20. Keira
KEIRA
E arly next morning, I return to Dublin under escort, two unmarked cars and six armed men flanking me like wolves trained not to snarl unless given reason.
They do not speak unless spoken to.
I don't speak at all.
The decision to return alone was Ruairí's call as much as mine.
He'll move back and forth between Wicklow and Dublin—half ghost, half general—keeping the logistics sharp and the weight of his absence meaningful.
I'll take the city and hold it while I wring out its old loyalties, pull the new lines taut, and stitch everything shut so clean, no one will dare test the seam.
The idea is to find out who is the main man running the offensive against us and finish it once and for all.
The sun is only just clearing the farthest edges of the Wicklow hills when we pull out.
There is fog along the shoulders of the road, low and curling like breath on glass, and the trees that rise beyond it are still soaked in the gray velvet of dawn.
The car moves slowly at first, careful through the forested edge of the district, where foxes have been known to dart out and the roads are too narrow for anything faster than cautious.
Past the first curve, the landscape begins to open.
Rolling pastureland unfolds in long green sighs, scattered with gorse still blooming late gold and bramble thick with fruit that will rot on the vine before the season ends.
Queen Anne's lace springs up in swathes between the hedgerows, delicate and bright white like lace caught on wind.
There are dog roses too, pale pink and unruly, threading their way across old stone fences that haven't been mended in years.
At the base of one slope, I see a thick spread of blue-flowered vetch curling around the remains of a rusted wheelbarrow, the color almost too vivid for this hour.
The men in the lead car remain alert, eyes shifting in rhythm with the dips and bends of the road.
I rest my hand lightly on the armrest, not tense, not ready to strike, but aware of the thousand ways this journey could go wrong.
We are not flashing our presence, but we are not hiding it either.
By the time we reach the curve above Blessington, the fog has started to burn off.
The lake lies below us, a flat plate of silver broken only by the ripple of early boats or the shadow of birds gliding low to catch what moves beneath the surface.
I watch it as we pass, the same way I did as a girl in my father's car.
Further along, the road narrows again as we enter the stretch known for limestone cutaways and ivy-choked ruins.
A ruined abbey passes on the left, its arch still intact, though the roof fell long before I was born.
Wildflowers creep between the stones.
Harebells, their violet heads bobbing in the wind.
Red poppies like smudges of blood against green.
The kind of beauty no one tends, no one claims, and no one can quite destroy .
Closer to the city, traffic begins to pick up.
The edges of the motorway show the first signs of commuter sprawl—fast-food signage, petrol stations with peeling paint, kids in oversized school uniforms dragging bags behind them.
My window stays closed.
I watch but do not participate.
When we hit the outskirts of the capital, the architecture shifts.
Terraced houses with laundry lines still out.
Shopfronts with signs in both Irish and English.
Roads that have been repaired and torn open again so many times they no longer know which decade they belong to.
The approach to the Donnelly estate is unchanged.
The gate is recessed, half-swallowed by old holly and the reach of an ancient ash tree that no one's ever dared cut back.
Fuchsia drips down the hedge in long-lipped flowers the color of spilled wine.
The iron of the gate itself is worn, but it holds.
When it opens, the sound is a slow creak pulled from the throat of memory, thin and high, echoing down the long drive where gravel crunches beneath the tires like bones too old to protest.
The Donnelly estate waits for me.
The gates open on a suspended creak, a sound I remember from childhood mornings when the milkman came too early, and my father swore under his breath about the bastard waking the dogs.
It used to feel larger then.
Warmer.
Like it had a heartbeat.
Now the house just looks alert.
This estate is no longer a home.
It's a headquarters with a memory problem.
But I walk the corridor with quiet steps, boots muffled on the new runners, taking in every piece they've preserved and every one they've replaced.
The wood paneling is intact, polished back to its old shine.
The sconces are new, sleek and cold, with bulbs that don't flicker like the old ones did when the wind came in from the canal.
