Chapter 11
CILLIAN
Iopen the door and step inside first, and she follows without hesitation, her heels soft against the wood floor as the door shuts behind us.
I pinch my nostrils and appreciatively inhale the nostalgic, familiar scents of old paper and the briny sea.
The hallway is narrow but warm, framed photographs lining the walls in neat rows that tell a history without shouting it.
I hang my jacket on the hook beside the door and gesture for her to come in further, and she takes in the space with a careful sweep of her eyes.
“We’ll wait in the study,” I tell her, and she nods.
The study sits at the back of the house facing the water, and I push the door open to let her in first this time.
The room is simple, dark shelves built into the walls, a leather sofa opposite two armchairs, a heavy desk near the window.
Books are everywhere, well worn, very read, and equally loved.
She moves toward the shelves without being told, her fingers grazing the spines like she’s cataloguing them, and I watch her as I cross the room and stop near the window.
The harbor stretches out beyond the glass, boats rocking lightly against their moorings, gulls circling above the water in slow loops.
“You grew up with this view,” she says quietly, pulling a book from the shelf.
“Yes.”
She opens it without asking and settles into one of the armchairs, crossing her legs neatly as she scans the first page. I glance at the cover before she turns it fully away from me. Old World Families. Italian syndicates. American commissions. Structures built on blood and contracts.
“You reading for fun?” I ask.
She glances up briefly. “Curiosity.”
I turn back to the window.
They call me the devil of the docks.
I’ve heard it enough times that it doesn’t register anymore, but sometimes I wonder how I became that person, how a boy who watched his father unload crates at dawn grew into a man whose name is spoken in whispers across half the port.
It didn’t happen overnight.
My father ran distribution for this side of the harbor when the old crews still operated without structure, and he believed in loyalty more than leverage. He trusted men who shouldn’t have been trusted. He shook hands instead of tightening contracts. He thought honor would protect him.
It didn’t.
The first wave of synthetic imports hit the city when I was seventeen, and nobody understood what they were yet. New product. Cheap. Fast. Stronger than anything moving before. The older men saw margin. The younger ones saw opportunity.
My father saw risk.
He refused to distribute it through our lanes, and that refusal marked him as weak in the eyes of men who preferred profit to caution.
The shipments moved anyway, just not through us, and the neighborhoods near the docks started to change within months.
Overdoses climbed. Fights escalated. Families who’d survived generations of rough trade started burying sons.
Fentanyl.
I say the word rarely. It tastes foul.
My father called it poison before anyone else did, and he tried to shut it out of our corridors. That made him an obstacle.
He was killed in what the papers called a territorial dispute, and the official story pinned it on a splinter crew looking to expand their stake. I knew better. The move was too clean, the replacement distributors already lined up before the funeral.
Patrick O’Callaghan.
The name surfaced later through whispers and quiet confirmations, through men who spoke only after enough drink or enough fear. He’d pushed the synthetic lines into Dublin under shell carriers and proxy crews, and he’d offered partnership to those willing to move it. My father declined.
That was his mistake.
By the time I took control of our lanes, the damage was already visible. Entire blocks hollowed out. Mothers waiting outside clinics with faces drawn thin. The product was cheaper than whiskey and twice as deadly.
I shut it down where I could, burned shipments that came near our gates, made examples of men who tried to move it through my crews. That’s when the name stuck. Devil of the docks. Ruthless. Unforgiving.
Maybe I was.
But I watched what that product did to families I’d grown up around, and I decided early that I’d rather be feared than responsible for that kind of rot.
Patrick’s wife died years later, and I heard it was the same poison. Overdose. Quiet burial. No press. Some said it was grief, and from the rumors, some also believed my family was behind it, though that was balderdash and likely planted by Patrick himself.
The whisper started in the pubs near the quay, then moved through the suppliers, then into the backrooms where men pretend they don’t traffic in gossip while doing exactly that.
I heard my name attached to it before I heard hers.
