43. The Strike
Chapter forty-three
The Strike
Renny
Three weeks since the study. Three weeks since the wreckage. The community center smells like soup and wet coats. November in Dublin means damp in the bones, means old Mrs. Murphy pressing my hand and telling me my father would be proud. I smile. The lie sits smooth on my teeth.
I'm here because Lorcan said the family should show. Presence. Stability. A veterinarian volunteering at the soup kitchen isn't political—it's domestic. It's proof that the Gallaghers are rooted, normal, woven into the fabric of this place that they own and bleed into.
Mrs. Murphy releases my hand. I ladle broth into her bowl. Steam rises. The kitchen is warm. My shoulders are finally loose.
I've been tense for three weeks. Since Lorcan told me the truth about Padraig.
Since the night in the study when he came to me bloodied and broken in ways that had nothing to do with his body.
Since I realized that the man I love had been lying to me with every careful word, every deliberate gesture of trust.
Being here helps. Being normal helps. The soup is hot. The kitchen is functional. No one's screaming.
Mrs. Murphy releases my hand, and I watch her shuffle back to her seat. She moves like a woman who's survived things. Like a woman who knows the world is harder than it should be. I admire that in her—the way she doesn't apologize for her fragility.
I've been thinking about fragility differently lately.
Lorcan's fragility isn't apparent. It lives in the spaces between his words.
It lives in the fact that he opened his files to me.
In the fact that he brought me into operations and then stepped back, letting me see the gears, the leverage points, the machinery of control.
For a man who governs through secrecy, that's a kind of violence he's committing against himself.
I ladle more broth. The kitchen is full of volunteer coordinators and lunch prep staff. Everyone focused. Everyone moving with purpose.
That's when everything stops.
The back door explodes inward. Not a collapse—a breach. Wood splinters in geometric patterns. Glass bottles from the donation bin shatter on the tile floor. The sound is huge, wrong, all of it wrong.
My body knows before my mind catches up.
Training floods through me like ice water. From Lorcan's men, whispered drills disguised as casual conversation. Exit points. Threat assessment. Violence recognition.
The man in the doorway is professional. Dark clothes. Hands moving with intention. The gun isn't small.
I grab Mrs. Murphy's shoulders and push her down, toward the counter. Not the most direct path to safety—I'm thinking in geometry, in angles of fire. The kitchen offers steel and wood. The dining room is open.
"Down," I say. It's not loud. The word carries enough.
I'm moving before the second person comes through the door. That's when I know—this isn't robbery. This is surgical.
My phone is in my pocket. I don't reach for it.
The first shot punches into the refrigerator behind where I was standing. The refrigerator is old, loud, and now bleeding coolant. The sound is the worst part—not the gunfire, but the hiss of everything spilling out.
Someone screams. Mrs. Murphy maybe. I'm already moving the serving station, sliding between the counter and the wall, toward the supply closet. The angle is bad. Too exposed still. But it's movement, and movement is life.
The second shot cracks the tile. Close. Close enough to feel the percussion.
My hands are shaking and I hate that they're shaking. I'm a veterinarian. I've sewn wounds and set broken bones and held animals while they died. I'm used to blood and crisis. This is different because the crisis is mine. Because I can be erased and the erasure will be total.
The supply closet is locked. Of course it's locked.
My breath comes in short, controlled spikes. This is what happens when training meets instinct. My body is ice. My hands are steady. The fear is there, but it's boxed, compartmentalized, something I'll deal with later. If there is a later.
I think of Lorcan's men. I think about the fact that they're always present—always waiting in the periphery of my carefully normal life. Cillian will be near. Donovan maybe. They're security, dressed as volunteers, watching the kitchen from the dining room.
But that depends on them being positioned correctly. That depends on them seeing the threat. That depends on them moving faster than professional murderers.
I turn instead toward the internal door—the one that leads to the hallway, to the main community center, to people and chaos that might be safer than this kitchen.
The man with the gun is turning. He's searching.
His eyes move across the kitchen with the systematic intensity of a man who knows exactly what he's looking for.
