13. Ruairí
RUAIRí
T here's an hour of the night that belongs to no one.
It's not morning yet, but everything necessary, has already been done, and the rest is just aftershock.
This is the hour I prefer for business, because anyone who calls now is serious or dead.
I'm at the desk in the operations wing, curtains drawn, lamp set low, the only light the powder-blue of the tablet and the thumbnail glare of my cigarette.
The whole floor is soundproofed, more for paranoia than necessity, and the air tastes of old lacquer and the anticipation of crisis.
The call comes in on the encrypted line, silent vibrate, no chime.
I pick up before the second pulse.
"Go ahead."
The informant doesn't bother with preamble.
"Connollys have a pulse in Sandymount. Two men, sometimes three, mostly freelance. They're not watching the house, but they're asking questions."
I make a note in my head, not on paper.
"Type of questions?"
"Financial. No one's asking for your head, just for a spreadsheet. "
"And the topic?"
There's a pause as if he's scrolling the night's log.
"Donnellys. Or what's left. They want to know if the Crowleys have absorbed the family or if it's a cut-out. They're also asking about the girl."
My hand tightens on the pen, but it doesn't move.
"How direct?"
The informant's voice is dry as a post-mortem.
"Not at all. They buy a round for the bookie, mention the Donnelly daughter in passing, maybe an old story about school. Never about location, always about movement. Who she's seen, what she's spending, if she's making friends in the neighborhood."
"Who's answering?"
"The usual barflies. One of yours is playing dumb, but the others are just flattered anyone cares."
I look at the wall, where the last month of shifts is posted on magnetic tiles.
"Have they flagged any new faces?"
"Not yet. But I'd say they're laying ground, not digging for gold."
I light another cigarette, slow, controlled.
"Keep listening. Don't move until you see a pattern."
There's a soft hiss.
"Do you want me to escalate?"
"Absolutely not. The truce is real until it isn't. We're not the ones to break it."
He hesitates, which is rare.
"Copy."
"And if anyone comes to you directly, I want the transcript, word for word."
"Understood."
I consider ending the call, but the silence on his end is loaded.
He says, "Off the record, Boss? "
I permit myself half a sigh.
"Say it."
"They're not scared of you anymore. Not like last year. Something's changed."
I let that settle.
"Noted. Anything else?"
"No, sir."
I disconnect.
The room is silent again, thick with unsaid things.
My face in the glass of the window is the same as it's always been—pale, pitted, eyes too deep in their sockets.
Nothing new.
The shadows under my eyes are genetic, or maybe just a record of all the nights I've traded for minutes like these.
The Connollys don't waste time on fear.
They move like a virus, looking for a soft spot.
The informant's right—something's changed.
The old world is coming back, meaner, less interested in rules.
My job is to make sure the Crowleys outlast it, so I make two calls.
Given the hour, they will understand the urgency.
Mullins is first to arrive.
He stands in the doorway, tall and awkward, hands behind his back like a soldier who remembers his drill but not why he bothered to enlist.
He's from outside—Wexford, maybe.
The accent is scrubbed but leaks out when he's tired.
The Crowleys never used to recruit beyond the city, but I find out-of-towners are better at doing what needs to be done and keeping their mouths shut.
He says nothing, just waits at attention. Good.
The second man, Gorman, is smaller, wiry, hair like straw, eyes like black glass.
He closes the door behind him without being told.
He's smart enough to wear soft-soled shoes and moves with the kind of quiet that isn't natural but has been hammered into him by enough years in bad places .
I let the silence work for a few seconds, then gesture them to the chairs.
They sit at the edge, not quite at ease.
I approve.
"Here's the situation," I say.
"There's outside interest in our guest. It's not open, but it's deliberate. Mullins, you'll run perimeter. No more than thirty meters, day and night. Change your pattern every six hours. You're backup for the regular guards, but you're not to be seen."
He nods once.
"Understood."
"Gorman, you're interior. Stick to the main floor unless there's a deviation. The target is unpredictable but smart. Don't underestimate her. If she spots you, you deny everything and stick to the cover story."
Gorman leans in, voice soft.
"What's the story?"
I meet his gaze.
