Crossfire (Savage Crown #4)

Chapter 1

Aran

Silence.

Silence is what exists before gunfire.

Most people never learn the difference between quiet and silence. Quiet is the absence of noise. Silence is the presence of intent. It has texture. Weight. It presses against your eardrums like a hand over your mouth.

Silence and I have the same relationship a surgeon has with their blade. I know what lives inside it, what it hides, what it promises.

Right now, it promises a man is about to die.

I lie prone on the wet concrete of a rooftop in Ringsend, the DMR settled against my shoulder like an extension of my body. Rain runs in thin lines across my knuckles. I don’t wipe it away. Movement is noise. Noise is failure.

Below, through the scope, a car park stretches gray and empty behind a row of industrial units.

Streetlights carve the space into blocks of orange and black.

Two cars sit at the far end, noses facing each other like dogs about to fight.

One is a silver BMW, engine running. The other is a dark Audi, lights off.

Both arrived within four minutes of each other, which tells me this meeting was arranged to the second.

Connor’s intel said midnight. It is 12:03. Late by three minutes. In this world, three minutes is a statement.

I breathe. Slow. Controlled. I have been here for two hours, arriving before the security sweep that Connor told me to expect.

They checked the building opposite, the alley to the south, the drainage culvert.

They didn’t check this rooftop because the access door is bolted from the inside and has been for eighteen months.

I came up through the ventilation shaft at ten this evening with the rifle broken down in a holdall.

Patience is not a virtue. It is a skill.

And I am very fucking skilled.

The BMW door opens. A man steps out. Mid-fifties, heavy in the middle, expensive coat that strains across his gut.

Patrick Gillen. He ran a protection racket across the Northside for the Kavanagh family for fifteen years until he decided he was smarter than the people who paid him.

Three weeks ago, he skimmed forty thousand from a shipment that was supposed to pass through clean.

The money doesn’t matter. Connor wouldn’t blink at forty thousand.

What matters is that Gillen thought he could do it, and no one would notice.

Connor noticed.

Gillen walks to the space between the two vehicles. He buttons his coat against the rain, a stupid, small gesture of vanity that won’t matter in about ninety seconds. A second man climbs from the Audi. Younger, leaner. I recognize him as one of Gillen’s men. Cian something. He carries a gym bag.

That will be the money. Returned in full, probably with a premium on top, because Gillen is here to grovel. He thinks this is a negotiation. He thinks turning up with the cash and a sorry expression will settle the account.

He’s wrong.

I adjust the scope. The crosshairs settle on the bridge of Gillen’s nose.

At this distance, one hundred and forty meters, the round will arrive before the sound.

He won’t hear the shot that kills him. He will simply stop existing.

One frame, he is a man buttoning his coat in the rain. The next, he is nothing.

I wait.

Not for the shot. The shot is easy. Like breathing.

Something my body knows how to do even when my mind is somewhere else entirely.

I wait because Connor wants Gillen to feel safe first. He wants the money handed back.

He wants Gillen to believe, for one full minute, that he walked in here and walked out clean.

Connor is very particular about the order of things.

The money returns. The message is sent. Two separate transactions, and only one of them involves currency.

I watch through the scope as Gillen talks.

His mouth moves, but I can’t hear the words and don’t need to.

Body language tells me everything. He gestures with open palms. Supplicant.

He points at the bag. Offering. The younger lad unzips it and tilts it forward.

Even from here, I can see the banded stacks.

Forty grand and change. Gillen probably added an extra ten as a sweetener.

Cian zips the bag and sets it on the ground between them. Gillen steps back. He puts his hands in his pockets. He rocks on his heels. He thinks it is done.

That’s my signal.

I exhale half a breath and hold. My index finger finds the space between heartbeats. The trigger breaks clean.

What escapes is a flat, mechanical cough that the rain absorbs before it reaches the ground. Gillen drops. No stagger, no stumble. His legs fold, and he hits the wet tarmac like someone cut his strings. The heavy coat spreads around him, soaking up rainwater and what comes after.

Cian just stands there like a fucking statue.

Two whole seconds gawking at the body. Amateur hour.

Any pro would be halfway to his car by now.

Then he starts looking up at the rooftops like he’s at the cinema.

He won’t find me. I’m already flat on my belly in the dark.