No more warped photos in crooked frames.
No more marks on the wall where my brother used to carve his name with a house key.
I don't take the master suite, even though it's been set up for me.
I pass it without pause.
That was my mother's room, and I have no use for echoes that soft.
Instead, I take the room at the end of the south wing with the window that faces the city and the crack in the ceiling where the plaster once fell after a bottle rocket misfire on Bonfire Night.
It used to be mine.
The wallpaper's been stripped, but the bones are the same.
The closet still sticks on the left side.
The old radiator hums when I turn it on, coughing to life like a drunk forced out of bed.
There's a new bed, firmer than I like, but the frame creaks the same when I sit on the edge.
The window glass has been replaced, but the view hasn't.
The city sprawls outward, half-built and half-rotted, still trying to decide what century it wants to belong to.
I place my gun on the nightstand and my notebook beside it.
There is a quiet here that hums under the skin, not peace, but something older.
The kind of hush that settles just before the verdict.
An hour later, Niamh arrives.
She appears in the doorway like she used to when we were girls and she needed to borrow lipstick or steal a coat, and I remember how my father trained her for her role and how he trained me for mine.
She looks leaner now.
Still hard in the eyes.
Dressed in street clothes, but the kind that hide weapons well.
"You really picked this room?" she asks, glancing around like she's still measuring its perimeter for threats.
"I liked the view."
Niamh snorts.
"You liked the crawlspace behind the closet. You used to hide there when you pissed off your da. "
"Still might."
She doesn't laugh, but the edge of her mouth pulls.
It's enough.
We eat in the new kitchen, though I still think of the old one with cracked tile and yellowed blinds and the rusting Aga that groaned every winter.
This one is sleek, burnished steel and warm stone, counters wide enough to prepare for twenty, but tonight, there are just the two of us.
Still, the table is set with care.
Someone remembered.
The staff bring out dishes that don't speak of war, only of home.
A tureen of coddle first, fragrant and pale, the sausage plump, the onions melting, flecked with parsley the way Mam used to like.
The steam curls up into my face and knocks something loose in my chest.
I hadn't realized how long it's been since I've eaten food that wasn't meant to be tolerated.
This was made to be remembered. Beside the coddle is fresh batch loaf, thick-crusted and still warm, cut into wedges the way Brendan used to slice it when he was in a hurry and didn't want to wait for toast.
There's salted butter in a glass dish, and I smear it too thickly, watch it melt into the soft white.
I take a bite and close my eyes.
"You missed that," Niamh says, already halfway through her bowl.
"I missed all of it," I say.
They bring colcannon next, piled high with curls of butter on top, the green of the cabbage still bright against the mash.
A cut of roast beef follows, slow-cooked and falling apart on the fork, served with a mustard gravy that tastes exactly like the one from Ryan's on Camden Street before they closed it down.
The roast carrots have been done in honey and thyme, just how Da liked them.
I eat slowly, letting the flavors spread, heavy and warm and almost enough to make me forget how sharp everything else has become.
Niamh watches me across the table with something too soft to be suspicion, but not quite peace.
"You really came home," she says, like she still doesn't fully believe it.
"Was there ever a choice?"
"There's always a choice," she says, cutting into her beef.
"It just gets smaller every year."
For dessert, they bring porter cake soaked through with Guinness and studded with fruit, the kind that sticks in your molars and leaves the taste of cloves behind.
There's a dollop of fresh cream on the side, and when I lift my spoon, I see Niamh watching me again.
She sets hers down.
"About the note."
I meet her gaze.
"I read it the moment I could. I just—there were eyes. Watching the post, watching my house. The O'Duinns don't trust anyone outside their lines. I couldn't risk it. I didn't know if they'd already gotten to you."
"They tried," I say and leave it there.
She sighs, rubbing her thumb over the rim of her glass.
