Chapter 22 #2
Saoirse wipes blood from the side of her cheek with the back of her hand, not hers, and looks toward the side transept. “Gavin won’t waste men on a straight breach if he knows he’s outgunned,” she says. “He’ll try for hostage leverage if he can’t get a clean shot at you.”
Declan hears that from the pew line and snarls, “Let him try.”
I glance over and catch him crouched behind carved oak in a dark suit, tie gone, pistol steady in both hands like he never left the old days. My mother sits lower beside him, one hand on Maeve’s shoulder, calm enough to shame everyone in the room.
She meets my eyes and says, “End it quickly.”
“I intend to.”
The next thirty seconds come in pieces.
A flash at the side corridor.
Conall shouting from the rear.
A body hitting stone.
Nikolas swearing once and shifting left.
Then one of Patrick’s men breaks from the smoke near the vestibule and runs the center aisle with a compact rifle up, desperate and fast, and he almost gets a line on me before three of mine cut him down from different angles.
He folds across the pews, momentum carrying him into polished wood and flowers and white ribbons that were still tied when this started.
So much for peaceful.
I rise just enough to look past the altar base and take in the doorway.
We built overlapping fire lanes from the choir loft and the sacristy passage, and Patrick’s shooters are finding every one of them the hard way.
He sent professionals, I’ll give him that.
They came in timed waves, they staggered the first shots, and they used the wedding blast to split attention.
A month ago, that might have bought them enough confusion to get me.
A month ago, Patrick still had a machine.
He doesn’t now.
While the city whispered that he was lying low, I spent four weeks cutting through his spine one vertebra at a time.
Not with headlines and not with theatrical hits.
I took his accountants first, then the men who made his shell companies breathe.
Nikolas and I pulled ledger trails through church restorations, road contracts, and medical supply fronts, and every time we found a hinge, I had it removed.
Quiet warrants through friendly offices.
Frozen accounts through banks that owed me.
Cargo delays in ports he paid to trust. Drivers offered safer routes under my protection.
Brokers turned with cash and proof. Three crews folded after one missed payroll.
Two more disappeared when their weapons shipments landed empty and their phones started ringing with my people instead of his.
Patrick built power on pressure and myth, and I starved both.
By week two, he was burning reserve cash to keep outer crews loyal.
By week three, he was sending boys to make noise while his experienced men stopped taking his calls in daylight.
By week four, he was a name moving through borrowed houses, issuing orders through intermediaries who charged him extra and lied about timing.
A man like Patrick always answers collapse the same way.
He reaches for revenge and calls it control.
That is why we are here.
“Nikolas,” I say, eyes still on the doors. “Status on outer ring.”
He taps the earpiece under his collar and listens while shots echo outside. “East wall secure. House team reports two vehicles disabled. One runner toward the lower road got dropped. South gate still active. Front push is almost done.”
“Any sign of their lead?”
Before he can answer, Conall’s voice comes over comms, rough with motion. “Rear pair neutralized. One dead, one wounded. And you were right, Saoirse, there was a second route. We’ve got two more in the pantry corridor, and one of them is Gavin.”
Everything in Saoirse goes still beside me.
“Alive?” I ask.
“For now. He tried to bite Murphy when they cuffed him.”
Declan barks a laugh from the pew line. “That sounds like him.”
Saoirse turns to me, and her voice lands flat and hard. “Don’t kill him yet.”
“I won’t,” I tell her. “Not until he talks.”
A final burst erupts outside the chapel, then another, then silence drops so suddenly, the ringing in my ears takes over. Smoke drifts in through the blown vestibule glass. Somewhere outside, one of my men shouts for a medic, and another answers with a location.
Nikolas rises first, checks his lane, and signals clear with two fingers. “Inside is done.”
I stand and pull Saoirse up with me, careful of her shoulder and the way she winces when she moves too fast. Her dress is ruined at the hem, her veil is torn, and there is glass in her hair. She looks like a bride who walked through a war and stayed on her feet.
Maeve pushes up beside us and points toward the side room. “Take her to the sacristy. I’ll get Mam.”
My mother stands on her own before anyone can help and smooths the front of her dress with one hand. “I am perfectly capable,” she says, then looks at Saoirse and softens. “Come here, Love.”
Saoirse goes to her, and for one brief second, in the wrecked middle of gun smoke and broken wood, my mother cups her face the same way she did the night Saoirse left my house. Saoirse closes her eyes and leans in, and then it is gone and we are moving again.
