Liam
The morning after a bad night has a particular quality to it that I've never been able to adequately describe to anyone who hasn't lived this life.
It isn't a hangover — I didn't drink. It's more like the emotional equivalent of sleeping with a stone on your chest and waking up to find it still there, just slightly repositioned.
I'm at my desk by seven. Conor has already sent a summary of overnight activity — nothing critical, a few border reports, a note that the warehouse on the west side is running short-staffed again. Manageable. I draft two responses and am midway through a third when my door opens without a knock.
Roise comes in with my coffee the way she always does, which is precisely and without warmth. She sets it on the corner of the desk, smooths the front of her blazer, and takes out her tablet. She is twenty-eight, efficient, and has not made direct eye contact with me in eleven days.
"You have a call with the solicitor at nine," she says to the tablet. "Conor needs a signature on the Docklands paperwork before noon. Your sister's flight lands at two-fifteen at JFK. And you've had three messages from a number I don't recognize that I've flagged for security review."
"Thank you, Roise."
"The car is available from one o'clock if you need it for the airport."
"I'll let you know."
She nods once, precisely, and turns for the door.
"Roise."
She stops. Doesn't turn fully. "Yes."
I consider what I was going to say, which was something about the eleven days, and decide against it with the wisdom of a man who has made this particular mistake before. "The Docklands paperwork. Leave it on the desk, I'll sign it before noon."
A beat. "Of course." She leaves, pulling the door shut with a click that is not quite a slam but is making a point nonetheless.
I sit with my coffee and the complicated silence she leaves behind and am still sitting with it when Ailish appears in the doorway approximately four minutes later, because Ailish has always had an instinct for timing that borders on unsettling.
She looks at the door. She looks at me. She sits in the chair across from my desk without being invited, which she never waits to be.
"How bad is it this morning?" she asks.
"Roise or Declan?"
"Both, but start with whichever one has you making that face."
"I'm not making a face."
"You're making your face," she says. "The one that means you're calculating what something is going to cost you."
I lean back in my chair. "Roise is professional. Efficient. Excellent at her job."
"And furious with you."
"And somewhat furious with me, yes."
Ailish tilts her head. "You couldn't have just—"
"No." I say it before she finishes because I know exactly where that sentence ends and we have had an abbreviated version of this conversation before.
"I couldn't have. And I didn't make her any promises that suggested I could.
She's angry because things didn't go the direction she wanted them to go, which is—"
"Human."
"Which is human," I agree. "And inconvenient. And not something I can fix without making it significantly worse."
Ailish looks at me with the expression she saves for moments when she thinks I am being obtuse. It is a frequent expression. "So what are you going to do?"
"Hope that time is the great healer everyone keeps insisting it is and in the meantime avoid being alone with her in rooms." I pick up my coffee. "Declan came back from somewhere last night before I got to him. Somewhere that wasn't sanctioned. Did he say anything to you?"
The question shifts the room slightly. Ailish's posture doesn't change — she is too controlled for that — but something behind her eyes does. "He didn't say much of anything useful. You know how he gets when he's in that particular mood."
"Who was he with?"
"He didn't tell me." A pause. "I didn't push it."
I study her. "You didn't push it."
"He was drunk and angry and done talking. There's a time to push Declan and a time to let him exhaust himself." She meets my eyes steadily. "I know the difference."
She does. She always has. It's one of about fourteen reasons she is invaluable to me, and one of the three reasons having her around Declan right now makes me vaguely nervous in a way I don't examine too closely.
"Fine. Keep an eye on what comes in about last night.
Movement reports, anything near his usual meeting points. "
"Already asked Conor."
"Of course you did." I finish my coffee and stand. "Come to the airport with me."
She blinks. "I'm not your driver, Liam."
"I know that."
"Or your assistant."
"I'm keenly aware. Roise has made the distinction extremely clear this week.
" I reach for my jacket. "I'm asking you to come to the airport with me because my sister is landing at two and I haven't seen her in four months and the drive alone with my own thoughts sounds genuinely terrible right now. Come or don't."
A beat. Two. Ailish stands. "I'm not sitting in the back."
"I wouldn't ask you to."
The drive to JFK is the first hour I've had in recent memory that doesn't feel like it's made of something flammable.
