Liam
Mackenzie has been home for four days when I find out she went to see Declan.
I find out because Declan tells me, and the fact that he tells me at all is half the story.
Declan hasn't volunteered me anything in six months that wasn't extracted through sustained pressure and occasional shouting.
The fact that he walks into my office on a Thursday morning and sits down and says, without preamble, "Your sister came to see me yesterday," means one of two things — either he's angry enough about it that he wants me to know, or she got through to him enough that something shifted, and he's not sure what to do with that yet.
I look at him over the edge of the report I was reading.
"Did she," I say.
"She did." He sits with his elbows on his knees, which is Declan's version of an open posture.
He doesn't do it often. "Showed up at the east building.
Told the men at the door she was there to see her brother and when they said the wrong brother was there she told them that was fine and she'd see him instead. "
"She said that."
"Word for word." Something moves across his face that is not quite amusement and not quite exasperation. "She brought food."
"She bribes with food."
"She always has."
We sit with that for a moment — Kenzie at fourteen showing up to whatever argument was happening between us with a plate of something she'd made, setting it on the table like a peace offering. She'd been doing it since she was old enough to reach the stove.
"What did she say," I ask.
Declan leans back. He is quiet for a moment in a way that tells me he's organizing it rather than avoiding it.
"She said I was being a bastard," he says eventually.
"Those were her exact words. She said I was being a bastard and that she'd been watching from a distance and she understood why — that she knew the last two years had been hard and that losing Da and then watching the whole direction of things change without being consulted was the kind of thing that could make anyone feel like they were disappearing — but that I needed to stop taking it out on you. "
I say nothing.
"And then she told me off for about four minutes straight," he continues, "without stopping for breath, which I'd forgotten she could do.
She gets that from Mam." A pause. "And then she asked me what I actually knew about your conversations with the Italians.
What I actually knew, not what I'd assumed or what Connolly had told me. "
"What did you say?"
"I said I knew enough." He looks at me. "She said that wasn't the same as knowing.
And then she made me sit down and she told me what she knew.
What she'd been reading, what she'd been tracking from the UK, what she'd put together on her own.
" He shakes his head once. "She's been paying close attention, Liam. More than I realized."
More than I realized too, I think. But I don't say it yet. "And after she told you what she knew?"
"She asked me what I was actually afraid of.
" He says the word afraid the way men in this life say it — with a careful neutrality that's doing a lot of work.
"Not what I objected to. What I was afraid of.
" He stops. "I told her I was afraid the alliance with the Italians would make us into something we weren't. That we'd start taking orders from Vito Rosso and stop being Irish and start being an extension of their operation. "
"That's not what—"
"I know," he says. "She told me. She told me rather specifically what the agreement actually is, and what your conditions were, and what Vito agreed to and didn't. She knew the details, Liam. She'd done the reading." He meets my eyes. "Where did she get all of that?"
"I sent her updates," I say. "When she was away. I didn't want her coming back to a situation she didn't understand."
He is quiet. "You sent her updates but you didn't tell me."
"You stopped taking my calls in March."
Another silence. This one is different — heavier, carrying the weight of something he can't argue with.
"She told me off for that too," he says finally.
"Good."
"She's got a mouth on her."
"She's ours," I say. "Where do you think she got it."
Something happens to his face then. Not quite a smile — Declan doesn't come to smiles easily — but the thing before a smile, the loosening that happens when a face remembers it knows how.
"She told me that if I didn't get my head out and start working with you properly she was going to make it her personal project to be so aggressively present in both our lives simultaneously that we'd have no choice but to get along out of self-defense. "
I stare at him.
He almost smiles. "I believe her."
"So do I."
He stands, which means the part of this conversation he was willing to have is finished. This is also Declan — he'll come to the table, put something down, and need to leave before it gets processed any further. I've learned not to push past the leaving.
"The south distribution plan," he says, at the door.
"Bring it to me."
He nods and goes.
I find Mackenzie in the kitchen an hour later, which is where I find her most mornings, because she runs on coffee the way some cars run on fumes.
She is leaning against the counter with a mug and her phone and the expression of someone who is pretending very hard to be simply present in a room rather than waiting for a specific person to arrive in it.
I get coffee. I lean on the counter next to her.
"Declan came to see me," I say.
"Mm." She looks at her phone.
"He told me you visited him."
"I brought food." She drinks her coffee. "The men at the east building are very polite, by the way. You've trained them well. Except for the one with the red hair who looked at me for slightly too long — you might want to have a word about that."
"Mackenzie."
"Liam."
I look at her. She looks back at me with the expression she's had since she was a child — the one that means she's done a thing and knows she's done a thing and has prepared for both gratitude and annoyance. "You went and got the real version out of him," I say.