"You're here to inspect the heating. Old pipes, new system, house is a sieve. If she asks questions, be technical. She'll lose interest fast."
He grins, a flash of teeth.
"Copy."
"Neither of you is to engage unless she's in danger or unless someone else breaches the line. No one is to know you're shadowing. Not even the house staff. If you're made, you report to me. Directly. No intermediaries."
I stand, let them know the meeting is over.
"Questions?"
Gorman glances at Mullins, then back at me.
"You expecting a play, or just smoke?"
"Assume both, and that means our guest could be in real trouble unless we intervene, although she is the last person who'd accept that," I say.
"The Connollys don't send scouts unless they're preparing for a siege.
But the minute we look scared, we're fucked.
I want them to think we don't see them."
Mullins nods, stands at parade rest.
"If there's contact? "
"Contain it," I say.
"No one gets hurt unless they throw the first punch. We're not the aggressors, not this week."
Gorman cracks his knuckles, which is as close to nervous as he ever gets.
"Understood."
I give them the nod, and they're gone.
I linger in the office afterward, letting the adrenaline bleed out.
Then, I make the rounds anyway, a ghost in my own fortress.
There's nothing tactical in it.
I just need to remind myself that the house and its people are mine.
I pass the study Keira has claimed for herself.
The door is cracked just enough to see inside.
There's a lamp on, low, and the scent of bergamot leaking into the hall.
On the desk, a legal pad with lines of blue ink, the handwriting tight and impatient, a half-empty cup of tea cooling to a skin.
The windows are open a sliver—she likes it cold and says it keeps her sharp.
She's asleep on the couch, legs folded, one arm tucked under her head, the other draped across her ribs like she's holding something in.
The blanket has slipped halfway to the floor.
Her sweater's bunched at the hem, exposing the soft line of her waist.
Her lips are parted just slightly, enough to suggest she gave in to sleep only after fighting it longer than she should have.
A book rests on her chest, spine cracked.
She hasn't turned the page in hours.
Her hair's come loose.
Not all at once, but in that slow way of giving up one by one until it's down around her shoulders like nightfall.
There's ink on her fingers and a faint crease of worry between her brows, even now.
She sleeps like she lives—alert even in surrender, never entirely off guard.
With a tight nod and nothing more, I step away and continue my walk.
When I was a kid, the Crowleys were strictly rural enforcement.
The real estate was Wicklow, not Dublin, and my father kept the family in line with a shillelagh and an absolute refusal to speak above a whisper.
He liked to settle matters behind closed doors, preferably after midnight, preferably with no witnesses.
We lost two uncles that way and gained three more by adoption.
Loyalty was enforced by blood but never spilled in public.
By the time the city opened itself to us, the only thing that mattered was speed.
My brothers wanted war of the open, dramatic kind that would be a statement of intent.
I watched them for a year before I realized what everyone else already knew—violence is just a lever, and the city has infinite leverage if you know how to use it.
I started making deals, cutting staff, building capital instead of a body count.
The old men on the council called me a coward, but they also called me for a loan whenever their own payroll dried up.
Fiachra never got over it.
He thinks every problem can be fixed with a bullet or a bottle of petrol.
Maybe he's right, but I've lived longer than any of the men who used to mock my version of progress.
What bothers me most about the Connollys isn't their appetite for mayhem or their willingness to torch half a block just to make a point.
It's that they don't care about the game.
They don't play to win.
They play to erase the board.
You can't predict that.
You can only prepare for the moment it finally matters.
Keira, though—she's something else.
She isn't a fighter, not in the way my brothers mean it, but she's survived things they wouldn't dare name out loud.
She has her father's sense for risk, her mother's indifference to pain, and something else, something I can't catalog.
In her first week here, she mapped every exit in the house, broke the library lock just to prove it could be done, and talked her way past three levels of staff without anyone remembering her face or her name.
Fiachra wanted her watched, but I knew there was no point.
If she wanted to leave, she'd already be gone.
But lately something's changed.
Not colder, exactly, just more careful.
She avoids eye contact, and when she speaks, it's like she's rehearsing for an audience that doesn't exist.
The only time I see her alive is when she's alone, reading her dead father's journals or standing at the window like she's waiting for the city to burn.
I know that look.