Ailish puts the radio on something I wouldn't have chosen and doesn't talk about Declan or the Italians or Roise or any of it, and I find that I'm able to breathe in a way that the morning hadn't allowed.
"She's going to be trouble," Ailish says, somewhere on the expressway.
"She's always been trouble."
"She's been away trouble. That's manageable trouble." She glances at me. "Home trouble is a different category."
"She's been asking questions," I admit. "About all of it. More than I've answered."
"Mackenzie doesn't stop asking questions just because you stop answering them. She just goes and finds the answers somewhere else."
"I know that."
"She gets it from you."
"She gets it from herself." But I'm almost smiling, which is something. "She and Declan always got along. She might be the only person who can reach him right now without him going defensive."
Ailish is quiet for a moment. "That's not a small thing to put on a twenty-two-year-old."
"No," I agree. "It isn't."
We leave it there.
Mackenzie comes through the arrivals gate with two bags, a coffee she got somewhere in the terminal that she is fully committed to despite having presumably just spent eight hours on a plane, and the particular energy of someone who has decided that being stationary is a personal failing.
She is dark-haired like the rest of us, quick-eyed, and the sight of her does something to the stone that's been sitting on my chest since last night.
She stops when she sees Ailish beside me and her face opens into something genuine. "You came."
"He asked nicely," Ailish says, which is not true but goes unchallenged.
Mackenzie drops one of her bags to wrap both arms around Ailish first, which I was fully expecting and am not at all offended by. Then she gets to me, and the hug is fierce and slightly too tight, the kind that communicates something she wouldn't say in words out here in the open.
"You look tired," she tells me.
"Thank you, Kenzie."
"Not bad tired. Just — a lot on your mind tired." She steps back and looks at me with the assessing quality she's had since she was about nine years old and figured out it worked on people. "How bad is it?"
"Let's get coffee first."
"I have coffee."
"Proper coffee. Not whatever that is."
She looks at her cup with mild offense. We find a place near the terminal, the three of us at a corner table with our coats piled on the empty chair, and for twenty minutes it is almost ordinary.
Mackenzie talks about her program, about a professor who has apparently been making her life difficult in ways she finds both irritating and privately entertaining.
Ailish asks the right questions. I drink my coffee and let the normalcy of it settle somewhere it can do some good.
Then Mackenzie looks at me over the rim of her cup. "Declan's not going to come around on his own."
"We're not talking about that today."
"We don't have to talk about it. I'm just telling you. He needs someone to get through the wall before it gets any thicker, and right now you and he are too much alike to do it for each other." She sets down her cup. "I can talk to him."
"Absolutely not."
"Liam—"
"You've been home for forty minutes. You are not walking into the middle of this."
"I'm already in the middle of it. I've been in the middle of it from four thousand miles away." She says it without drama, which is somehow more affecting than if she'd made it one. "I'm not fragile. And I'm not going anywhere."
I look at her. She looks back, and there is something in her face that I recognize — the particular set of someone who has already made the decision and is merely informing you of it as a courtesy.
I think about what I said to Ailish in the car. About Declan and the wall getting thicker.
"Stay out of it for now," I say. "Give it a week. Let things settle after yesterday."
She opens her mouth.
"A week, Kenzie."
She closes it. Picks up her coffee. "Fine. A week." A beat. "Can I at least see Gianna? Ailish said she's back."
"That," I say, "I'll allow."
My phone rings before I can reach for my jacket.
It's Conor. I step away from the table, and he gives me the report in four sentences, which is his preferred number.
A shot fired near Declan's secondary meeting location.
One of our men clipped but not critical.
The shooter was gone by the time anyone got eyes on the area, but the description — build, coat, movement pattern — matches known Russian contract work.
I stand with my phone at my ear and the airport moving around me and think about the seam I told Vito Rosso doesn't exist.
It's fraying faster than I told him.
"I'll be there in an hour," I tell Conor. "Don't tell Declan yet."
I hang up and turn back to the table. Ailish is already watching me. She reads it in my face before I say a word, and the look she gives me is the one that means I told you this wouldn't be a quiet week.
She's right. She usually is.
"Kenzie," I say, picking up my jacket. "Welcome home."