I turn to Nikolas. “Lock the grounds. Nobody leaves without being searched and photographed. Pull every weapon, every phone, every piece of paper. I want IDs before the hour is up.”
He nods. “Already started.”
“Good. Put medics on ours first, then theirs if they’re worth saving.”
“And the dead?”
“Line them along the south wall under tarps. I want Saoirse nowhere near that.”
Nikolas’s expression shifts once at that, then settles. “Understood.”
Conall appears at the side entrance with blood on his sleeve and two men behind him dragging Gavin between them. Gavin’s face is split over one brow, his lip is swollen, and one knee buckles every second step. He still has enough pride left to stand straight when he sees Saoirse.
“Little queen,” he mutters, voice wrecked. “Didn’t think you’d marry him in white.”
Saoirse steps out from my mother’s side before anyone can stop her.
She is shaking, and she still walks right up to him until only a man’s reach sits between them.
“You followed me when I was thirteen,” she says quietly.
“You stood outside my dance lessons with Rory and told my father who I smiled at.”
Gavin’s mouth pulls into something that wants to be a grin and fails. “Kept you safe.”
“You held women down for him,” she replies, and her voice turns colder. “You delivered pills. You threatened doctors. You came to kill the father of my child at my wedding.”
The room goes silent around them.
Gavin looks at her belly, then at me, and spits blood onto the stone. “You think this ends him? Patrick always comes back.”
I step in then, close enough that he has to tip his head to hold my gaze. “No,” I tell him. “Men like Patrick come back when they still have routes, money, and believers. I took all three.”
He laughs once, ugly and wet. “You took what he let you see.”
I hit him hard enough to knock the laugh out of his face, then catch his collar before he drops all the way.
“You are going to give me the hideout,” I say.
“You’re going to give me vehicles, men, fallback routes, and every code he changed in the last week, and if you lie, I will know before the sentence ends. ”
Gavin blinks blood from one eye and says nothing.
Conall shifts his grip. “There’s a room in the lower house with no windows.”
Declan walks over, gun loose at his side, and studies Gavin like he’s picking a cut of meat. “I know him,” he whispers. “He won’t break for pain first. He’ll break for timing. Make him think Patrick’s already moving without him.”
Nikolas joins us and hands me a phone in a clear evidence sleeve. “Pulled from one of the rear shooters. Recent calls are burner chains, but there’s one saved location pin sent three hours ago and deleted after read. We recovered the cache.”
I look at the screen, then at Gavin.
His eyes flick once. That is all I need.
“Take him,” I say. “Keep him breathing.”
Conall and the others drag him toward the side corridor, and Gavin twists once to look back at Saoirse. “He’ll use you too,” he rasps. “He’s just better dressed.”
Saoirse does not move. “Maybe,” she says, and her voice carries clean through the broken chapel. “But he never told me to hate the wrong man.”
Gavin’s face changes at that, and then the door shuts behind him.
I stand there a second longer, listening to the aftermath spread across the grounds. Orders. Boots. Radios. A stretcher wheel catching on stone. The chapel smells like cordite, flowers, and seawater drifting through shattered glass.
My mother touches my arm. “Finish this.”
“I will.”
Maeve looks around the ruined altar and lets out a sharp breath that could turn into tears later and will not now. “So,” she says, wiping soot from her cheek with the heel of her hand, “are you two still getting married today or do we reschedule around the gunmen?”
Declan snorts. Even Nikolas almost smiles.
I look at Saoirse, her dress torn, her eyes red, her mouth set, and I feel the old anger settle into the shape I need again. Patrick sent his best man. Patrick showed his hand. Patrick failed.
Now we take the rest.
“We finish the ceremony,” I say, and every head in my family turns toward me. “Then we get Gavin talking. By nightfall, I want Patrick’s door.”
Saoirse steps to my side and threads her fingers through mine, grip firm despite the tremor still running through her. “Then let’s not waste the priest,” she replies.
Somewhere outside, a gull screams over the cliffs, and one of my men calls all clear on the chapel grounds.
Inside, broken glass crunches under Declan’s shoes as he turns to retrieve the priest, and Nikolas starts issuing the next round of orders into his comms with the steady voice of a man who knows the job is not done, only moving to its final stage.
Patrick wanted revenge at my wedding. What he gave me instead was a map.