It's the same one I used to see in the mirror, the week before my old man died and left me with nothing but an office full of ghosts.
I head for the kitchen.
The night staff have left a bottle of Redbreast on the counter, along with a single glass, a deliberate show of respect.
I pour two fingers, neat, and carry it back to the ops wing.
The room is as I left it—quiet, but alive with the static of information.
I sit, swirl the whiskey, watch the surface go still.
The house isn't just a house.
It's a test.
Every day, it resets, and every night, you have to earn your right to wake up in it again.
I drink, let the fire settle in my gut, and scan the logs from my tablet, scrolling past hours of nothing—a staffer microwaving soup at 15:18, Gorman's soft-shoe patrol, the half-minute pause when Mullins ducked into the pantry for a smoke.
I skip to the afternoon, when Keira left her study and circled the ground floor twice, moving room to room like she was counting escape hatches.
She never looks up at the cameras, but she never walks into a blind spot, either.
There's a moment—caught at 17:02, timestamped and burned into the chip—when she stands in the atrium, eyes fixed on the front door.
It's not a wistful look, not even a calculating one.
It's the look of someone rehearsing the route from memory, knowing she might need it one day, or maybe just hoping someone is coming through it.
I watch it three times, looking for a tell.
There isn't one.
I set the tablet aside, flex my hand to shake out the ache.
I think about the wedding, the way she stood at the altar like she was bracing for a firing squad, the dry crack in her voice when she said yes.
The marriage was always a deal—my name, her debts, the city split down the river and both halves pretending to be happy about it.
It worked better than anyone thought it would, at first.
But lately… lately, I'm not sure what I want.
The council says she's an asset, a trophy, a proof of concept that the Crowleys can take the old blood and do something useful with it.
But the longer she's here, the less I want her to be a chess piece.
The more I want her to stay, not because it's strategic, but because she makes the house feel alive in a way the rest of the city never could.
I'm still thinking about this, the glass of whiskey untouched on the desk, when Fiachra walks in.
He's wearing yesterday's shirt and a look that means trouble.
Natural, given that he is also awake at this ungodly hour.
He doesn't bother with small talk.
"We have a problem."
I lift an eyebrow.
"Just one?"
He sits, phone in hand, already loaded with whatever report he's about to dump on me.
"Logistics. One of the new hires—woman, early twenties, solid background, nothing flagged—was approached at a bar in Drumcondra. Not a known hangout, but they made her."
"They?"
Fiachra taps the screen, brings up a blurry CCTV still .
"Woman, thirty-five, maybe forty, blonde, Italian shoes. She's not local, but she asked about Keira."
"Directly?"
"Not at first. She started with payroll—said she was running a background check for a second job, wanted to know if our new hire was in good standing. Then she shifted to personal—Is Keira happy? Does she plan to stay? Is there any reason she might want to leave?"
I take the phone, zoom in on the face.
The image is shit, but the posture is perfect—relaxed, calculated, the angle of her body set to put anyone off guard.
"Connolly?"
Fiachra nods, once.
"Confirmed by two sources. She's running under a fake name, but the accent slips in the recording. We think she's ex-police, maybe a cousin. They're testing the net."
I hand the phone back.
"Did our girl take the bait?"
"No. She played dumb, left after one round. But she flagged the incident. She's sharper than her CV."
I sit back, let the numbers run.
The Connollys don't probe unless they already have a plan in motion.
They're looking for a weakness, but they wouldn't waste time on a rookie unless they thought there was a real shot at flipping her.
Fiachra waits for me to say something, but I just stare at the photo, memorizing the lines of the woman's face.
He tries again.
"You want me to bring her in for questioning?"
I shake my head.
"Let her ride. She did her job."
He leans forward, voice low.
"This could be an opening. We hit back now, we send a message."
"That's exactly what they want," I say.
"We overreact; we look scared. We wait, we watch, we find out what they're really after. "
He grunts, unimpressed, but doesn't argue.
I pour another finger of whiskey, hand him the glass.
He takes it, sips, and waits for the next order.
I give none.
When he is finished, he straightens his shirt and heads for the door.
Just before he leaves, he says, "You should talk to your wife. She's not as asleep as you think."
I laugh, but it's not funny.
"Neither am I."