CHAPTER 23 Liam #3
"He's been on Viktor's payroll for eight months.
" I say it directly, without softening, because Declan has never responded well to softened things.
"Through an Antwerp shell. Small payments, irregular timing, structured as consulting fees in a transport company he has a listed interest in.
" I hold my brother's eyes. "Eight months, Declan. Since before any of this started."
He is very still.
"The fracture between us," I say. "The way the alliance with the Italians has looked to you — as a takeover, as a slow erasure of what we are — that's Connolly's work.
He's been shaping the narrative for you while feeding our operational intelligence to Viktor.
He's been doing both things at the same time, very cleanly, for eight months. "
Declan looks at the desk.
I wait.
The silence is long and has several things in it that I recognize — the specific quality of a person revising something large, the structural shift of a foundation being examined and found to have been built on ground that wasn't what it appeared.
"You have confirmation," he says. His voice is flat and even and carrying the specific weight of controlled fury that has a direction now, a named thing.
"Yes. The account structure, the payment history, the Antwerp connection. All of it documented."
"Connolly." He says the name like he's testing whether it still means what it meant yesterday. "How long have you known."
"Four days."
"Four days."
"I wanted confirmation before I brought it to you. Unconfirmed, it's just an accusation. Confirmed, it's — what I just told you."
He looks at me for a long moment. Something moves through his face that is not one thing but several things in rapid sequence — betrayal, anger, the specific grief of learning that someone you trusted chose you deliberately as the vehicle for their own ends.
"He put everything in my head," Declan says.
"Yes."
"Every conversation. Every—" He stops. His jaw tightens. "The things I said to you. The things I believed. He—"
"I know."
"I nearly—" He stops again. He puts both hands flat on the desk, anchoring himself to something solid because the ground has just moved. "I nearly voted with his men. Against you. At the meeting in September."
"I know."
"If I had—"
"But you didn't," I say.
He looks at the desk. He is quiet for a long time.
"What are you going to do about him," Declan says.
"What we've always done about people who betray this family. But not tonight. Tonight I came here for something else."
He looks up.
I hold his gaze. "I need this to end, Declan. The distance between us. The war inside the house." I lean forward. "I should have come to you directly months ago, and I didn't, and some of what happened between us is on me. Not the Connolly part. But the rest of it — I could have handled better."
He says nothing.
"Old way," I say. "Tomorrow morning. You and me. No weapons. Winner is the head of the Irish and the loser accepts it and we move forward."
The room is very quiet.
Declan looks at me for a long moment. The way he looked at me when we were boys and I told him something he didn't want to hear but recognized as true.
"Connolly first," he says. "Before tomorrow."
"Yes."
"Tonight."
"That's what I was thinking," I say.
Something shifts in his face. The complicated weight of the last six months moving, not lifting entirely, but shifting into a different arrangement.
"All right," he says.
"All right to the fight or all right to Connolly."
"Both," he says. He meets my eyes. "But Connolly first."
I nod.
"Liam," Declan says.
I look at him.
"If you'd told me sooner. About Connolly. Would it have—" He stops.
"I don't know," I say honestly. "Maybe. Maybe not. He'd been working on you for months before I had anything to bring you." I hold his gaze. "But I should have tried."
He nods.
Connolly is at the bar he keeps on the south side.
The one he's owned for fifteen years. The one where his men drink and his couriers pass envelopes and where he holds court three nights a week with the particular ease of a man who has built a small kingdom inside a larger one and stopped questioning whether the larger one will tolerate it indefinitely.
Conor pulls the car up at the rear entrance at half past nine.
Declan and I get out. Two of Conor's men go in ahead and clear the back room and the office.
By the time Connolly is brought back from the bar he is already past the point where any version of the next twenty minutes ends with him walking out, and he knows it. I can see him know it.
He sits in the chair we put him in. He puts his hands flat on his thighs. He looks at me, and then at Declan, and the second look takes longer than the first because Declan is the part of this he wasn't expecting to see.
"Liam," he says. The word is calm. Connolly has always been calm. It's part of what made him useful for as long as he was useful. "Whatever you've been told—"
"Don't," I say.
He stops.
I take the folder out of my coat and put it on the table between us. I don't open it. I don't need to. He knows what's in it because he's the one who structured the payments inside it.
"Antwerp shell," I say. "Eight months. Viktor."
Connolly looks at the folder. He looks at me. He looks at Declan.
"Declan," he says, and there is a note in his voice that I recognize as the beginning of the speech he prepared for this contingency — the version where he turns to my brother and reminds him of the things he's been saying for months and asks him to consider, before he commits, what side of this he's actually on.
Declan looks at him.
"No," Declan says. Quietly. "You don't get to do that one."
Connolly closes his mouth.
I watch the recalculation move through his face.
The same recalculation I've seen in other men in other rooms — the moment they stop running through escape routes and start running through what they can preserve by being useful in the final minutes.
Connolly is good at that math. He starts speaking before either of us has to ask.
He gives us the names — three I expected and two I didn't. He gives us the contact protocol Viktor used.
He gives us the locations of two drops he was scheduled to make this month and the timing of the next confirmation Viktor was expecting from him.
He talks for eleven minutes without being interrupted, and when he is finished he stops, and the room is quiet, and he knows what comes next.
"For what it's worth," he says.
I wait.
"I believed some of it." He meets my eyes. "About the Italians. Not all. Some."
"I know," I say. "It's what made you good at it."
Declan steps forward.
I look at my brother. He looks at me. There is no question in either of our faces about who is doing this.
Declan does it. Once, clean, with the small handgun Conor handed him at the door. Connolly is on the floor before the sound has fully finished moving through the room.
Declan stands looking down at him for a moment longer than the act required. Then he hands the weapon back to Conor and walks out into the back hall without speaking.
I follow him.
In the back hall he stops with one hand against the wall. He breathes. He doesn't say anything for a long minute. Then: "I have done that before. It's never been someone I knew that well."
"I know."
He pushes off the wall.
We go out to the car.
Afterward, Declan and I stand in the courtyard at the compound in the cold and neither of us says anything for a while.
Then he says: "Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," I agree.
We go back inside.