“Byrne retaliation,” someone muttered. “He doesn’t forget.
” The story shifted depending on who told it.
In one version, we’d laced a shipment bound for Wicklow as a warning.
In another, we’d leaned on a distributor close to her.
In the worst version, I’d ordered it personally to make Patrick feel the same kind of loss he’d dealt me.
None of it was true.
I don’t poison women to make a point, and I don’t send product into homes to settle scores. I kill men who move against me. I don’t play with families.
But Patrick understood narrative better than most. He knew how to let a rumor breathe just long enough to blur lines.
If the city believed I was capable of that kind of retaliation, it hardened my image and isolated me further.
It made every negotiation colder. It made men think twice before crossing me publicly if they thought I might answer through their wives or daughters.
He never denied the rumor outright. He never accused me formally, either.
He let it sit in that gray space where no one could challenge it without admitting they’d been listening.
I received three separate messages from intermediaries within a month of her burial, each one phrased carefully, each one implying regret for what had “happened between our families”.
I responded once, directly, and told them I had nothing to do with his wife’s death.
The response came back measured and unreadable.
“We understand,” they said. “These things are complicated.”
Complicated.
That word is what men use when they don’t want to trace the line of blame all the way to its source.
The truth was simpler. The same synthetic lines Patrick introduced into Dublin had expanded outward, and his own corridors weren’t immune to the rot they carried.
The product doesn’t care whose territory it runs through.
It doesn’t honor alliances or recognize bloodlines. It consumes what it touches.
I’d seen enough bodies by then to know how it ends.
There were murmurs that she’d been struggling, and she’d tried to pull him back from the expansion.
She’d wanted the cleaner trade and the legitimate fronts.
I don’t know which of those were real and which were stories layered on after the fact.
What I do know is that Patrick continued distributing after her death, and he did so without public pause.
No shutdown. No moral stand. No withdrawal.
If I had been responsible, he would have retaliated openly. That’s how men like us operate. We don’t grieve quietly and then return to business unchanged—or at least, that’s what I think.
A knock sounds at the study door, and my mother steps in, a tray balanced on one hand like she’s been doing this her entire life. She sets it down on the low table between us with quiet efficiency, two cups of tea, a small plate of soda bread, a dish of butter already softened.
“Five minutes,” she says, glancing at me first, then at Riley with polite curiosity. “Your uncle’s still arguing with your sister about something pointless.”
“That sounds about right,” I reply.
My mother gives me a look that says she knows more than she lets on, then nods once at Riley. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“Thank you,” Riley says, her voice warm and bright.
When the door closes again, I pour tea into both cups and pass one to her. She takes it with a small nod, her fingers brushing mine briefly, then she settles back into the chair with that same composed focus.
I lean back against the desk and take a sip.
Back then, I let the rumor die slowly, and I reinforced my own rules.
No synthetics through my lanes. No tolerance for secondary shipments hidden in legitimate exports.
I made examples when necessary, and the docks stabilized under a different kind of fear, through a series of moves made quietly and without apology.
The first shipment I intercepted came through a subcontracted freight handler that thought they could tuck small pressed batches into spare compartments of a whiskey container. The manifest was clean. The seals were correct. The paperwork matched.
But the weight was wrong.
I ordered the container opened in front of the entire crew. I cut into the false panel myself and pulled out the packets one by one while the men watched. The handler tried to claim ignorance.
I didn’t believe him.
I didn’t kill him either. That would have been simple. Instead, I stripped him of his contract, froze his accounts, and barred his family’s company from the docks entirely. Word traveled faster that way. A man can survive a beating. He can’t survive exclusion.
The second attempt came through a different corridor, a smaller pier used by independent haulers.
This one was clever. The synthetic product was declared as medical surplus bound for Eastern Europe, routed through one of Patrick’s quieter subsidiaries before looping back into Dublin for redistribution.
I traced the paperwork back three layers and found the signature that mattered.