They pass over the serving station. My hands are on the counter. Then his eyes snap back. He's found me.
The moment stretches. I'm looking at death. Real, immediate, professional death. This man came here with a purpose and I'm the target.
My body reacts—I duck and pivot, sliding behind the counter, the movement born from months of Lorcan's training.
It bypasses thought entirely. The gun follows.
The shot explodes into the cabinet behind where my head was a second before.
Wood splinters against the cabinet. The sound is wrong, all of it wrong.
The hallway is dark. I move into it anyway, pulling the door half-closed behind me. My heart is in my throat. My hands are cold despite the adrenaline.
The main room erupts. Shouting. Lorcan's men, I realize distantly. They're here. They're always here, even when I forget they're here. Two of them in the main doorway. Two more coming from the parking lot entrance. They move like a school of fish—organized, purposeful, violent.
The first one, Cillian, has his gun out. He doesn't hesitate. The crack of gunfire in an enclosed space is worse than in the kitchen. It echoes. It multiplies.
I'm pressed against the hallway wall, my breath coming in shallow spikes. The supply closet lock is broken now, one of Lorcan's men shot it open. But the second shooter is already down. Three shots. No hesitation. No mercy.
The first shooter staggers backward. He's bleeding from his shoulder. His gun wavers. Cillian moves, just moves forward with the calm of a man who knows exactly what he's doing. There's a third shot, and the man falls.
The community center is screaming. But it's not gunfire screaming. It's people screaming.
I push off the wall. My legs are functional. I move back into the main room where the chaos is settling into something organized. Lorcan's men are checking bodies. Checking the room. Checking for more.
The community center looks like a crime scene. Because it is a crime scene. The dining area is scattered with abandoned bowls, benches pushed back where people ran. Blood pools in geometric patterns on the tile. The second shooter is motionless by the serving window, his chest isn't moving anymore.
Mrs. Murphy stumbles out of the kitchen, her cardigan torn. She's not shot. Her eyes find mine and I watch her register the relief, she's not shot, and neither am I. The adrenaline is starting to wear off and it's being replaced by something worse: the knowledge of how close I came.
But Father Eamon is bleeding from his arm. And the volunteer coordinator has a graze wound on her temple. And there are at least four civilians on the floor, some crying, some silent in that shock-stunned way that precedes real panic.
I walk toward Father Eamon. My legs feel distant, like they belong to someone else. My hands are shaking now, really shaking, the tremor starting in my palms and moving up my arms. The adrenaline crash is coming. I can feel it waiting.
I'm pulling my cardigan off, wrapping his arm with the clinical precision that's been drilled into me. The blood is warm and the warmth is wrong. It should be cold. He should be cold. Instead his arm is warm from life, from the fact that he's still alive.
"You're alright," I tell him. "It's not deep. The artery's intact." My voice is steady. It's a voice that belongs to a veterinarian who's sutured wounds and set broken bones and maintained composure while animals died under her hands. "You're going to be alright."
The words are automatic. They're what I'm trained for, the stabilization, the calm, the clinical assessment. But underneath the words, I'm calculating. I'm thinking about how close that shot came. How professional. How orchestrated.
His hand is shaking in mine. I hold it steady.
But inside my skull, I'm doing math.
The timing of this is wrong. Lorcan pulled security yesterday for a shipment routing through Waterford.
I know because I asked why the interior detail was smaller, and he told me, trusting me with operational knowledge because he's trying to stitch us back together by showing me his hands.
Showing me there's nothing hidden in the folds.
He's been opening his books to me for weeks now.
Every decision, every route, every alliance.
Demonstrating that the lie about Padraig was singular, compartmentalized, not rot through the whole structure.
The timing is too perfect to be chance.
The community center wasn't random. I volunteer here every third Thursday. It's documented, scheduled, predictable. For someone with inside intelligence, I might as well be wearing a target.
Shay. The thought arrives like a bullet.
Shay, who's been visible and invisible simultaneously.
Shay, who smiled at me two days ago with something that looked like pity in his eyes.
