The entire operation is predicated on the assumption that we are enemies playing at alliance."
"And instead we're eating beans in a safehouse."
"And instead we're eating beans in a safehouse." His mouth twitches. A ghost of a smile.
It lands in my chest with a warmth the coffee couldn't provide.
"We need proof," Alessandro says. "Seeing Seamus isn't enough. We need him in the act. A recording. A transaction. Something we can take to the Dons."
"We can't use Falcone assets," I say. "If Seamus has compromised us, the leak flows both directions."
"We can't use Kavanagh assets either. If Seamus knows we're looking, he goes to ground."
"Then it's us."
"It's us."
The words hang in the air. Two men against two families and an external enemy. Operating on stolen cars and safehouse pantries.
"We don't go back until we have the head of the snake," Alessandro says. "Not to the penthouse. Not to Gallagher's. We operate independently until Seamus is confirmed."
"That means cutting off from our own people. Rory. Rocco."
"Everyone except each other."
I look at him. He is serious. He is committed.
"Alright," I say.
I extend my hand across the table. The gesture mirrors the one in the car—the same hand, the same scars. But the currency has changed. In the car, it was a professional handshake.
This is something else.
His hand meets mine. His palm is warm. His grip is firm. His eyes are steady.
"To each other," he says.
"To each other."
The grip holds. Then releases.
He stands up. "We need to move. We can't stay here. If they tracked the Volvo even part of the way, this location is burned."
"We ditched the Volvo," I remind him. "We're in the Ford."
"The Ford is a rolling probable cause stop. We need a secure location in the city."
"Rory's studio," I say.
He glances at me. "Not the penthouse?"
"The penthouse is compromised. If Seamus has Russian backing, they know where we live. Gallagher's is out—Seamus has a key. The studio is Rory's personal space. It's not on any Kavanagh registry. He rents it under an alias."
"And you trust him."
"With everything I have."
"Let's go."
We clean up. We bury the cans in the trash. We wipe down the table. We leave the safehouse exactly as we found it—empty, silent, waiting.
I walk to the door. The stitches pull, a sharp reminder of the night, but I can walk. I can fight.
Alessandro opens the door. The morning air is cold.
We walk to the car—the grey Ford sedan, battered and ugly in the daylight.
"I'm driving," Alessandro says.
I don't argue. I toss him the keys.
I get in the passenger seat. The seat smells of old vinyl and the blood I lost last night.
Alessandro drives. He navigates the dirt road, then the highway, heading back toward the city. He drives precisely. Checking mirrors. Signaling.
The city assembles around us as we cross back into the populated grid. Traffic. Pedestrians. The commerce of a morning that doesn't know two of its residents spent the night bleeding in a shack.
The normality of it is obscene.
We reach the arts district. It’s a neighborhood of converted factories and warehouses, gritty and quiet at this hour.
The studio is on the third floor of a brick building with fire escapes that look like rusted spiderwebs.
Alessandro parks the Ford on the street. Kills the engine.
The building is dark. The windows on the third floor are unlit.
"He could be asleep," I say.
"Or not here."
The second possibility sits in my stomach like a stone. I sent Rory a text yesterday. Stay safe. If Seamus is watching, he knows Rory is my pressure point.
I open the car door. The stitches protest. I override them.
Alessandro is beside me. The Beretta is under his jacket. He looks tired, drawn, the stubble heavy on his jaw. But he looks dangerous.
We walk to the steel door. No signage. Just a biometric lock that Rory built himself.
I press the buzzer.
Nothing.
I press it again. Hold it.
A click. The intercom crackles.
"If you're selling something, I'm not buying. If you're collecting for the church, God and I have an understanding. If you're—"
"Rory."
Silence. One second. Two.
The lock disengages with a heavy clunk.
The door opens.
Rory’s face appears in the gap. He looks pale, dark circles under his eyes. He’s wearing a paint-stained t-shirt.
"Kill." His voice cracks. "Jesus Christ, Kill, I thought you were—"
He stops. His eyes move past me. Find Alessandro.
The relief hardens into assessment. He takes in the stolen car, the bloodstains on my jacket, the way I’m leaning slightly to the right to favor my side. He sees Alessandro standing close, ready to catch me.
"You'd better come in," Rory says.
He steps back.
We walk into the dark stairwell.
"Third floor," Rory says.
We climb. Every step is a negotiation with the pain in my side. Alessandro is right behind me, his hand hovering near my back, not touching but there.
We reach the top. Rory unlocks the heavy steel door to the studio.
We step inside.
It’s a massive space. High ceilings, exposed brick, huge windows covered in black-out curtains. It smells of turpentine and oil paint. Canvases are stacked everywhere.
Rory locks the door behind us. He throws three deadbolts.
He turns to face us.
"You look like hell," he says to me.
"I feel like it."
"And you," he says to Alessandro. "You look... different."
Alessandro nods. "It was a long night."
Rory looks between us. He sees something. The shift in gravity. The fact that we aren't standing like enemies anymore.
"Okay," Rory says. "Coffee. First aid. Then you tell me everything."
"Everything," I agree.
I walk over to a battered sofa and sit down carefully. Alessandro sits on the arm of the couch, his shoulder brushing mine.
We are safe. For now.
But the war is still waiting outside.
And Seamus Maguire is still out there, selling my family to the wolves.
I look at Alessandro. I look at Rory.
My family.
Not the clan. Not the bloodline. This. The two men in this room.
I will burn the city down to keep them safe.