No chance he spots me. Flash was basically nothing, and I’ve got this wall between us. Textbook.

He runs. He leaves the bag. Good lad.

Nothing. Not a fucking thing. I check for it like you’d poke a bruise to see if it still hurts. No rush, no guilt, no whatever.

I break down the rifle. Stock. Barrel. Suppressor.

Mag. Each bit goes into its own foam cutout in the bag.

Takes me forty-five seconds, start to finish.

Could do it in thirty if I pushed it, but why bother?

Cian’s run. Gillen’s not exactly going anywhere, and nobody knows I’m up here except Connor and me.

I sling the bag over my shoulder and head for the vent shaft. Rain’s coming down harder now, making the roof slick as shit. Being six-six and wider than most men makes squeezing through ventilation a bit of a joke, but I do it anyway. The door would leave traces.

I drop down into the corridor and slip out the fire exit on the east side. Alley’s dead quiet. My Q7—black, like every other fucking Q7 in Dublin—is right where I left it, sporting fresh plates since this morning.

Inside, I peel off the latex gloves and bag them. I pull into traffic, keeping it steady. I take the coast road south past Sandymount. The bay is just a dark blur on my left. The wipers go thump-thump across the windshield. I crack the window just enough to let the salt air in.

The latex gloves go into a wheelie bin outside a chip shop in Harold’s Cross, buried beneath greasy paper and half-eaten chips that steam in the cold night air. The smell of vinegar and frying oil clings to my coat as I walk back to the car and drive the rest of the way home.

The car goes into the garage at the back of my house in Ranelagh, a red-brick terrace I bought five years ago because it has a lane entrance that no one overlooks.

I let myself in through the back door. The kitchen is dark and clean. Everything in its place. I put the kettle on, because that is what you do at half twelve on a weekday night when you have just killed a man, and you have nothing else planned.

The house is quiet. Not silent. Quiet. The boiler ticks in the utility room. The fridge hums. The rain taps against the window over the sink. These are the sounds of a house where one person lives and doesn’t need, nor want, company.

I make tea strong enough to stand a spoon in and drink it at the counter with the lights off, looking out at the small back garden where nothing grows but grass, because I haven’t planted anything. The soil is there. I just never saw the point.

My phone buzzes.

Connor: Clean?

I type back: Clean.

Three dots appear. Then: Good. Come to the house tomorrow. Something’s come up.

Something always comes up. That is what Connor does.

He sits in his study with his whiskey and his documents and his cold blue eyes, and things come up that require a man like me to make them go away.

I have been that man since I was ten, and he took me to Seamus’s fight club and told me the family needed me.

That was twenty-five years ago. Not once have I hesitated. Not once have I questioned an order. Not once have I wanted to.

I didn’t leave like Logan did—even though he’s back now.

I stayed. Did the work. Sat in the silence while my brother knelt in churches, and I pulled the trigger every time Connor asked.

Not because I enjoy it. Not because I’m broken or twisted or whatever comfortable label people slap on men who kill.

Because it needs doing, and I’m capable of doing it, and capability without hesitation is the most valuable currency in this family.

After finishing the tea, I wash the mug clean and place it on the rack with the handle pointing left. Always left.

Heading upstairs, I flick the bathroom light on and turn the shower dial three-quarters clockwise.

The pipes groan once before the shower runs hot.

I strip and step under the water. It hits hard enough to sting, which is how I like it.

Not punishment. Sensation. I stand there and let it run over my dark hair, my neck, down my inked skin.

The heat works into the muscles between my ribs, where two hours of lying flat on concrete have left their mark.

I stand under the spray for another ten minutes because I can, and because there is no one waiting, no one knocking, no one asking me to hurry up. That is the architecture of a life built for one. Everything happens when I say it does.

I kill the water, towel off, and pull on a pair of joggers. The bedroom is sparse. Bed, wardrobe, nightstand with a lamp and a charger. The sheets are gray. The walls are white. If someone broke in here, they’d think the place was staged.

I plug in the phone and lie on my back, arms behind my head.

Tomorrow, Connor’s got something else for me. Might be another Gillen. Might be a collection, a conversation, a reminder I’ll deliver through split knuckles or a quiet word in a cold car park. Doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, I’ll handle it the way I handle everything.

Controlled.