Shay, who would know exactly when Lorcan's focus was split because Shay watches.
Because Shay's been positioning himself for months, offering counsel, supporting decisions, being the steady hand while Lorcan spiraled into his confession and his grief.
Roisín Doyle's father would move now. While the Gallaghers were fractured. While Lorcan's attention was fragmented between running operations and trying to convince his wife not to hate him. While the council was unstable and the lines of succession were suddenly negotiable.
This was coordinated. This was inside intelligence meeting outside opportunity meeting calculated timing.
My hands steady on Father Eamon's arm. I'm wrapping the cardigan, creating pressure, creating stability.
The clinical part of my brain is functioning.
The other part, the part that belongs to the organization now, that ordered violence against the Doyle shipment in September, that understands blood and leverage and consequence, is already three moves ahead.
Cillian appears in my peripheral vision. "We need to move you," he says quietly. "The safe house on Leeson Street."
I nod. I let him guide me. I'm cooperative and compliant, even as I'm thinking about Roisín's last message, a coded text about needing to talk about supply routes, about watching her back, about her father planning something that frightened her.
We reach the car outside. Cillian holds the door. I slide into the backseat, and the Dublin street disappears behind tinted glass.
My phone is in my pocket. I pull it out with hands that have stopped shaking.
I don't call Lorcan.
I call Roisín instead.
She answers on the first ring. The sound of her breathing tells me she already knows. “The community centre,” she says. Not a question.
“Your father’s people?”
A pause. Then: “Your father was my godfather.” The words arrive without warning, without the strategic framing I’ve come to expect from her.
“Padraig stood for me at my christening. He paid for my education, a university fund my father never knew about. When I was seventeen and Da wanted to pull me out of school to work in the warehouses, Padraig made one phone call. One. And my father changed his mind.”
I’m sitting in the back of Cillian’s car with blood on my cardigan and Roisín Doyle is telling me that my dead father saved her life the same way he tried to save mine, quietly, structurally, without claiming the credit.
“I owe the Gallagher name a debt I can’t calculate,” she says. “And I’m paying it to you because you’re the only one left who carries it without the blood on the ledger.”
The car moves through Dublin’s streets. The tinted glass makes everything grey.
I think about Padraig, about the €2,000 monthly deposits, about Maura’s letters, about a man who loved from a distance because proximity would have destroyed the people he was trying to protect.
And now here is Roisín, another person he chose.
Another life he invested in without claiming.
“Roisín.” My voice is steady. The clinical register. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Survive. That’s what he’d want.”
She hangs up. I stare at the phone. My hands have stopped shaking.
I open my messages and find Roisín's contact. The numbers are there, dates, times, shipment locations. She's been feeding me information for weeks. Slowly. Testing me.
I type: "We need to talk. Now."
The response comes in thirty seconds: "The Barking Dog. Back room. One hour."
I send: "Done."
The safe house looms ahead. Cillian will report to Lorcan. Lorcan will come, blood still hot, needing to confirm I'm alive because he can't afford to lose me, not operationally, not strategically, and not in the ways that have nothing to do with the organization.
But I have one hour.
I have one hour to find out if Roisín is playing me, or if she's the only person in this organization who can see the cancer from the inside.
Shay moved. That means he's confident. That means he thinks Lorcan is broken enough to crumble. That means there's a window.
I watch the Dublin streets pass. The rain is starting. It's November's rain, cold and honest.
When Cillian glances in the rearview mirror, I'm already dialing Roisín back. She answers on the first ring.
"Tell me everything," I say. "And don't lie. I'm too tired for lies."
The line is quiet for a moment. Then: "My father received an inquiry two weeks ago. About your movements. Your schedules."
"From who?"
"Someone inside. Someone with access to Lorcan's rotation charts. Someone Lorcan trusts."
The car moves through the rain. Toward safety. Away from the truth I'm about to hunt.
"Keep talking," I tell Roisín. "Tell me it all."
Outside, the city is dark and wet and full of men who want me dead.
Inside this car, I'm already three moves ahead of them.