19. Ruairí
RUAIRí
M y war against those who tried to silence my wife and unborn children begins with silence.
Not the careful hush of the planning phase.
This is a raw, honest absence that comprises no word, no rumor, not even a whisper across the line.
The first night, the city simply holds its breath.
Then comes the first play.
Finglas—the test run.
Two Connolly crews, both legacy cells from the old guard, vanish between midnight and two, their cars found in opposite ends of the same cul-de-sac, four blocks apart, engines cold and windshields webbed by the first frost.
On the sidewalk, the only evidence is a spray of nine-millimeter casings and a row of red tags, each one stapled at ankle height to the iron palings—a simple glyph, the Crowley sigil, hand-drawn in the old ink.
No bodies.
No witnesses.
The gardai arrive just before dawn, log the event as a gangland warning, and move on before breakfast.
Local kids dare each other to touch the tags.
By ten a.m., the council phones start lighting up.
The Connollys howl, the O'Duinns pretend not to care, and the neutral families take inventory of their panic.
It works because we don't follow up.
For the rest of the week, there are no new disappearances, no retaliation, no escalation.
Just the constant, airless pressure of uncertainty, a tautness that strangles every street rumor before it can get out of the estate.
That's the part I enjoy—the not-knowing.
The discipline of restraint, the mathematics of fear.
By Wednesday, the usual rhythms have begun to erode.
The Connolly gambling front in Ringsend—a former butcher's, now a parade of slot machines and cheap liquor—goes dark.
Overnight, the windows are painted black, the doors padlocked from the inside, and the regulars are left to circle the block until they find a new nest.
The man who runs it, a minor cousin named Shane, switches his daily route and posts a runner at each corner.
His shadow men begin tailing our people, amateurish but persistent.
Fiachra brings me the daily logs, highlighting each minor perturbation in blue pen.
He's in his element now, never more alive than when the war has a logic to it.
He's sleeping four hours a night, eating on the move, and shaving his head every morning with a straight razor just to keep the routine sharp.
I watch him circle, annotate, and stack the files into two neat piles—actionable and irrelevant.
He says, "They're waiting for the hammer, but I think the shadow work's getting to them."
I don't bother looking up from the map.
"Let them chase ghosts. We're not touching Ringsend until they move first."
He taps the blue line that snakes from Portobello down to the canal.
"They might not. Word is, they're planning to ride it out, see if we overcommit. "
I trace the canal with my thumb.
"We don't overcommit. We escalate."
He grins wolfishly.
"Just say when."
Thursday passes in a minor key.
The Ringsend front stays shuttered.
The kids who used to work the door now loiter two blocks away, pretending to sell vapes and bumming cigarettes from the old women who run the newsagent.
It's almost sad, the way the whole block deflates without the Connolly traffic to animate it.
I walk the area in late afternoon, Fiachra at my side, each of us in civilian clothes and nondescript trainers.
We don't speak, just observe.
The regulars pretend not to notice us, but the pause in their gait tells the real story.
They know the ground has shifted.
On the walk back, Fiachra says, "Did you ever think we'd have to clean up our own city from scratch?"
I say, "I never thought we'd get the chance."
That night, I meet with the operations crew in a motel room near the north bypass.
The team is four men and a woman, all under thirty, all handpicked for what they call "moral flexibility".
They wait for me in silence, sitting on beds and plastic chairs, eyes fixed but not eager.
I lay out the plan—succinct, final, no room for interpretation.
They nod in unison, then each signs the page in turn.
The woman, Siobhan, folds her copy into a perfect square before tucking it into her pocket.
I like her style.
By midnight, they're gone.
I do not sleep.
Instead, I pace the length of the motel balcony, counting the seconds between passing headlights on the bypass.
At exactly 03:14, my phone buzzes once, a single word in a secure text— Finished .
Friday morning, the club on Camden Street lights up at 06:23.
The fire starts in the basement, where the night manager likes to nap on a mattress beside the water heater.
The insurance company will later call it faulty wiring, but everyone who matters will know it's us.
By 07:10, the street is a column of orange and black, the smoke visible all the way to the quays.
I park two blocks south, on Harcourt, and walk the scene at a slow pace, noting how it smells of diesel and burning varnish, undercut by the tang of ozone.
