EPILOGUE
Aoife
THREE MONTHS LATER, the Murphy house is rebuilt.
Not the same house. The old one is gone, reduced to a blackened shell that William had cleared within days of leaving the clinic.
This one sits on the same foundation, but everything above ground is new.
Stone walls. Slate roof. Windows that let in the gray Irish light and hold it.
Jason found the contractor. Aidan handled the permits.
The Brennans sent a crew from Limerick who worked fourteen-hour days without being asked.
I stand in the kitchen doorway and watch William drop a teabag into a mug that doesn't match anything else in the cupboard.
The kitchen still smells faintly of paint in the corners where the sun hits, but mostly it smells like the tea he's been drinking since six this morning.
It's just past nine. He's already taken two calls and reviewed a report from Lorcan about the western ports.
"Aidan and Raven are coming for lunch," I say.
He nods without looking up. "Matty?"
"I called him this morning. He said he'd come."
Jason went back to Kira after the clinic. He helped find the contractor for the rebuild, handled things by phone, but he hasn't been back to Ireland since. William doesn't mention him. I don't either.
I cross the kitchen and take the mug from his hand before he can drink.
He's left the teabag in again. He always does.
I fish it out and drop it in the sink and add milk from the fridge because he won't do it himself.
He watches me. Lets me. Something he wouldn't have done when I first came here.
Something that would have felt like an intrusion instead of what it is, which is me knowing how he takes his tea and caring enough to fix it.
"Your father wants to visit next week," he says.
My chest tightens the way it always does now when someone mentions my father. Not fear. Not anger. Something in between that I haven't figured out how to name.
My father is recovering. The throat wound healed cleanly, and his voice is back, deeper than before, rougher at the edges.
He knows about Reilan. All of it. William sat with him for two hours in the hospital and told him everything my brother had done, and when it was over, my father asked for fifteen minutes alone, and when the door opened again, his eyes were dry, his jaw was set, and he asked about the alliance.
That's my father. Break his heart, and he'll fold it into strategy before the blood dries.
"He can come," I say. "The guest room is ready."
William looks at me over the rim of the mug. "Are you?"
"For my father?" I lean against the counter. "I'll manage."
He sets the mug down and reaches for me. His hand on my hip pulls me closer until I'm standing between his legs, where he's leaning against the counter, and his other hand is on the back of my neck, and his forehead is against mine.
We stay like that. Breathing.
I think about Reilan. I think about him every day, and I hate myself for it, but I think about him anyway.
William told me he got on a plane. London first, then somewhere in Europe.
No contact details. No forwarding address.
My brother is out there, somewhere, alive because I begged for his life, and the space where he used to be is a wound that doesn't close.
I don't talk about it. William doesn't ask.
But sometimes at night, I lie awake in the dark beside him, and I think about the corridor outside Reilan's room.
The light under his door. The sound of my palm against his face.
And I wonder if he's sleeping or if he's awake too, somewhere, thinking about the sister he tried to save by burning down everything around her.
William's thumb traces the line of my jaw. "You went somewhere."
"I'm here."
"You went somewhere," he repeats. Patient. Not pushing.
"Reilan," I admit.
His hand doesn't tighten. Doesn't withdraw. Just stays where it is, warm against my skin.
"I know," he says.
That's all. He doesn't tell me it'll get easier. Doesn't tell me I made the right call. Just holds me and lets the name exist in the space between us without trying to fix what can't be fixed.
The morning passes. William takes another call in the sitting room.
I unpack a box of plates that arrived yesterday and find places for them in cupboards that are still mostly empty.
The house is full of these small gaps. Shelves with nothing on them.
Walls with no pictures. Rooms that echo because the furniture hasn't caught up with the space. It'll take time. We have time.
Just after noon, the doorbell rings.
William is in the kitchen before I am. His hand goes to his waistband. Habit. The gun is there. It's always there now.
"It's Aidan," I say, checking the time. "He's early."
"Aidan's never early." William's hand drops from his waistband, but doesn't relax.
He crosses the kitchen, and I follow him to the front door. Through the glass, I can see Aidan's car in the drive. Raven is beside him, stretching as she steps out. Behind them, a second car. Matty.
William opens the door.
Aidan comes in first. He looks at the hallway, the new floors, the fresh paint. Something moves across his face that might be pride or might be grief for what was here before. He claps William on the shoulder and walks past him into the house.
