Chapter 31
Aran
The silence is the worst part. I think I’d prefer it if she shouted, ranted, told me to fuck off. But this dreadful silence where I know she’s feeling a dozen different things and none of them makes sense, is killing me.
But I don’t move.
I stay in the chair. I don’t follow. I don’t do any of the things my body is screaming at me to do, because this is one of those moments where doing nothing is the hardest thing in the world. The only right thing.
I pick up my mug. Cold. I dump it in the sink and pour a fresh one, not because I want tea but because if I don’t do something with my hands, I’m going to put my fist through the wall.
She saw his face. I watched it hit her. I watched her eyes go flat, then bright, then somewhere I couldn’t follow. Two years of running, two years of making herself invisible, and I sat across from her and made him real again in under ten minutes.
This is the right call. I know it is. She deserves to know.
She also deserved a choice, and I took that the moment I called Dave.
I’ll sit with every part of it, including the look on her face when she said show me his face and I turned the phone toward her and watched two years of carefully constructed distance collapse in three seconds.
My phone buzzes. Dave.
“Yeah.”
“Patterns are done.”
I frown. “Already?”
“He’s a creature of habit. The man runs on rails.
Office Monday through Friday, eight-thirty to six.
Drives in, uses the car park under the building.
Lunch from a place on South Mall or at his desk.
Gym three times a week, mornings. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays.
A place called FX Fitness on the quay. Leaves the apartment at six, back by seven-thirty, then straight to the office. ”
“Weekends.”
“Golf club Saturday mornings. Fota Island. Gets breakfast there after. Saturday nights he’s out, usually city center. One of those wine-bar places near the opera house. Sundays are quiet. He’s in the apartment most of the day. Runs in the evening. Fitzgerald’s Park, same route every time.”
“Do I even want to know how you got this so quickly when you moaned about tightness?”
He snickers. “Location data off his phone came through fast. Three months of it. He’s on one of those fitness apps that logs everything, and he hasn’t locked his privacy settings. His GPS history reads like a train timetable.”
A senior VP in finance who doesn’t lock his app privacy settings. The man who controlled every breath Aoife took for two years can’t manage his own digital footprint. The arrogance of it. He doesn’t think anyone’s looking, because he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong.
“Apartment security?”
“The building has cameras in the lobby and the parking garage, nothing on the upper floors. Stairwell access from the parking level. Fire door. Magnetic lock, easy to override.”
“Apartment number?”
“Fourteen. Second floor. Corner unit. Balcony faces the river. Two exits. Front door and the balcony.”
“Neighbor situation?”
“Twelve is a couple, both work. Out by eight, back by six-thirty most days. Sixteen is a woman who travels, gone more than she’s home.
The building is half empty during the day.
Weeknights it’s quiet after nine. The car park has maybe six or seven cars at any given time.
It’s that kind of development. People bought as investments.
Half of them are rented out to short-term lets. ”
“Anything else?”
“You’ve got it all.” He hangs up.
I sit with it.
Walsh runs on rails. Monday through Friday, eight-thirty to six.
Gym at dawn. Golf on Saturdays. Wine bar.
A man who hasn’t deviated from his routine in three months, which means he hasn’t deviated in longer.
Men like him don’t change. They settle into grooves and wear them deeper.
The routine isn’t discipline. It’s control.
He controls his mornings, his evenings, his weekends, the same way he controlled her.
Every hour accounted for. Every variable managed. Except one.
She walked out with a bag while he was at his desk between eight-thirty and six, because that was the only window he gave her. She knew his schedule better than he did, because knowing it kept her alive.
My phone buzzes again. Text. Cork number.
Wine bar on Emmet Place. Staff know him by name. Tips well. Polite. Leaves alone. Spoke to a barman who’s been there two years. Said Walsh is a gentleman. His exact word. Said he’s never seen him with a woman. Said he asked about it once, and Walsh said he was waiting for someone.
I read that last line twice.
Waiting for someone.
It’s not patience. It’s possession. He hasn’t moved on because he hasn’t let go. He kept her name on the lease. He drinks alone, waiting. In his head, she’s not gone. She’s temporarily misplaced. A thing he owns that wandered off and will eventually come back.
