Chapter 15
SAOIRSE
Roarke’s funeral is a study in monochromatic tension.
The graveyard is a sea of black wool and stiff collars, a gathering of men who usually only meet in the dark or through the crosshairs of a scope.
They stand shoulder to shoulder out of a desperate, silent calculation that the power lines of this city are changing and sides must be taken.
Every intake of breath is an assessment of the vacuum Roarke left behind, and every eye is on Cillian. They are measuring the depth of his mourning against the breadth of his rage, trying to decide if the man standing over the open grave is a leader they can follow or a ghost they should flee.
Cillian doesn’t offer them the catharsis of a speech.
He stands like a column of salt, eyes fixed on the wood of the coffin as it descends into the damp earth.
His restraint is more terrifying than a shout.
It is the silence of a fuse burning toward a cache of dynamite.
When the first clod of dirt hits the lid, he doesn't flinch.
He simply turns and walks away, the hem of his coat snapping like a whip in the biting wind.
By Monday, the city begins to tilt.
The war doesn’t start out with fire. The beginning is with ink and cold, administrative cruelty.
Two mid-tier logistics firms restructure under Byrne oversight with the quiet finality of a closing door.
An inland warehouse operator finds its credit insurance vanished overnight, the lines of communication as frozen as its bank accounts.
There are no sirens, only the soft click-clack of keyboards and the dry rustle of terminated contracts.
The battlefield is a spreadsheet, and Cillian is its architect.
He triggers compliance audits at three in the morning.
He raises customs flags on containers that have moved like ghosts for a decade.
He offers fuel subsidies to the loyal and regulatory purgatory to the defiant. It is a slow, methodical strangulation.
Patrick strikes back with the frantic energy of a cornered animal.
Anonymous reports of historical violations flood the municipal offices.
A televised committee hearing questions the legitimacy of the Byrne holdings.
A transport union, greased by Patrick’s coin, threatens to paralyze the eastern districts.
The air is thick with the smell of scorched reputations and desperate leverage.
At night, the estate transforms into a hive of strategic malice. Maps are pinned to the oak of the dining table like flayed skin. Territory overlays pulse on screens, glowing neon against the dim mahogany of the room.
Cillian moves through the war room with a lethal, quiet clarity, his voice a low vibration that makes the younger men lean in as if toward a flame.
“We pressure here,” he says, his finger tracing the eastern corridor on a digital map, the light turning his skin a ghostly blue. “We let them feel the weight of their own overhead. No overextension. We let them starve in their own shadows.”
I sit beside him now, a permanent fixture in the structure of his command. I’m no longer a guest. I’m a presence, a witness to the dark machinery of his mind. He doesn't hide the maps when I enter. He doesn't lower his voice when I sit. He trusts me in the room.
That trust is a wire tightening around my ribs, making it harder to draw a full breath.
When the men finally depart and the house settles into its haunted, midnight quiet, he comes to me.
The war has sharpened his edges, turned him into something whetted and dangerous, but in the privacy of his office, he unspools.
He pulls me onto his lap, his hands seeking me out with a desperate, grounding intensity, as if I am the only piece of earth he owns that isn't under siege.
“You’re still here,” he murmurs into the hollow of my neck.
“Yes.”
“Even now. Even with the blood on the door.”
“Yes.”
The sex has changed. It isn't the reckless collision of the car or a display of dominance. It’s slow, deep, and devastatingly intimate—a silent language of bodies trying to remember how to be human in the middle of a slaughter.
He buries his face against my throat and breathes as if he’s trying to inhale my very soul, anchoring himself to the only thing that doesn't demand a signature or a sacrifice.
I hold him, and the line I drew in the dirt—the one between Riley and the girl my father wants to own—is washed away by the tide.
Reporting becomes a form of self-mutilation.
I still retrieve the burner from the hollowed-out history book, the plastic cold against my palm. I still run the faucet to mask the sound, the water a white-noise hiss against my mounting dread. But the calls are becoming hollow. I give him fragments. I give him smoke.
“You’re withholding.” Patrick’s voice is a blade over the line.
“I’m giving you what there is to see.”
“You’re in his bed, Saoirse. You’re close enough to steer his hand.”
“I’m close enough to survive,” I retort, my voice trembling.
