Liam
The ambush happens on a Wednesday.
We're moving product through the secondary route that Declan's south distribution plan identified — a route I approved, a route I put men on, a route that two weeks ago was clean and which someone has clearly been watching since I signed off on it.
The call comes through at half past eleven at night from Conor, who uses the specific phrasing he uses when casualties are involved, and which I've heard enough times that my body responds to it before my mind has finished processing the words.
Three men down. One critical. The product is gone, the vehicle is burned, and the two men who weren't down scattered into the surrounding blocks and are currently being collected by Conor's secondary team.
The ambush was professional — coordinated entry and exit, clean extraction of the product, no engagement beyond what was necessary to clear the road. Not opportunistic. Planned.
I'm in the car in four minutes.
The scene is on a service road in Maspeth that smells like burning rubber and cold metal, and the men who are walking have the specific quality of men who are still running on adrenaline and will feel the full shape of what happened in about two hours when it wears off.
I check them. I check the one who isn't walking, who is being stabilized by someone Conor called in and who will live, the medic tells me, but who will need a hospital in the next hour.
I make the calls that get him a hospital bed without a police report.
I'm crouched at the burned vehicle, looking at the entry and exit points, when the parting shot comes.
One round. From a rooftop two blocks east — someone watching the scene who hadn't fully left, taking one last try at whoever showed up after the fact.
It punches the vehicle frame six inches from my shoulder, and the ricochet catches my arm before any of my men have brought their weapons up.
By the time Conor's secondary team is on the rooftop, the shooter is gone.
I look at the burn pattern and the way the product was extracted and the angle of the parting shot, and I think about Declan's south distribution plan, which I approved, and which laid out this route in detail, and which I gave back to Declan to run.
I stand in the cold of a service road in Maspeth and I think about Connolly.
Nadia is at the apartment in Astoria when I call. She came back to the safehouse the day after she left, as we agreed, and went back to Astoria yesterday to make her scheduled check-in with Viktor and keep the cover alive. It is not a clean arrangement. It is what we have.
She answers on the second ring.
"Don't say anything," I tell her. "I need somewhere that isn't the compound or the safehouse for a couple of hours. Is the apartment clear."
A brief pause. "Yes. What happened."
"I'll tell you when I get there."
She gives me the building entrance code.
She opens the door in a way that tells me she's been awake, which means either she doesn't sleep well or she was waiting, and I don't ask which because I'm bleeding through my jacket sleeve and my head is splitting and I'm holding the specific kind of anger that has to be kept at a controlled temperature or it becomes something I can't use.
She sees the jacket sleeve immediately.
"Sit down," she says.
"It's not—"
"Sit."
The apartment is small and organized with the specific neatness of someone who keeps everything in reach because they might need to leave quickly.
There is a kitchen table and two chairs and a couch that faces a window with a view of the street below, and I sit in one of the kitchen chairs because it's closer and because I am, now that the adrenaline has fully organized itself into exhaustion, more tired than I was twelve minutes ago.
She gets a kit from under the bathroom sink.
Not a first aid kit from a pharmacy — a proper one, the kind assembled by someone who knows what they're preparing for, which tells me another thing about her father and the education he provided.
She sets it on the table and sits across from me and holds out her hand.
I give her the arm.
She works in silence. The jacket comes off, the shirt sleeve up, and the cut is a graze from a ricochet, which means someone's angle was off or I moved at the right moment and the difference between this being a graze and something else is the specific geometry of one second.
She cleans it with the focused efficiency of someone who has done this before and who is doing the work rather than performing feelings about the work, which is what I need right now.
"How many," she says, working.
"Three down. One critical. He'll make it."
"The product."
"Gone." I watch her hands. "It was coordinated. Professional. They knew the route."
She is quiet for a moment. "The distribution plan."
"Yes."
"Declan."
"Someone in Declan's circle," I say. "Not necessarily Declan." I say it with the specific care of a man who is trying very hard to be fair to his brother and who is finding the effort increasingly difficult. "Possibly Connolly."
She secures the dressing. She doesn't release my arm immediately, and the contact — her hands still at my wrist, warm and real — does something to the controlled temperature of my anger which is not helpful and which I cannot entirely account for.
She looks up.
We are very close in the small kitchen with the kit between us and the city outside doing its three-in-the-morning thing, and the quality of her eyes in this light is the quality I've been trying to file in the operational section of my thinking about her and which keeps failing to stay there.
She leans forward.
I stand up.
Not abruptly. Not with the quality of rejection. But with the deliberateness of a man who knows that if he doesn't move now the argument he's been making to himself is going to become a great deal more complicated.