"I went and visited my brother," she says carefully.
"You debriefed Declan."
"That sounds very official for what was essentially a conversation over pasta."
"Kenzie." I set my mug down. "What exactly did he tell you."
She sets her phone down too, which means we're doing this properly.
"He told me about Connolly. And Brennan.
He told me what they've been saying to him — that the Italian alliance is a takeover in slow motion, that you're trading Irish autonomy for Italian protection, that in five years we'll be operating as a subsidiary rather than a family.
" She holds my gaze. "And he told me that part of him believed it. Not all of him. But part."
"Because they've been feeding it to him for months."
"Because he's been alone with it for months," she says, with the precision that makes me remember she is not only Declan's sister but mine, and she applies the same unsparing clarity to both of us.
"He doesn't talk to you. He doesn't talk to Ailish — not really, not about this.
He sits with Connolly and Brennan, who have their own agenda, and he lets it ferment.
" She pauses. "You should have someone around him who isn't them. "
"I'm aware of that."
"Someone he trusts. Someone who can give him a different version of events without it feeling like a lecture from you or a management exercise from Ailish."
I look at her.
She looks back at me.
"No," I say.
"I'm not asking permission."
"Kenzie, if Declan thinks you're there on my behalf—"
"He won't think that if I'm not there on your behalf.
" She picks up her mug again. "I'm his sister.
I'm going to see him. I'm going to bring food and have conversations and be present in his life because that's what family does, and if in the course of being his family I happen to be a reasonable alternative voice to Connolly and Brennan, that's just a natural consequence.
" She tilts her head. "You're not using me, Liam.
I'm making a choice. There's a difference. "
I study her face and think, not for the first time, that she has grown into someone I didn't entirely see coming.
She was always sharp, always quick, always the one in any room absorbing more than she appeared to.
But the Mackenzie who left for the UK two years ago was still partly a kid, still partly protected by the distance we'd all maintained between her and the sharp edges of this life.
The version in front of me now has closed that distance herself, from her end, without being asked.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. I know how I feel about it as her brother. As the head of this family, it's more complicated.
"If it ever gets to a point where you feel like you're not safe," I say.
"I'll tell you."
"Or if Declan—"
"Liam." Her voice is gentle but the word is a full stop.
"I know how to handle Declan. I've known how to handle Declan since I was nine and he was seventeen and convinced himself I was too young to come to Mam's birthday dinner.
I sat outside the restaurant in the cold for twenty minutes before he came out and got me himself.
" She smiles, small and certain. "He always comes out and gets me. "
I look at her for a moment longer. Then I pick up my coffee. "If you're going to be useful around him," I say, keeping my tone even, practical, "you should understand the full picture. Not the version I've been sending in updates. The actual picture."
She straightens very slightly. Not surprise exactly. More like the confirmation of something she was already holding space for.
"The loyalists have been more organized than I've let on," I say.
"Connolly has contacts I haven't fully traced yet.
The shot near Declan's meeting spot — that wasn't random.
Someone knew he'd be there, which means someone's talking to someone they shouldn't be, and it may be in Declan's circle rather than in mine.
" I pause. "I need to know if Declan is part of that or if he's being used by it.
I can't get close enough to find out. You can. "
She holds my gaze steadily. "That's not nothing you're asking."
"No," I say. "It isn't."
A moment of quiet. Then she nods, once, with the quality of someone making a decision they've already considered from every angle. "Then I'll need to know everything you know. Not summaries. Everything."
"All right."
"And you stop making decisions about what I can handle."
I look at the ceiling briefly. "All right."
"And you get someone to have a word with the red-haired one at the east building."
"Mackenzie."
"Those are my terms, Liam."
I take a slow sip of coffee. Outside the kitchen window the city is doing its usual relentless thing — cars and noise and a grey-white sky that hasn't decided yet whether it means to snow.
Inside, my twenty-two-year-old sister is looking at me with the calm authority of someone twice her experience, and I am thinking about loyalists and tracker apps and the particular footage of a woman leaving a ballet studio loose and warm in the afternoon cold.
There's a shape forming to all of this. A way through it that I couldn't see a week ago.
It requires Mackenzie, and it requires Declan to come far enough back that I can reach him, and it requires the Irish to stop fracturing from the inside long enough for me to address what is fracturing from the outside.
None of that is simple. None of it is guaranteed.
But it's more than I had last week.
"I'll arrange a proper briefing," I tell her. "Tomorrow morning. You, me, and Conor."
She raises her mug. "See. That wasn't so hard."
"Don't push it."
She smiles into her coffee. It is the most normal thing that has happened to me in two weeks, and I hold onto it for the rest of the morning.