Raven stops in front of me. She looks good. Color back in her cheeks. Her dark hair pulled back, a sweater that covers the scar on her arm.
"You owe me wine," she says.
"It's in the kitchen."
She grins and follows Aidan.
Matty comes last. He pauses at the threshold and looks at the house. At the stone. The windows. The new door.
"It's good," he says.
William watches his brother step inside. Something tightens around his eyes. His gaze follows Matty down the hall in a way I've noticed before but can't explain.
I touch his arm. He looks at me.
"He's all right," I say.
"For now." He closes the door.
We eat in the dining room—a new table, long enough for all of us.
Raven brings the pasta she made this morning, and Aidan brings wine; he doesn't offer any to William, and I notice that this time it's deliberate.
He sets two bottles on the counter, pours for Raven and himself, and leaves the rest alone.
When I catch his eye, he gives me a small nod.
Aidan learned. It took a missile and a fire and twelve dead men, but he learned.
The conversation moves around the table. Aidan teases Matty about something, and Matty responds without looking up from his plate, and William's mouth twitches, and for a moment, just a moment, this could be any family sitting down to a meal together.
Then William sets his fork down.
"We need to talk about Volkov."
The room shifts. Not visibly. No one moves. But the air changes. Raven's hand pauses on her glass. Aidan's posture straightens by a degree.
"Viktor named him before he died," William says. "Volkov. Someone above Viktor in the Bratva hierarchy. Already in Ireland. Already watching."
"Jason's put out feelers from his end," William continues. "None of his contacts have heard the name."
"Lorcan hasn't either," I add. "I spoke to him yesterday. The O'Rourke network has nothing."
"Which means he's careful," Aidan says. "More careful than Viktor was."
"Viktor was a hammer," Matty says. Everyone looks at him. He looks back, unhurried. "He came in loud. Made himself known. Forced a confrontation." He pauses. "If Volkov is the person above the hammer, he's not going to operate the same way."
The table is quiet.
"The families are united," William says. "Brennans, Walshes, Reillys, O'Rourkes. The alliance holds. We held it through Viktor's worst, and it didn't break."
"It came close," Aidan says.
"Close isn't broken." William's jaw sets. "We rebuild. We dig in. We find Volkov before he finds us."
"And if we can't find him?" Aidan asks.
"Then we make sure that when he comes, we're ready." William looks around the table. At his brothers. At Raven. At me. "We held the line. We keep holding it."
Matty pushes his chair back. "I'm going to get some air."
He leaves through the kitchen door. I watch him go. Through the window, I can see him walk to the edge of the garden where the new stone wall meets the old. He stands there with his hands in his pockets, and his face tipped up toward the sky, and he doesn't move.
William watches too. His hand finds my knee under the table.
"Matty," he says to Aidan. Just the name. Nothing else.
Aidan nods. "I know."
I don't know what passes between them. But it's something. And it's not the first time I've noticed it.
After they leave, I find William in the sitting room. The fire is going. He's standing at the window with his back to me, looking out at the drive where Aidan's taillights are disappearing down the road.
I come up behind him. Slide my arms around his waist, careful of his left side where the stitches have healed into a ridge of scar tissue I can feel through his shirt. My cheek against his back. His heartbeat under my hands.
"You're thinking," I say.
"Just about how I'm going to win this war."
I smile against his back. "That's very cocky."
He turns in my arms. Looks down at me. His dark eyes in the firelight, the thin scar above his eyebrow catching the light. "And so I should be." His mouth curves. A real smile. "Look at the woman I captured."
My chest swells. I smile back.
"Come to bed," I say.
He lets me lead him. Through the hallway with its fresh paint and bare walls where nothing hangs yet.
Up the stairs that still creak in the wrong places because the builders haven't finished.
Into the room at the end of the corridor, where the bed is made, and the window looks out over the garden and the land beyond it, dark and quiet under a sky full of stars.
Tomorrow, William has the council meeting. I have phone calls. A father arriving next week who needs to be faced, and a brother somewhere in Europe who needs to be mourned, and a name none of us have heard before that carries more weight than all the violence that came before it.
But that's tomorrow.
Tonight, William locks the door. Puts his back against it. Looks at me across the room with an expression I don't have a word for but feel in every part of my body.
I hold out my hand.
He crosses the room and takes it.
THE END