CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
William
AOIFE'S brEATHING IS the only sound in the room. Shallow. Uneven. Even in sleep, she hasn't let go of what happened.
She cried until there was nothing left, and then she went still against me, and I carried her upstairs and put her in the bed and stood over her until her breathing evened out.
She curled onto her side, her knees pulled up, her hands tucked under her chin.
She looked small. She looked like someone who'd just lost the last person she thought she could count on.
I watch her for a long time. Longer than I should.
Then I go downstairs.
The kitchen light is on. Matty is sitting at the table with his phone flat in front of him and a cup of tea going cold beside it. He doesn't look up when I walk in. I pull out the chair across from him and sit.
Then Matty lifts his head. His dark eyes find mine. He nods once.
"It's done."
Two words. That's all it takes.
My chest does something I don't have a name for. Not relief. Not guilt. Something between the two that sits heavy and doesn't shift.
"Where?" I ask.
"M6. West of Ballinasloe." His voice is flat. Factual. The voice he uses when he's reporting numbers. "It was quick."
"And the body?"
"It will never be found."
I think about Reilan in the back of the car. Thinking he was going to the airport. Thinking he was getting out. Thinking that Aoife had saved him, and the worst was over.
I think about Aoife asleep upstairs with tear tracks still drying on her face.
"She can't know."
Matty's gaze doesn't waver. "She won't."
"Not ever."
"I know."
I need a minute. I need to sit with the fact that I just had my fiancée's brother killed, and I don't feel what I should feel. I don't feel remorse. I don't feel sick. I feel the cold certainty that this was the only move left on the board, and I made it, and now it's done.
Reilan fed Viktor intelligence that got people killed. He orchestrated the hit at the contract signing. He got Dillon O'Rourke shot. He put Aoife in the crosshairs of the Bratva, and then he stood in the same room as her and pretended he was protecting her.
I couldn't let him walk. It doesn't matter what I said to Aoife.
It doesn't matter what she begged for. A man who knows your operation inside and out, who has a direct line to Viktor Tarasov, who's proven he'll sell you out when it suits him, that man doesn't get on a plane and disappear.
He gets on a plane and lands somewhere and picks up a phone and starts talking. And then people die.
I know what that makes me. A liar. A man who looked her in the face and promised something he had no intention of delivering.
I'll carry that.
Matty slides his phone across the table. I pick it up and scan the screen. Encrypted messages, timestamps, location pings. He's already scrubbed everything that needs scrubbing.
"Car?" I ask.
"Burned. Shell in a quarry outside Loughrea."
I set the phone down. Look at my brother. This kid, whom everyone wrote off as the quiet one, the fragile one, the one they needed to watch in case he went the way our father went. He coordinated an execution on a motorway and cleaned it up, and his hands aren't shaking.
"You good?" I ask.
He picks up the cold tea. Takes a sip. Sets it down.
"I'm good."
I nod. That's enough. We don't need to talk about it. We don't need to process it or examine it or sit with our feelings about it. Reilan is dead. The mole is gone. Now we deal with what comes next.
"Viktor," I say.
Matty's expression shifts. Something sharper behind the blankness.
"Viktor has resources we can't match on our own.
Russian money. Local contractors. Whatever muscle he can pull from the continent.
" Matty turns the phone back toward himself.
"And now that Reilan's gone, Viktor loses his eyes inside our operation.
He'll know something's wrong. His response will be to hit us hard before we can consolidate. "
"We can't take him alone," I say.
"No."
Both of us know what that means.
"The families," I say.
Matty nods. "The Reillys. Dillon's people. Whatever smaller houses we can pull in. Everyone who still has skin in this."
"They won't come willingly."
"They will if you ask them right."
I look at him. "Since when do you give speeches?"
Something that might be the ghost of a smile crosses his face. "I don't. You do. That's the point."
He's right, and I hate that he's right. The Irish families have been fractured since Viktor started moving against them.
He's been picking them off one at a time because none of them trust each other enough to stand together.
The Reillys lost men in Limerick. The Brennans and the Walshes have been bleeding from the port disruptions Viktor's people have been running since October.
They're all hurting. But hurt doesn't make people cooperate. Fear does. And right now, they're more afraid of each other than they are of Viktor.
I need to change that.