The crowd at the perimeter is small—mostly early commuters and the few drunks who never made it home—but I recognize at least three faces from the old guard, each one pale and clammy with the knowledge that they could be next.
Fiachra is already there, posted at the corner with a takeaway coffee and the morning edition folded under his arm.
He checks his watch as I approach.
"Thirty seconds faster than planned," he says.
I watch the fire crews angle their hoses at the upper floor, water ricocheting off the brick and back into the street.
The windows explode in sequence, sending a pulse of wet heat out over the crowd.
The onlookers flinch, but no one leaves.
I say, "Are we ready for the response?"
He sips his coffee, eyes never leaving the blaze.
"Already in motion. Nothing comes out of that building alive."
I nod, satisfied.
The message is complete.
We stand there for a while, silent, until the first news van pulls up and the reporters start their soft shoe at the police tape.
The world outside will call it arson, call it a gangland dispute, call it anything but what it really is—a new war, written in fire and made public before breakfast.
I look at Fiachra, the orange of the flames reflected in his pupils, and realize for the first time that I'm not angry anymore.
I'm just awake .
The city is ours now.
All that remains is to prove it.
The second prong of the attack could be bloodier than the first, but only if we want it to be. I, for all intents and purposes, do.
Dublin wakes on a Friday with the river clotting under a film of mist and the city's arteries clogged with the kind of dread that sits just below conscious thought.
Before the joggers hit the quays, before the news cycle even has a pulse, the men I trust most are already working in the half-dark, all gloves and silence and old-country ritual.
At 05:13, the Ha'penny Bridge is empty except for the body.
He's a Connolly sergeant, one of the mid-rankers who thought an accent and a pair of patent leather boots could pass for loyalty.
My men have him staked to the curve of the span, arms cruciform, wrists and ankles spiked clean through the meat and into the iron lattice.
His chest is flayed open from collarbone to navel, ribs splayed like the jaws of an animal trap.
What's left of his face is pointed at the river, mouth packed with the black feathers of the crow we've fixed to his chest.
The bird is the old signal.
A message in a language most of Dublin has forgotten but which the right people will remember.
We use a hardware nail gun for the joints.
It's faster and quieter than the old mallet-and-spike method, and less likely to draw attention from the night patrols.
The body is cleaned, the wounds cauterized, and the blood channeled into tidy lines that run off the bridge into the Liffey.
No mess, no theatrical spray.
Just the fact of it, undeniable and permanent.
By 06:17, the first runner—a retiree, ex-army by the look—finds the tableau.
He vomits on the spot, then dials the guards with shaking fingers.
The response team arrives inside seven minutes, but they don't touch the corpse.
They just stand at the south end of the bridge, radios dead silent, and wait for someone with more authority to tell them what to do.
At 06:41, the first photo hits social.
By 07:00, every street kid, doorman, and kebab vendor in a five-mile radius knows what's happened.
The story mutates instantly—some say the body was left by the Spaniards, others blame the Easterners, a few even claim it's an inside job, some cannibal trick by the O'Duinns.
The truth is more subtle than that, but no one wants the truth.
They want the fear.
By the time I finish my breakfast, three crews have already bailed on their Connolly contracts.
One goes to ground in Swords, another calls in sick to a week's worth of shakedowns, and the third sends an emissary to our safe house with an envelope, a bottle of decent bourbon, and a single line written on hotel stationary— We'd rather switch than burn.
Fiachra calls at 08:22, voice sharp with caffeine and triumph.
"It worked," he says. "They're shitting themselves."
"Of course they are," I reply.
"But don't get greedy. This is when they try to flip it."
"Doesn't matter," he says, and I can hear the smile.
"We have the river. We have the bridges. And after today, we have half the market in the city center."
He's right, but I remind him anyway.
"Don't let the council see your hand."
He grunts, and the line goes dead.
The rest of the day is a series of small aftershocks.
The Crowley colors show up in places we never bothered with before—on the trusses of a pedestrian overpass near the university, on a set of roller shutters in Donnybrook, even stenciled over the old O'Duinn graffiti on the train platform at Clontarf.
It's not random.
Every mark is placed with intent, mapped out two weeks in advance, calculated to hit the points where the city's old boundaries have started to rot.
I spend the afternoon in the north dock offices, watching the feeds as the city pivots, piece by piece.