“That wasn't the assignment. Don't forget who brought you out of the gutter. Don't forget who you belong to.”
The words are a weight I carry into the morning.
The truth is my father’s fracturing. Two of his outer distributors defect, citing the "instability" of his leadership. Another tries to stay loyal and finds its main carrier blocked from the port by a sudden, inexplicable technical review. Cillian doesn't celebrate. He just turns the page.
“You’re cornering him,” I say one evening, watching him sift through a mountain of acquisition papers.
“I’m removing variables,” he replies without looking up.
“And when there are none left?”
“Then he makes a mistake. And then I end it.”
Patrick feels the noose. His calls shift from calculated to volatile, the sound of a man watching his empire dissolve in a compliance audit.
“You think he’ll spare you when the lead starts flying?” Patrick demands. “You think he’ll care about the way you taste when he finds out you were my eyes in his house?”
“You’re the one escalating,” I whisper, the burner phone hot against my ear.
“Test me, Saoirse. I can send him every message. Every recording. I can burn you down with a single click.”
I hang up, my hands shaking so violently, I nearly drop the phone.
That night, Cillian pulls me into his bedroom with a silent, heavy urgency.
He doesn't ask about the tension in my shoulders or the way I won't meet his eyes.
He just undresses me with a slow reverence and kisses me as if he has all the time in the world, as if there aren't men with rifles sitting in vans three miles away.
I let him. I want to be lost in the wreck of him.
The pill sits in the drawer of my nightstand. I take it every morning like a ritual, a small white shield against a future I can't afford. I set alarms. I count the days. I have been doing this for years. I am not a girl who makes mistakes.
But war rearranges the clock. Meetings bleed into midnights.
Strategy sessions blur into dawn. Twice I wake up in his sheets and have to scramble for a burner call before I even remember my own name.
Once I take it late. Once, staring at the little white box, I realize with a cold, hollow dread that I can't remember if I took it at all.
I tell myself it’s fine, the stress is playing tricks on my memory.
Two weeks into the escalation, the nausea hits at night.
Sleep doesn’t hold. Heat drags me out of it, a sudden rush from stomach to throat, and I’m upright before I’m fully conscious, hand over my mouth, feet hitting cold floor as I move down the hall.
I make it to the bathroom, lock the door, and drop to my knees as my body folds in on itself without permission.
It’s fast and humiliating, loud in a house that never feels empty, and when it’s over, I stay there with my forehead pressed to porcelain, breathing through my mouth while my pulse thunders in my ears.
This isn’t nerves. I’ve lived on nerves for weeks.
I rinse, sit back on my heels, and stare at my reflection. My skin looks sallow, my eyes ringed darker than I remember, and for a second I tell myself it’s exhaustion, that I haven’t slept more than four hours at a time since Roarke’s funeral.
The thought doesn’t settle.
I walk back to my room and shut the door quietly, then cross to the shelf and slide the hollowed book from its place. The burner rests inside like it always does, cold and waiting. I power it on and the screen lights immediately.
Two messages.
You’re slipping.
Where is he moving next?
My thumb hovers only a moment before I press call.
He answers on the first ring. “Took you long enough.”
“I was asleep.”
“You should’ve called me first.”
“I’m not on your clock.”
A soft exhale comes through the line, controlled and unimpressed. “You are until this is finished.”
“It’s escalating faster than you planned,” I say, keeping my voice level. “He’s locking down routes, limiting access to internal updates. I don’t get handed documents anymore.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“What do you want, then?” I press my fingers to my temple.
“I want the next move before he makes it.”
“He hasn’t told me.”
Silence stretches for a beat.
“He tells you everything,” Patrick says. “That was the point.”
“He tells me what he wants me to know.”
“You sound defensive.”
“I sound tired.”
“You sound compromised.”
I sit straighter on the edge of the bed. “Careful.”
“You think I don’t see what’s happening?” he continues, voice growing dark. “You’ve slowed down. Your updates are reactive. You used to be ahead.”
“He’s not predictable anymore,” I say, and I shift forward on the edge of the bed, elbow braced on my knee, voice kept low so it doesn’t carry through the walls.
“He’s a creature of habit.”
“He was,” I correct, stifling a groan. “He’s grieving.”