She sits back. She reads it correctly — I can see her read it — and she doesn't push it, which is one of the things about her that I find most difficult, that she knows when not to push.
"Tell me what you're thinking," she says.
"What I'm thinking isn't useful right now."
"Tell me anyway."
I go to the window. The street below is empty in the specific way of streets at three in the morning, everything paused.
"I'm thinking that Declan's been saying I've been compromised.
That whatever I'm doing with a Russian operative is exactly what a man who's lost his judgment does.
That my loyalists don't trust me, the Italians are watching me, three of my men are down, and I'm standing in the apartment of the person responsible for hitting the Italian supply routes instead of making the call that every clear operational instinct I have is telling me to make. "
She is quiet.
"I'm thinking," I say, "that maybe he isn't wrong."
"He's wrong about the part that matters," she says. "Which is why."
"The why doesn't change the what, from outside this room."
"It changes everything, from inside it."
I look at the street. "I know." I turn around. "And that's the problem. That I'm making decisions inside this room that have consequences outside it, and the people outside it can't see the inside, and from where they're standing—"
"You look like a man who's sleeping with the enemy," she says. Direct. Not cruel. Just the flat version of it.
"Yes."
She stands. She comes to where I'm standing at the window and stands beside me — not close, just in the same space, looking at the same empty street. "What do you want to do," she says.
"I need to deal with Declan," I say. "Not around him, not through Mackenzie, not through Ailish. I need to deal with him directly and finally and in a way that ends the question." I look at the window. "One way or the other."
"What does one way or the other mean."
"It means either he's with me or he isn't. And if he isn't, he goes." I say it quietly, which is the only way I can say it. "Not the way our father would have handled it. But he goes."
She is quiet for a moment. "And if he's with you."
"Then we stop being at war inside our own house and we deal with what's actually trying to break it down from the outside."
She nods. Not encouraging, not discouraging. Just receiving the information and taking it seriously.
"The ambush tonight," she says. "Was it Connolly or was it Viktor."
I look at her.
"I'm asking because they're different problems," she says.
"Connolly leaking the route to Viktor's people means Connolly is a Russian asset, which means the fracture in your organization goes deeper than a loyalist dispute.
It means Viktor's been running someone inside your circle for longer than the current operation. " She meets my eyes. "I can find out."
"How."
"My father kept contacts in Moscow finance — people who track Bratva payouts because that's how the money moves before the operations do.
They're not on the operations side. They wouldn't tell Viktor I was asking, because they don't talk to Viktor.
I have three of those contacts I haven't burned.
If Connolly's been getting Russian money, the trail will be in one of their ledgers.
" She holds my gaze. "It'll take me a day. Maybe two."
I look at her. At the woman who spent five days in my safehouse and handed me the receiver and said please and means it and is now standing at a window at three in the morning offering to use her father's last private network to trace whether my brother's closest ally is a foreign intelligence asset.
"If it's there, I'll find it," she says. "And if it is, it changes your conversation with Declan."
"How."
"Because it means he's not the betrayer. He's the betrayed." She holds my gaze. "Which is different. And which might be the thing that brings him back."
I look at her for a long moment.
"All right," I say.
"All right you'll let me look."
"All right I'll let you look." I pause. "And Nadia."
She waits.
"Whatever you find," I say. "You bring it to me before you do anything with it. You don't contact Viktor about it, you don't adjust your position with him based on it, you bring it here."
"I know."
"I need to hear you say it."
She meets my eyes. "I bring it to you," she says. "Before anything else."
I nod.
"Go home," she says. Not unkindly. "Sleep if you can. Come back when you're ready to talk about Declan."
I get my jacket from the chair. The sleeve is ruined. I put it on anyway because it's three in the morning and I walked in with it and I'll walk out with it.
"Your sister called me," Nadia says, as I reach the door.
I stop. "When."
"This afternoon. She got the number from somewhere I didn't ask about." She crosses her arms. "She asked if I was all right. I told her I was." A pause. "She said to tell you she's proud of you."
I look at the door.
I think about Declan saying you look like a man who's lost his judgment and Mackenzie saying he's been trying to be better and both of those things being simultaneously and completely true.
"Thank you," I say.
I go down the stairs and out into the three-in-the-morning street and walk to where I parked, and the city is suspended around me in the specific pause of its deepest hour, and I think about what it means to deal with Declan finally and in a way that ends the question.
I think about it the whole drive home.
I don't arrive at anything clean.
But I arrive at what I'm going to do, which is sometimes all you get, and which will have to be enough.