"Set up a meeting," I say. "Tomorrow. Neutral ground. I want the heads of every family at the same table."
"The Shelbourne?" Matty suggests.
"Too public. Too many eyes."
"Aidan has the farmhouse in Meath. Forty acres. Private road. Easy to secure."
I think about it. Nod. "That works. Call Aidan. Tell him we need the house, and we need it clean."
Matty's already typing.
I stand up. My body aches in ways that have nothing to do with anything physical. The tiredness goes deeper than muscle and bone. It lives in the part of me that's been making decisions no twenty-seven-year-old should have to make for longer than I can remember.
"William."
I stop in the doorway.
"She's going to figure it out eventually," Matty says. He doesn't look up from his phone. "Aoife. She's too smart not to."
"I know."
"What happens then?"
I don't answer. Because the truth is, I don't know. The truth is that the woman asleep in my bed has already survived more loss than most people face in a lifetime, and I just added to it, and when she finds out, there's a real chance she'll never look at me the same way again.
I'll deal with that when it comes.
Right now, I have a war to win.
The morning is gray and cold. March in Ireland. The kind of day that makes you feel like the sun forgot to show up.
Aidan arrives at eight. He looks like he hasn't slept either, dark circles under his eyes, his jaw tight. He walks into the kitchen and pours himself coffee and leans against the counter and looks at me.
"Reilan's gone," he says. Not a question.
"He's gone."
Aidan studies me. He's always been able to read me better than anyone except maybe Jason. Those dark eyes with the gold flecks moving across my face, looking for whatever I'm not saying.
I hold his gaze and give him nothing.
"Good," he says finally. "One less thing to worry about."
We don't talk about it again.
By noon, the calls have been made. Matty worked the phones all morning, reaching out through the old channels, the ones our father built and Frank tried to corrupt. I listened from the next room while he talked to men twice his age in that quiet, steady way he has, and one by one they agreed.
The Shelbourne suite would have been easier. But easier doesn't mean smarter, and I'm done taking shortcuts.
The farmhouse in Meath is a low stone building set back from a private road that runs through Aidan's land. It was a working farm once. Now it's a place where difficult conversations happen away from anyone who might be listening. Aidan had it swept for devices last month. Clean.
They arrive separately. Dillon's man first, Lorcan, whom I've seen at O'Rourke gatherings but never spoken to directly.
Then the Brennans, two brothers who run the docks in Waterford.
The Walshes send their father, old Seamus, with his eldest son.
The Reillys come last. Conor Reilly, tall and careful, watching everything.
I watch each of them come through the door. Watch the way they look at each other, at the room, at me. Sizing up the threat level.
Aidan stands at the back of the room with his arms folded. Matty is near the window. Lorcan's presence says what I need it to say: the O'Rourkes are with us. Dillon sent his man to stand with William Murphy.
Conor Reilly sits down last. He's my age, maybe a year older, with a face that gives away nothing.
"I'm here because Matty asked," he says. "That's the only reason. You've got five minutes."
I don't sit. I stand at the head of the table, and I look at every man in the room, and I let the silence do its work.
"Viktor Tarasov has been operating in Ireland for over a year," I say. "In that time, he's hit every family in this room. He's killed our people. He shot Dillon O'Rourke. He burned my house."
Nobody speaks. Good. I'm not done.
"He did all of this because we let him. Because we sat in our separate corners and told ourselves it was someone else's problem. None of you moved when the Brennans lost their men at the port. None of you came when they put a bullet in Dillon O'Rourke."
Conor Reilly shifts in his seat. "That's a lot of blame to be throwing around for a man who's been running things for five minutes."
"I've been running things long enough to see what isn't working." I hold his gaze. "Separate, Viktor picks us off whenever he feels like it. Together, we outnumber him, and he knows it. That's why he's spent the last year making sure we don't trust each other."
"And we should trust you?" Seamus Walsh's voice is flat. "Your uncle sold us out. Your brother made a deal with the Bratva."
The room goes tight.
"Yes," I say. "My uncle sold you out. And I put a bullet in his head.
My brother made a deal with the Bratva, and I dealt with that, too.
My family's been bleeding longer than any of yours, and we're still standing.
" I pause. "I'm not asking you to trust me because I'm a Murphy.
I'm asking you to trust me because I'm the one willing to do what needs doing. "