Chapter 26
Nico
Before The Storm
Nico
* * *
Three teams. Three locations. One chance to get this right.
I stand at the map table in Elysium's basement and divide my family into groups that might not all come home.
The blueprints are spread across the surface: harbor facility, Dorchester warehouse, waterfront industrial complex.
Three pins. Three entry strategies. Three sets of men who are looking at me for orders that will determine whether they see morning.
Team one: mine. Harbor facility. Viktor's confirmed location. Finn O'Brien is inside that building, along with whatever remains of Viktor's command operation. I take Stavros, four Greeks, two Irish soldiers, and my wife.
My wife. Who learned to shoot twelve days ago. Who carries the Beretta like she was born with it. Who is walking into a building full of men with automatic weapons because her brother is bleeding in a chair, and she will not be left behind.
Team two: Cormac and Declan take the Dorchester warehouse with eight Irish soldiers.
Cormac hasn't stopped moving since the video, but his energy has shifted.
The pacing has gone from the random churn of rage to the measured rhythm of a man calculating entry points and ammunition counts.
He's a general now, not a brother. Generals survive.
Brothers get killed running into rooms without checking the corners.
Team three: Lex leads a joint Greek-Irish unit to the waterfront industrial complex.
Lex looked at the blueprints, nodded once, and started checking ammunition with the methodical focus of a man who communicates through preparation rather than words.
My brother has never needed a briefing longer than thirty seconds.
He reads the situation, calculates the optimal approach, and executes.
It's what makes him the best enforcer in the eastern syndicate.
It's also what makes him nearly impossible to know.
I brief each team leader on communication protocols. Primary channel, backup frequency, extraction points, fallback positions. If one team hits resistance beyond capacity, they radio. If radio goes dark, the others don't pause. The mission is Finn. Everything else is secondary.
Stavros and I go over the harbor facility blueprints for the third time.
Main entrance: reinforced steel, breaching ram required.
Loading dock on the south side: likely barricaded but accessible.
Service door on the east, partially obscured by shipping containers.
Satellite imagery shows a four-second window when the exterior patrol rounds the northeast corner. That's our secondary entry.
I map the probable guard positions. The kill zones.
The hallways where an ambush could cut off retreat.
The geometry of violence laid out on paper.
I learned to read these patterns at twenty-two, standing over blueprints while my father's blood was still drying on a warehouse floor not so different from this one.
Cormac approaches the table. He stands beside me for a moment without speaking. Two men looking at a map, calculating the distance between strategy and loss.
"If Finn's dead when we get there—"
"He's not."
"If he is."
I look at him. Cormac O'Brien is six-two, broad-shouldered, built like a man whose hands were designed for damage.
He has the eyes of someone who has buried friends and broken enemies and never fully distinguished between grief and fury.
Right now, those eyes are asking me a question that has nothing to do with tactics.
"Then Viktor Reznikov dies slowly. And I'll hold him down while you do it."
Cormac studies me. Whatever he's measuring, he reaches his answer. He extends his hand.
In thirty-two days of marriage to his sister, every handshake between us has been mine to offer.
At the wedding. At the reception. At family dinners where he accepted my grip with the tolerance of a man allowing a stranger into a house he's guarded for twenty years.
This is the first time Cormac O'Brien has reached for me.
The difference between tolerance and trust lives in who extends first.
I take his hand. He grips hard. I match it.
"Bring my sister home safe."
"I will."
He holds for one beat longer than necessary.
Then he nods and walks back to his team.
I watch him go and think about what it costs to send someone you love into a building where people will try to kill them.
I think about how I'm about to do the exact same thing with Siobhan and how the hypocrisy sits in my chest like a stone I can't swallow.
I find her in the side room off the basement. She's sitting on an ammunition crate with the Beretta in her lap, checking the magazine for the third time. Fourteen rounds. She racks the slide with the efficiency I drilled into her at the range. Her hands are steady. Her breathing is even.
She's wearing jeans and a dark sweater from this morning, now covered by the tactical vest Lex fitted twenty minutes ago.
I watched her put it on. Watched her adjust the straps across her chest and settle the weight across her shoulders.
She paused when the Kevlar pressed flat against her stomach.
One second. Her hand adjusted the strap lower and then she moved on and the pause was so small I filed it as discomfort with unfamiliar equipment.
She looks like a soldier. She shouldn't have to.
"Hey."
She looks up. The composure holds for one beat, two.
Then the mask slips and the woman underneath is the one who stole my coffee this morning and laughed at a joke I didn't realize I was making.
The woman who pressed her forehead into my chest while the water heated and murmured "five more minutes" like the world beyond our kitchen didn't exist.
"Whatever happens tonight—"
"Don't." Sharp. Immediate. "No goodbyes, Nico."
"Siobhan—"
"We go in. We get Finn. We come home. That's the plan. That's the only plan."
"When did you get so brave?"
Her eyes hold mine. Steady. Clear. Absolutely certain.
"I was always brave. You just didn't know me yet."
She's right. I didn't know her when I watched her across the Ricci function eight months ago.
I didn't know her when she sat in my chair and negotiated terms I still haven't fully recovered from.
I've been learning her for thirty-two days and I haven't finished.
I may never finish. The thought doesn't frighten me the way it should. It feels like a promise.
I cross to her. Take the Beretta from her lap. Set it on the crate. Pull her to her feet. She comes willingly, hands settling on my chest. I cup her face. The gesture from our wedding, the first time I touched her. Palm against jaw. Thumb tracing cheekbone.
I kiss her. Hard. Desperate. The kind of kiss men give before wars because their bodies understand what their minds won't say: this might be the last time. She kisses back with the same urgency, fingers tightening on my shirt, her mouth fierce against mine.
Forehead to forehead. Her breath warm on my lips. My hands in her hair.
"Stay close to me."
"I will."
"If I tell you to run—"
"I'll run. I promised."
Her eyes on mine. Green-blue. The color I've been memorizing since the first night she slept in my bed. Her lips part. The air between us thickens. I can feel her holding a word behind her teeth. The shape of it presses against the silence like a hand against glass. I can almost hear it.
She doesn't speak. She rises on her toes and kisses me again. Softer this time. A promise, not a goodbye. When she pulls back, her eyes are bright. Not tears. Resolve.
"Let's go get my brother."
I hand her the Beretta. She takes it. Checks the safety. Tucks it into the holster. Ready. She's been ready since the phone call. Maybe since the night she knocked on my door and chose this life with her eyes open.
The teams assemble in the garage. Greeks and Irish checking each other's equipment, exchanging nods across the history and the grudges and the particular stubbornness of men who have decided to stop killing each other and start killing someone else. The alliance made operational.
Lex catches my eye across the garage. Nods. Cormac nods. Declan, holstered and moving toward his vehicle, nods.
"Harbor facility. Two-minute countdown from breach. Stay on comms. Stay alive."
Three vehicles. Three directions. Cormac's team peels north toward Dorchester. Lex goes east toward the waterfront. My vehicle heads south toward the harbor.
Siobhan sits beside me in the back seat. Vest over her sweater. Beretta on her thigh. She stares out the window at the city passing in streaks of streetlight and shadow. Her hand rests on her stomach. Brief. Instinctive. She catches herself. Moves it to her knee.
I notice the movement. But I don't think anything of it.
The harbor facility rises against the dark. Concrete and steel and the particular silence of a building pretending to be empty.
"Together," she says.
"Together."
The vehicle stops. The door opens on the February cold.
And we go.