Deluded bastard.
Waiting implies she left with his permission. She didn’t. She ran. She packed a bag, one morning, got a bus to Dublin, and disappeared. That’s not a woman who left. That’s a woman who escaped. The fact that he frames it as waiting tells me everything I need to know about how this ends for him.
I open an email that Dave fired through.
Building plans. I study them, committing the layout to memory.
The parking garage is underground, accessed from the street via a ramp with a fob barrier.
Visitors park on the street. The stairwell runs from the garage to the top floor.
Camera on the lobby door, camera on the garage entrance.
Nothing on the stairwell. The fire escape drops to a service lane on the east side that connects to a residential street with on-street parking and no cameras.
Apartment fourteen sits at the end of the corridor on the second floor.
The front door opens into a hallway with the kitchen to the left, the sitting room straight ahead, and the bedrooms to the right.
The balcony is off the sitting room. She lived here.
She stood on that balcony, looked at the river, told herself this was her life, and it was fine.
She just stood in the kitchen, frozen, because the man who was supposed to love her had trained the fight out of her so thoroughly that her own body betrayed her when it mattered most.
That’s the thing I can’t get past. Not the knife. The training. The months of incremental erosion that made a woman like Aoife—who stood in front of Connor O’Neill and didn’t flinch—stand still in her own kitchen and wait to die.
I close the plans.
I’ve done jobs with less preparation and worse access. Walk in through the garage, up the stairs, through the fire door, and inside his apartment before he’s finished tying his running shoes. Clean. Quick. Gone before anyone hears a thing.
I hear movement. The bathroom door. Footsteps across the landing. Then on the stairs. Slow. Measured. Each step deliberate, like she’s deciding with every one of them whether to keep going.
She appears in the kitchen doorway. Her eyes are red. Her hair is pushed back off her face. She’s still wearing my t-shirt. Her arms are loose at her sides. She looks like a woman who has made a decision.
“I’m coming with you,” she says.
“I know.”
That catches her off guard. She expected a fight. I can see it in the way her chin lifts, bracing for it.
“You don’t get to say I know like you’ve already decided.”
“I haven’t decided. You have. I can see it.”
She stares at me. “So you’re not going to argue?”
“No.”
She doesn’t know what to do with herself.
“You said you’d never leave me,” she says.
“I did say that.”
“So if you go to Cork, I go to Cork.”
“That’s the plan.”
She swallows hard. “When?”
“Tomorrow.”
Her head snaps up. “Tomorrow?”
“Despite his violent tendencies, he is a boring fucker. Predictable in a way that probably made Dave roll his eyes.”
She blinks. I watch her process that. I watch the fear hit first, then something harder shoving it aside.
“Tomorrow,” she repeats.
“We leave at seven. Drive down. Safehouse first. After that, it’s your call.”
“My call?”
“Whether you want to see him. When. How close. What you need from it. That part is yours.”
She sits down. “I want him gone. However you do that in your line of work. That’s what I want.”
She says it without flinching. No tears.
No hesitation. The woman who told me don’t tell me anything just looked me in the eye and asked me to kill someone.
I don’t take that lightly. She shouldn’t have to carry it, but she’s choosing to, and I won’t insult her by pretending she doesn’t know what she’s asking.
“I can do that.”
She nods once. Slowly. Like she already knew the answer and needed to hear it said out loud before it became real.
“Thank you. For letting me go upstairs.”
“You needed it.”
“Most people wouldn’t have let me walk away like that.”
“Most people would’ve been wrong.”
She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine. I turn my palm up, close my fingers around hers. Her hand is small, cold. It fits exactly where it is.
We sit like that for a while. Neither of us moves.
Tonight, after she’s asleep, I’ll do what needs doing. The bag in the garage. The route from the safehouse to the apartment, and two alternates in case one goes sideways. None of it is complicated. I’ve done harder jobs on shorter notice for men who meant nothing to me.
This one means everything.
I look at her across the table. Her hand in mine. Her eyes closed. Her breathing is even.
Sharp. I’ll be sharp. For her.