"Everything's changing. The council's eating itself. Half of them are lining up behind the O'Duinns, the other half are waiting to see if you make a real move. But after what happened to you and how Ruairí responded... everything's volatile. They smell blood. They're expecting war."
"They're not wrong," I say.
Niamh nods.
"They want you at the table. But it's a trap. A soft one. Conditional entry. No vote until you give them what they need."
"They'll get nothing," I murmur, "and they'll still ask."
"You need to show them you're not a memory."
"I already have. "
We sit in silence for a time.
The tea is poured—loose leaf, strong, the kind that stains your teeth if you're not careful—and I cradle the cup like I used to when I was sixteen, listening to the old women talk about sins and neighbors as if they were the same thing.
Niamh picks apart a biscuit, not eating it, just keeping her hands busy.
"It's different now," she says at last.
"All of it. You know that, right?"
"Yes," I reply, "and it still belongs to me."
Her mouth twitches.
"Then they've no idea what's coming."
We drink our tea in silence, the pastry crumbs catching in the candlelight.
The next day, I begin sending out word of my return.
The mechanics are simple.
You start with two, maybe three, trusted intermediaries—people who never made a name, never got greedy, and never appeared on any official report.
Then you test them, over and over, with nothing jobs—a handoff at a taxi rank, a cigarette smuggled into a holding cell, a bottle of codeine passed to a widow on Clanbrassil.
If they deliver without comment, you up the ante.
If they question, you cut them loose.
I use the girls on Moore Street first.
They sell scratchers and single cigarettes and know every man, woman, and child who owes a debt in this city.
I give one girl—blonde, always chewing a red Bic pen—a note folded as tight as a communion wafer.
She pockets it, doesn't blink, and two hours later there's a new number spray-painted in green under the arch at Blackpitts.
The number means the drop is live.
Old school, but it works.
The boys in the pubs are harder to manage.
Most are on day release, or under the watch of an uncle who would sell his own organs to cover last week's losses.
So you use the ones who keep to the corners, the ones who take bets on soccer scores but never place a wager themselves.
They move the messages, burner to burner, always one step ahead of the sweep.
I watch them work from behind the safety glass at McPartlin's, counting the seconds it takes for a bet slip to change hands.
Fast, efficient, nearly invisible.
The shopkeepers are the real backbone.
Every block has one, and they're always half-listening, always reading the codes in the way you order your milk or the way you pay for your paper.
I leave a note with my old butcher, who has never once said my name aloud, and within a day the price of loose cigs on the northside drops by fifteen percent.
The city is already moving, even if the rest of the world is still catching up.
For the first serious move, I use the watch.
It is an old trick, a ceremonial one.
When my father wanted a message to stick, he took off his battered Citizen—missing the band, face scratched beyond repair—and pressed it into the palm of the courier.
It meant—this is life or death, fuck it up and you're done.
The courier always brought it back. I inherited both the watch and the ritual.
I select the youngest runner, a kid with ears like satellite dishes and a nervous tic in his left eye.
I give him the watch, the band loosely looped around a finger.
He does not ask what it means, just takes the package and disappears.
He is back in two hours, watch returned, the message delivered.
Later, I learn he took a detour through the back lanes to shake a tail, and when a man tried to snatch the parcel, he bit off a piece of the attacker's ear.
The rest of the boys call him "the cannibal" now, which is fine by me.
That night, sleep is as elusive as the moon outside, but I make do with what I get.
Just after dawn, Niamh returns.
She comes without warning, and this time she's not alone .
The two men flanking her are old Crowley associates from the Cork side—Rory Bannon and Jack Kelleher.
My methods have borne fruit.
Neither are loyal in the way dogs are loyal, but they've survived four cleanings and two internal wars, which makes them reliable in the one way that matters—they don't move without cause.
Niamh closes the door behind them and leans back against it like she's guarding the room more than resting.
"We need to talk," she says, voice flat.